Unchanging beliefs in ever-changing times

Ian Harris ponders the origins and impact of religious fundamentalism.

It was a revealing remark. Ayatollah Khomeini had just toppled the Shah of Iran on the back of huge demonstrations fuelled by Islamic fervour, and an American Government official asked incredulously: Whoever took religion seriously?

Behind such a comment lies not only ignorance but an arrogant indifference to one of the most powerful influences at work in the modern world.

It is one thing to reject religion in one's own life, quite another to assume it is of no account to anyone else.

Lack of understanding does not end there, however.

At the other end of the spectrum, fundamentalist Christians, Muslims and Jews find it impossible to understand how out-and-out secularists can be so blind to things which for them are self-evident truths.

And in between those extremes lies the vast majority who have either found their own equilibrium without assuming it must be the norm for everyone else, or for whom the questions are still open.

That term fundamentalist was first applied to a Protestant movement in the United States which held that its interpretation of certain doctrines was fundamental to Christian faith.

A fundamentalist adheres strictly to those doctrines, with no concessions to modern developments in thought or culture.

Later, the term was also applied also to the same cast of mind in Islam and Judaism.

For fundamentalists, there are no greys: everything is black or white, true or false, for God or against.

Anyone who sees things differently is in error - or worse, an agent of the devil.

Each faith differs in the way that attitude works itself out, but one common thread is the conviction that their holy scriptures are God's inspired, inerrant and final word to humanity.

The fact that there are three distinct versions of God's infallible word should give them pause.

But each group is so firmly locked inside its own tradition that this does not happen.

They can also be highly selective about which parts they will emphasise: in the past 40 years, agendas have become increasingly political.

A central irony is that treating these vehicles of revelation as ultimate is tantamount to making an idol of their Bible, Koran or Torah, which cuts across a central tenet of each of their religions that God alone is worthy of their total commitment.

And there is a lot more to God (or Godness) than their scriptures.

What happened to bring this literalist, aggressive style of religion to the fore over the past century? How has it become such a force in the contemporary world?

The trigger was the impact of modernity on religions that were forged in a totally different environment.

When modern thought, science and technology burst upon them, millions of their adherents experienced a sense of disorientation and loss.

Age-old certainties could no longer be taken for granted.

A gaping spiritual void yawned before them.

This was unsettling enough for people in the Christian West, where the changes have been happening for 400 years.

It was traumatic for people pitched into a secular modernity where new values were imposed either by foreign colonial rulers, or by leaders in their own cultures who traditionalists believed were selling out their heritage.

Feeling threatened, they became resentful, then angry, then determined to reassert their own traditions.

In particular, they upheld the authority of their ancient scriptures, often seeking to apply them as if the modern world had not happened.

In the middle of the 19th century in the West, for example, Darwin's theory of evolution severely jolted age-old assumptions about God as the world's creator.

It implied that life did not begin in an act of creation that was perfect and whole, but evolved bumpily over vast tracts of time, and was still evolving.

On top of that came a searching study of the Bible that revealed not only how it came to be written by many hands over hundreds of years, but also showed how it reflected the ideas, cultures, circumstances and literary conventions of each era.

That made the old view that God had dictated every word obsolete.

For liberal Christians, this does not diminish the Bible, but adds to its human complexity and depth.

But others saw it as a threat to the very fabric of their faith.

And because Christians have always put special emphasis on believing the right things, even more perhaps than doing them, a century ago conservative Protestants in the United States drew a line in the sand.

More on that next time.

Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.

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