INTRODUCTION
THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING THE PHENOMENON OF FUNDAMENTALISM
In the history of Christianity, several well-known group identities started as sneers or belittling terms: a familiar example is ‘Methodism’, and another is ‘Quaker’. It is indeed implied by no less an authority than the New Testament that the word ‘Christianity’ itself, when first used in Syrian Antioch, was another instance.1 Such pejorative uses are external descriptions of the other, which have gradually been proudly adopted by the subject: ‘them’ have become ‘us’.
The history of the word ‘fundamentalism’ takes the opposite direction: from ‘us’ to ‘them’. It took its name from a defiant but confident Protestant Evangelical initiative in publishing, uniting mainstream Evangelicals either side of the Anglophone Atlantic in confrontation with liberalising moves in Protestant theology. Among the 64 authors of The Fundamentals were respected mainstream Christian theologians such as the Scottish Free Church Professor James Orr and the Anglican Bishop of Durham Handley Moule, whom it is not too fanciful to see as possible candidates for Fellowships of the British Academy, which was founded in the same decade. There are still Evangelical Christians who glory in the description ‘fundamentalist’, but now for the most part, it is used as a put-down, not least in many Christian circles. Particularly for journalists, it has also become a vaguer put-down with much wider reference, like another former in-term which has turned into a scattergun term of abuse, ‘Fascist’. Methodists, Quakers and Christians have achieved a certain social respectability; Fundamentalists and Fascists have lost it.
Indeed, the present state of the two labels ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘fascist’ has defeat built in: fascism, once widely hailed as the way forward for millions of people, failed in its bid for power. When it is used today, by all save a happily unrepresentative handful, it is a word intended to discredit. As with fascism, once upon a time, fundamentalist outlooks could plausibly have been seen as the future for Western Christianity. Only a decade ago, it seemed as if the power of fundamentalism really would return as the decisively shaping agent in the electoral politics of the United States of America, but that moment appears to have passed. While Christian fundamentalism is a powerful phenomenon across world Christianity, it is plain that it has not succeeded in its original address to the societies and establishments of the West. That may not, of course, mean that it has failed in a wider sphere.
There is no point in being squeamish about saying that fundamentalism negates all the principles on which a scholarly community like that of the British Academy is founded. Not surprisingly, Christian fundamentalists rail against ‘The Academy’, by which they mean something wider than our own beloved institution. The fundamentalist mindset detests open enquiry; it dismisses as irrelevant or is baffled by many of the concerns that preoccupy scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The concept of ‘The Academy’ embodies an attitude of liberal scholarship that is always poised to act as a destructive solvent on the certainties that the authors of The Fundamentals championed, and which is inherent in the ethos of Western universities – for all that fundamentalists have habitually founded teaching institutions that ape the structures of traditional Humboldt-style universities, in an attempt to develop a distinctively fundamentalist scholarly and rational tradition free from liberal taint. ‘Liberalism’ has indeed always been a primarily theological term of pejorative art for fundamentalists, which is why Europeans find its usage so puzzling in the secular politics of a still pervasively Protestant traditional culture in the United States – particularly when Europeans see obviously liberal American politicians fighting shy of calling themselves liberals.
If fundamentalism is a declining (even risible) phenomenon in the Christian cultures of its birth, what might be the point of devoting a collection of essays to it? I am sure that 40 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, most academics would have raised eyebrows at the idea of the British Academy symposium on fundamentalism from which these essays sprang; or at best, they would have seen it as a specialist event for those interested in internal Christian arguments. The future of world cultures then seemed set by models of ‘secularisation’, and religion was apparently poised to wither away as a decisive social force. As James Dunn points out in his contextual essay on origins and outcomes, geopolitical events from 1977 made a mockery of this sanguine outlook. In our society's efforts to understand those huge changes in global politics, the ‘fundamentalist’ label has taken on a much wider reference than once it had. So now this collection takes us to other world religions, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism, and although we have not chosen to include a view of Buddhism, it is worrying to hear reports in 2013–14 of the persecution of Muslims in Buddhist-majority Burma as a result of what sounds very much like fundamentalist rhetoric. Nor have we restricted our consideration to religion. It is possible for a certain sort of positivist Western scientific outlook to exhibit some of the characteristics of a fundamentalist mindset, often with direct reference to religious fundamentalism, whose crudities it sees as conveniently adding justification for its own project.
What is at the heart of the multiform fundamentalism that is now so important in the world? It is an inability to show indifference to difference, an intolerance of plurality. As several contributors here point out, this was not the usual characteristic of traditional societies. Whatever their theoretical intentions, their usual characteristic was pluralism, with parallel identities and language-groups living side by side, even when one of those groups exercised hegemony. That was a pluralism won out of historical experience, conditioned by protracted negotiations between different groups refined over time. Fundamentalists make little attempt to explore the pasts of societies, which they claim to be restoring to ancient traditions. It is a general characteristic of self-styled traditionalists that they only know a select part of their own tradition. They seem incapable of hearing or understanding the metaphors and figures of speech and thought that pervade their own historic literature, particularly sacred literature.
Fundamentalism is a symptom of modernity, yet also a rejection of it. It abhors the habit of neutral comparison which is such a distinctive and original aspect of Enlightenment thinking. Neutrality is a threat to anger: fundamentalists are generally angry, and they are angry because they are frightened, since rightly or wrongly they feel powerless. It is not that contacts with the other are novel in societies affected by fundamentalism, but rather those contacts have newly generated a sense that they may lead to the end of the society in which the fundamentalist lives and feels comfortable. Very often, admittedly, that sense is quite right. So fundamentalism is characterised by struggle, conflict. As Martyn Percy says in Chapter 3, without opposition, fundamentalism dies.
Fundamentalism impresses by its vitality. One of the symptoms of its modernity is its appetite for using the technology of modernity, from using the internet to spread its message and create group identities across the world, to various alarmingly modern ways of spreading mass terror. The very fact that as a term it has the varied references dealt with in these essays is an indication of growth and adaptability. Why does it have such wide appeal? One can point to particular historic causes: Laura Janner-Klausner's essay suggests how the shock of the Holocaust called into question the validity of Judaism's alliance with the Enlightenment, while in the Middle East, the humiliation of Arab regimes by Western powers beginning with the British and French Empires, and continuing with American imperium, makes the fundamentalist appeal to a supposedly pure Islam as the sole source of regional identity seem more plausible than it was in the early days of Arab nationalism.
Yet behind all these contingent causes, one can trace a common theme in religious fundamentalisms: their fury at the challenge to traditional patriarchy posed by the changing role both of women and of gay people. In both cases, as more generally in the pluralisms of traditional society, there were traditional spaces in which women and homosexuals could find means of self-expression while leaving the leading role of heterosexual men unchallenged. That is so no longer. It is interesting to observe the same strident rhetoric against feminism and gay liberation uniting fundamentalists who otherwise regard each other's religious rigidity as a symptom of their suitability for hell. Putin's Russia, Museveni's Uganda and the Ayatollahs' Iran all wield violence against gay people and women in order to preserve a caricature version of the past.
Yet the sexual pluralism that so enrages religious fundamentalism and gives it its widest appeal will probably also ultimately prove its solvent. It is difficult for heterosexual masculinity, a minority identity among human beings even at its most strident, to prevail against the majority for ever. Janner-Klausner mischievously suggests that the concealed smartphone will prove the nemesis of ultra-Orthodox closed communities: it is a lesson that applies more widely. In the meantime, fundamentalism will cause more violence and pain to those struggling to neutralise its message: those who stress nuance rather than strident simplicities. Part of the struggle for nuance is precisely to listen to the shouts of pain and anger that give fundamentalism its energy, and to show more imaginative sympathy than fundamentalists are capable of displaying – or indeed, more imaginative sympathy than scientific fundamentalists show towards religions. In particular, those who treasure the Enlightenment must avoid the trap of identifying the religions of the world, in all their glorious internal complexity and variety, with the fundamentalisms that those religions have spawned. Hence the importance of the various essays in this volume in setting out the problems and, just as importantly, suggesting some solutions.
Notes
1. Acts 11.26; see M. Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 539–40.