A Swift Survey of Fundamentalism
Subject:
We are increasingly aware that fundamentalism is not a monolith. It has political, cultural, social and religious implications which at times are extremely grave. Its characteristics and impact are often defined by the culture of the place in which it develops. This Symposium will help to define and clarify 21st century forms of fundamentalism in both academic and practical terms as found in diverse environments from Israel and Palestine, within European countries, to North America. The event will offer an opportunity to question a panel of speakers who are well placed to address this complex phenomenon.
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A Swift Survey of Fundamentalism
Introduction
Professor
Michael Mainelli
[SLIDE: FUNDAMENTALIST – MOI?]
Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a Fellow and Trustee here at Gresham College, as well as Emeritus Professor of Commerce. My job today as chair is to get the symposium going and help you, the audience, get the most out of our panel of three excellent, and interesting, speakers.
Well, as we say in Commerce – “To Business”.
When Bill Joseph, who really organised today, first approached me about chairing a symposium on fundamentalism, despite my normal immodesty I felt inadequate. I may have dabbled in philosophy somewhat seriously at some points, but as a largely a-religious business-person, it didn’t seem something I could chair. Then I realised that during my four years as Professor here at Gresham College I had witnessed and spoken about fundamentalism in business and economics, and probably was myself a fundamentalist in several areas, e.g. control of the money supply.
We held a conference last April, 22 April 2009, on Diversity & Danger that started to touch on fundamentalism as a potent element in many societal problems. In what follows Gresham regulars may hear a few echoes of my previous lectures, self-plagiarism if you will, while for the
rest of you novelty rules.
[SLIDE: DIVERSITY & COMPETITION]
Last year we made five points about diversity. First, isolated communities lose diversity and virility. Isolation is never good over the long-term, though in the short-term it may convey certain monopolistic benefits. Second, society should pursue policies that encourage diversity. Diversity among businesses is a result of competition and innovation. Adam Smith’s key insight was that markets’ harnessing of human desires, not all beneficial or benign, could achieve beneficial goals.
Third, diversity makes bubbles less likely. Bubbles are not just economic, there are intellectual bubbles and bubbles of belief. But the greater the independent diversity of opinion, the more likely the herd will reach the right answer. Fourth, decentralisation and competition seem to benefit all systems. Decentralised, competitive system superiority is widespread, though not universal. Fifth, the greater the variety within a system, the more regulation will reduce its variety. But more diversity frequently clashes with society’s increasingly risk-averse behaviours.
[SLIDE: CLOSED BELIEF SYSTEMS]
Fundamentalism refers to a belief in, and strict adherence to a set of basic principles. While often used pejoratively, like greed in open commerce, fundamentalism drives many people to do good things. People wonder how there can be fundamentalism in quasi-science such as economics and finance.
Economic and financial debating lines are as hard-drawn and fierce as those of the Gaza Strip or Belfast’s Falls Road - long-term/short-term, fiscal/monetary, Keynesian/Friedmanite, free/regulated, selfish/selfless, mutual/owned, public-sector/private-sector, rational/human, equality-of-opportunity/equality-of-outcome.
We have no shortage of fundamentalists, heretics or apostates. Let alone high-priests, shamans or gurus. As for charlatans, well… Rather ironically, while modern Keynesians seem fervent, John Maynard Keynes himself was flexible: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Fundamentalist principles dictate crucial policies all around us, for example letting banks go bust or saving them, quantitative easing or fiscal prudence, deflation or inflation, and the distribution of income and wealth.
In the current crisis, economic religions dictate the flows of global finance and the funds of government intervention. At Gresham College, where Sir Thomas himself funded the idea of New Learning, i.e. experimental science, it is important to admit that the concept of scientific inquiry in Commerce is worshipped more in the abstract than used to test commercial faith.
I am often reminded of Koestler’s closed belief systems. ‘Closed systems’ have three main peculiarities. First, they claim to represent a truth of universal validity which explains everything. Second, the system “cannot be refuted by the evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern”. Third, criticism is invalidated by shifting the argument to the motivation of the critic.
Koestler provides an example of a closed system from the orthodox Freudian school of pyschoanalysis. “…if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle” [Koestler, 1967, pages 263-264]
Much social science is about closed belief systems. I contend that there may be five stages of belief and action progressing from cocktail party flirtation to fanaticism:
¨ Cocktail Party Atheism - one holds to the fundamental end belief of all social sciences,
Contingency Theory, i.e. it all depends;
¨ Agnosticism - one flirts with a set of beliefs, but not such that other belief systems are excluded;
¨ Faith - one has a set of beliefs, but respects the right of other belief systems to exist;
¨ Fundamentalism - one has a set of beliefs, they are right to the exclusion of other beliefs, no other set of beliefs need exist and I can impose my views over yours;
¨ Fanaticism - one has a set of beliefs, they are right, other beliefs must be exterminated for the benefit of all.
[SLIDE: ANARCHISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!]
Of course, if fundamentalism is a singular application of theory to the exclusion of others, then anarchism, i.e. nothing rules, is the fundamental application of the subversion that nothing will work. The only way to avoid fundamentalism is to have no beliefs at all, and not believe in having no beliefs. Rather perversely, assuming one wishes to do anything at all, anarchism nicely cycles round to the atheism of Contingency Theory. Do we hold no beliefs, everything depends, Contingency Theory rules?
Do we pick and choose as appropriate, some kind of pragmatism? What would we say about a mathematician who said 2+2? It all depends. Or 2+2?
I’ll pick a system that fits.
Pragmatic choices are not made in a value vacuum. As flexibility grows, conviction diminishes.
Meanwhile somewhere between Fundamentalism and Fanaticism people frequently converge on one belief, that “the end justifies the means”. During a crisis, with the concomitant social imperative to “do something”, fanatics can overrun non-ideological positions with ease.
In the perverse way of feed-through (or positive feedback), the fanatics
become emboldened by their ideological successes and reinforced in their beliefs. Fanaticism has its self-gratification while tolerance simply has another cheek. The über-pragmatist is as much to be feared as the fanatic. His or her ends will always justify the means.
A good indicator of the fragility of belief systems is their dependence on history. History is often fundamental to fundamentalism – it is the return to the basics, such as the Tea Party and the US Constitution at the moment. Systems coalesce around the stories surrounding beliefs. History can sometimes provide justification – decades or centuries of adherents can’t be wrong. History can also provide a trajectory – something rooted in a more distant past must have a purpose, implying some teleology. It’s not surprising to find economic fundamentalists tracing their way back to Keynes or Ricardo or Smith. The more the story matters, the more we need to question the story if what matters is what works.
Other good indicators of Fundamentalism and Fanaticism are splinter groups. Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905-1972), a political scientist and professor at Columbia University, supposedly said, “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.” By way of corollary: “That is why academic politics are so bitter” or “Academic disputes are so bitter because there is so little at stake.” Satirists regular satirise the triviality of fundamental heresies – just think of Jonathan Swift’s “Big-Endian/Little-Endian” controversies between Lilliput and Blefusco. But one can only have a perspective on triviality from the outside.
[SLIDE: FUNDAMENTAL CLASSIFICATIONS]
You’d expect any self-respecting business-person to reduce any complex situation to the
fundamentals - a two by two matrix.
Unwilling to disappoint you, in this slide I’d like to submit my thoughts before we begin our symposium. The slide contrasts simplicity of interpretation against strength of belief in an attempt to classify belief systems. On the vertical axis we have simplicity of interpretation, from low to high. On the horizontal axis we have strength of belief, from left to right, low to
high. The four resulting intersections are worth a quick mention:
¨ low simplicity and low belief might well be an intellectual quest. People in this quadrant are dealing with complexity and accept high levels of uncertainty. Many philosophers might fall into this box. Perhaps this is also the Anglican Church – highly tolerant and able to accept high levels of ambiguity and diversity;
¨ high simplicity and low belief might be either social cohesion or social coercion. Cohesion in the sense of simple beliefs and ceremonies that cement community, perhaps as simple as the recent Guy Fawkes celebrations in England last week.
Coercion in the sense of simple beliefs or ceremonies such as
celebrating tyrants in the Roman era, to Central Asian tyrants today or North Korean and Burmese dictators.
¨ today’s subject may be high simplicity and high belief, the ability to grasp the fundamentals and then build outwards, through social mechanisms to affect wider society;
¨ finally, low simplicity and high belief may be rare, but might well constitute sects which I’ve over-simplistically labelled as mysticism. The Nupe are a people in West Africa who have developed a very sophisticated system of prophecy based on patterns in sand. As one anthropologist studying the Nupe noted back in 1954:
“The most striking feature of Nupe sand divining is the contrast between its pretentious theoretical framework and its primitive and slipshod application in practice.” [Nader, S.F., Nupe Religion,
1954, page 63 from Feyerabend, 1988, page 50]
For me, the key issue for society is the ability to rely on freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The crucial arguments on the importance of freedom of thought and expression come together in John Stuart Mill's 1859 work, On Liberty.
Debate on truth drives out falsity, and ideas on their own, true or
false, should not be feared. In fact, without debate over ideas we would never find truths. Mill argued forcefully for vigorous discussion to counter the “deep slumber of a decided opinion”. Karl Popper went further in the past century pointing out that the very foundations of knowledge and science rely on falsifiability. A theory is scientific only in so far as it is falsifiable.
Thus a theory has little validity if it exists in an unfalsifiable environment, perhaps together constituting a closed system of belief. And that’s why we have symposia, to provide falsifiable environments. So long as those of strong faith stick to the third stage of the cocktail party, - Faith, they respect the right, however feeble, for other belief systems to exist – and don’t move to the fifth stage, Fanaticism - then science and society function well enough.
[SLIDE: PROGRAMME]
Today’s programme.
[SLIDE: DIVERSITY RULES]
One of my favourite little self-awareness quotes comes from some Tea Party folks in the states on the issue of climate change - "Some people say I'm extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too."
My final fundamentalist belief for our symposium then? “Diversity rules!” Thank you.
©Michael Mainelli, Gresham College 2010
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The Fundamentalist Mentality
William Joseph
I originally set out to develop the idea of The Fundamentalist Mentality but I quickly realized that it could as well be entitled, The Fundamentalist Mentality in Us All. There are fundamentalist assumptions and principals behind so many of the things you and I do but we don't recognise them. I don't imply that this is always a bad thing and I hope to expose some of these tendencies.
Our first association when we hear the word fundamentalism is probably the religious flavour. That is certainly the one in the news today with tragic effect. The motive behind religious fundamentalism is logical. If God has revealed things to us, we would be fools to ignore or question them. That may be a conditional sentence but it is also a valid principal.
Religious fundamentalism is not limited to that principle. People of faith are usually those who sense something transcendent in human life. It can be compared to having a sense which recognises beauty or elegance. Some have this sense more keenly than others but it is not to be dismissed. The physicist energetically pursues the question, Why is there something and not nothing? To one degree or another, all of us ask it and a creative God can certainly be an answer. The next logical question is, What is my place in the created universe? A sense of the transcendent helps approach an answer. We all want to make sense of our lives.
Some of our fundamentalism is taught to us from our youth. There is much truth in that song from the show South Pacific, “You've got to be taught before it's too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate.” Prejudices are a learned mindset about assumptions we then find difficult to overthrow. Elements of our culture are hard to abandon. In the extreme, we can be taught a Kafkaesque authoritarian conscience from which we cannot extract ourselves. These can become our fundamentals.
Enter authoritarianism! If God spoke, we believe it but the difficult part is to determine how to find the revelation in all of these words. Clearly history demonstrates that the revelation might not be that obvious, judging from the numerous Christian denominations and interpretations of the Bible. The same situation exists in Islam with the Koran. Some conclude that we need scholars to tell us what that revelation is. Some Protestant denominations decided that anyone could read the Bible and God would inspire them to reach the proper conclusion. The other extreme is that only an institution is capable of competent interpretation.
For the most part Christianity was fundamentalist until the Age of Enlightenment and the development of experimental science starting in the mid 16th century. Prior to that time science was more a natural philosophy. As a response to the Enlightenment, there developed in theology the science of hermeneutics, the processes through which we could filter out the revelation from the words carrying that revelation. Historical criticism, literary form analysis, cultural influences and the like all help.
Again, there are numerous manifestations of fundamentalism. It might be useful for our purpose to define fundamentalism as any literalist or absolute philosophical approach to any human endeavour. That approach could be toward materialism, secularism, rationalism, or atheism as well as theism. These become fundamentalist whenever they are considered the only way to truth.
Capitalists can be fundamentalists who pursue their tried and true principles with evangelical zeal. They think the business world would be a better place if everyone followed their thinking. Like the bible, they have a library of scriptural chapters, even if one of them is only a copy of The Power of being a Positive Thinker. They listen attentively to experts as if hearing the words of a saviour. They regularly gather in boardrooms for worship and now and then indulge in a bit of soul-searching with auditors and the legal department. There is also a free market fundamentalism but, with the past Gresham Commerce lecturer moderating our panel, I dare not pursue this any further.
Unfortunately, a common issue is the conflict between science and religion which is being stoked in some quarters. We should notice that the conflict is not between science and religion, but between the practitioners of both and it is fundamentalism that is generating the heat in both camps. But is scientific fundamentalism possible? I do not mean being both a scientist and a fundamentalist at the same time. I mean seeing science as the only accurate way to understand all reality. When accused of being a fundamentalist in his atheism, the scientist Richard Dawkins responded, “No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.”
His estimate of the fundamentalist mindset is accurate in many cases, but the problem with his approach is the word “evidence.” Richard Dawkins defines for himself what he will and will not admit as evidence but so does the religious fundamentalist. The latter will explain away everything from fossil evidence to the light spectra of stars. The scientist will do the same with the common awareness of the transcendental and the exclusion of anything that cannot be recorded on film or in digital data collected from physical instrumentation. It is, however, the case that theologians who try to keep up with science can often suffer from instrument envy.
In science there is always the chance, even hope, that there will come along a better understanding of the subject. Perhaps this starts with mathematics, the language of science, in which we know that calculations are fixed and accurate and yet we may be using what we call irrational numbers which can't be written accurately, like the value of π. Scientists usually provide estimates of the accuracy of their conclusions or offer a range of values. Theological certainty tends to be binary, not a range.
Concerning science, if the creator made any mistake it might be this. The natural world was designed so complex, interesting, fulfilling and satisfying to discover and understand that scientists can be tempted to feel no need for anything else. There is an elegance in good scientific theories and conclusions. Even mathematical proofs, provided we don't suffer from math anxiety, can be elegant and things of beauty. This is why it can be worth spending one's whole life studying the natural world for its own sake. Should not the religious fundamentalist be able to share that type of satisfaction?
The practice of religion is often associated with fanaticism. Our next speaker will clarify the popularity of religious fundamentalism in North America. Fortunately in Europe and in the UK we do not find that same level of enthusiasm. Instead, here the enthusiasm is in opposition to all religion in general and comes from celebrities such as Stephen Fry or those made celebrities by their outspoken opposition to theism such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or even Stephen Hawking. None of these, however, focus on the fundamentalist expressions of religion, just religion as a whole.
Stephen Hawking maintains that we do not need philosophy or metaphysics to answer the question, Why we exist. He says in his latest book, The Grand Design, "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” He then asks, “Why are the fundamental laws as we have described them?" and then he proceeds to discuss the “ultimate theory.”
“Fundamental” here is more than a play on words. Scientific fundamentalism is based on fundamental laws of nature derived through theories and experimentation. Religious fundamentalism is based on laws of God derived from divinely inspired texts. There is a interesting sequence here. The spontaneous generation of micro-organisms was supported by the Royal Society as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. Spontaneous creation did not appear until the latter part of the twentieth century and can best be described as a philosophical conclusion.
In answer to questions like, Why is there something and not nothing and what is our place in want exists? in The Grand Design, Hawking says, "These are questions of philosophy but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, especially physics.” (Chapter 1) I think what he means here is that philosophy does not yet use quantum-speak. But this is difficult when dealing with something, in Richard Feynman's words, no one understands. Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He warned an audience during a lecture that they would not understand it. He then added, “You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.” It is also possible that quantum-speak becomes a good way to make philosophical arguments sound like scientific ones.
Stephen Hawking also seems not to have heard of Bernard d'Espagnat who worked with people like Fermi and Bohr, is a physicist with great interest in quantum mechanics and a philosopher of note. In 2006 he published a book entitled ON PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY and won the one million pound Templeton prize in 2009. In his book he discusses the vocabulary of quantum physics as well as the philosophical relationship between causes and laws of nature. To say that philosophy has not kept up with physics is not to say that philosophy can't keep up with modern science and in some quarters, it has.
It seems to me that the more serious error is that many theologians most definitely have not kept up and more is the pity for that. But then theology is not a science but one of the humanities yet no less real. If a scientist mentions theology, it is usually along with the word “myth.” When a theologian mentions science, it is often followed by, “But of course...” and then a list of caveats. We are all effected by our own fundamentalism and in some cases those most influenced by it are the most in denial.
Does religious fundamentalism matter? What harm is there in it, so long as it is not politicised by extremists or forced into the school curriculum? The politicisation of religion is loosely based on the theory that “error has no rights.” But principles do not have rights, people do. In the mind of the extremist, inflamed by the perceived injustices inflicted by infidels, this justifies terrorism. The extent to which this terrorism has disrupted what we consider to be civilised society defies belief and yet it has happened on our streets and in our underground trains.
The most pervasive harm from religious fundamentalism is that it gives God and religion a bad name. It distorts the image of God as well as inhibits the human potential to reason and discover. Religious fundamentalism impoverishes our notion of God by limiting our view of the universe which was created by the God in whom religion professes belief. We do not get closer to God by not engaging with his creation. We don't improve our understanding of God by neglecting to understand the physical things he has created.
Secondly, fundamentalism makes religion a pejorative term. Two times I have had people tell me, "I think that religion is the greatest evil in the world." Unfortunately both times it was the person sitting next to me on a flight, one of which was transatlantic. It was easy to point out that, to my knowledge, people like Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler were not driven by religious motivation but they were driven to one degree or another by a fundamentalist mindset. Communism also benefits from a fundamentalist focus on a particular solution to social order.
This pejorative sense is why Stephen Fry, in the recent Intelligence Squared debate, chose to refer to “religionists” rather than “theists.” There is in that a bit of accuracy or at least it makes a useful distinction. To put it bluntly, if there is a God, some supreme being who caused this universe, and that God has something specific in mind for us, then pursuing the idea of God's existence and his intentions for us should bring about the good in humankind. Goodness is the ability of a thing to achieve the purpose for which it was made. Religion should improve our lot.
On the other hand, when, in the name of faith, lives are snuffed out, sometimes in wholesale proportions, families torn apart, personal lives psychologically blighted, funds misdirected, authority misused and national governmental structure destroyed, then yes, this is a distortion and an abomination, a perversion of the whole concept of a creative divinity. But then doesn't society in general have its own similar problems and theists are drawn from general society as are scientists, politicians and all others who impact the social order.
Finally, religious fundamentalism feeds the impression that all religion is blind, unreasonable, unrealistic, anti-science, fanatical. I always liked the definition of fanaticism coined by George Santayana. The fanatic is someone who redoubles his effort after he has forgotten his aim. Then I encountered G K Chesterton's definition as someone who can't change his mind but won't change the subject. I think there are those with religious, scientific and many other interests who fall squarely under either or both of these definitions.
Engineers are an interesting group. Much of their work involves following rules in the form of equations and technical manuals. This is a rather fundamentalist activity. The scientist or engineer who also engages with religious faith can enjoy both his or her science and faith without contradiction. Their faith in both the created universe and the creator God suggest to them that the reality and constancy of human purpose is as stable and reliable as are the laws of physical nature. In both cases the laws which from our understanding of physical and transcendent nature, while they may not be perfectly accurate, are what we have and they are workable. They can lead to desirable results.
The results of the work of scientists and engineers are useful, productive, helpful and, in some way to the uninitiated, extremely mysterious. After all how can that memory stick store so much information, so many photographs in our camera. The people who derived the equations and designed the products can begin to feel quite superior. They become the people in the know just as some in religious groups can feel that they are superior because they are the ones who have the truth. Both of them can become quite arrogant. As a result the religious fundamentalist can easily assume that it is science which must bow to the superior quality of divine revelation while the scientist cannot accept that truth can be expressed in things as subtle as poetry and metaphor, in any transcendent idea rather than equations and engineering or periodic tables.
Again, the world of engineering is a world of technical manuals and following rules expressed by mathematical equations. There is comfort in that. Ohms law will specify exactly how much heat a particular resistor in the circuit being designed must dissipate. Engineers have faith in the validity of the equations and data manuals and feel no need to derive them for themselves. This too is a characteristic shared with religious fundamentalist. Divine revelation can assure the engineer of the values they need to invest in any human activity in order to achieve the human potential.
The thinking engineer is aware of the fact that solving engineering problems in the physical world is not the same as solving human problems in the social and personal world. The principles needed to work through this latter category of problems, if the principles exist at all, are most likely to be found in the realm of faith, theology and even revelation. This is where theists look for the meaning of human life and not just in the organic functions of human biology.
What is so attractive about fundamentalism that makes it so popular? It sounds like an oversimplification but some people do not like too much excitement. They have difficulty dealing with uncertainty and wrestling with new ideas is unsettling. The conviction that we already possess the truth has a great force of attraction. Those who operate this way are ripe for fundamentalism. In the extreme, it eliminates the need to think. Yet that is the denial of the hallmark of being human and the elimination of imagination and creativity.
Scientists have learned to deal with uncertainty far better than the theologians. Scientists are trying to approximate truth. The engineer needs to determine how close is enough. Greater precision could just be a waste of time or a pipe dream to achieve.
Scientists know that the equations which express the laws of nature may only be valid within a particular range of values. Newtonian laws of motion work so long as speeds are not close to the speed of light or we are not dealing with atomic particles. At these levels we need to switch to relativistic transforms or quantum mechanics, things Newton never dreamed of. We can say that no scientific measurement or value is perfect, perfect in the sense of finished and so it can't get any better. Should not the scientific, sociological, economic and religious fundamentalist understand that any philosophical idea or conclusion expressed in human language can only be an approximation and never perfect, seldom the last word?
Unfortunately, to the religious fundamentalist, any formulation of a law of God becomes static, unassailable and sacred. This is sometimes called doctrinal fundamentalism. In fact, a more literal interpretation is given to doctrinal formulations than to the scriptures themselves. Theologians can find themselves walking backward into the future for fear of treading on something formulated in the past. It is truth that is static, unchanging, not the verbal formulations of that truth. It is nature and not the equations we use to express how nature works which is absolutely constant, stable and reliable.
If fundamentalism is such an all-pervasive characteristic of our human nature, we can legitimately ask, could fundamentalism be a survival mechanism in humankind? From an evolutionary viewpoint, if something works, why not keep using it? Or is this one of those evolutionary structures which are not needed once our species is advanced enough to take conscious control of our future. Have we reached the stage in human evolution such that looking out for number one can be consciously replaced by altruism?
There is a difference between knowing facts and being able to associate the facts. The scientist knows that the evolution of life forms took a long time, 3.5 billion years, and so did Homo sapiens which has been on Earth only about 120,000 years or so. Thus moral evolution of the kind suggested by Teilhard de Chardin, is going to take a long time. Many find it difficult to accept that there is a divine purpose for humankind because of the evil we find in human society. It raises the question, how can there be a God who would allow people to do this. They are ignoring the time requirements of evolution. So perhaps we are expecting too much from ourselves at this stage in our evolution or we may have a faulty notion of God and his intentions.
The first Homo sapiens required a fierce compulsion for the survival of number one, that is, their self and their family relatives. Perhaps this is why textual revelation did not happen until there was a substantial amount of human socialisation on a large scale and the problems caused by the residue of the survival mechanisms of primitive humankind became more obvious. The evil we find in human society can often be associated with of the survival mechanisms that got us to this point in our history. It is going to take a long time for the moral, social, and intellectual evolution to progress and, in the evolutionary time scale, we are just getting started.
The religious fundamentalist needs to understand that evolution is slow. Unfortunately, many religious fundamentalists don't accept the fact or possibility of evolution. Human existence has been short and the divine revelation to this point is just a start. It is curious that both Islam and Christianity teach that scriptural revelation is finished and there will be no more. All the more reason to turn to the discoveries of science. Santayana observed that science is simply thinking God's thoughts after him. The scientist gets great satisfaction from discovering new things about the physical evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang. Historians study the evolution of governments. Business types trace the evolution from individual tradesmen to global commerce. The conclusions can be a revelation to all involved.
In evolutionary terms, the stability of the genes contribute to survivability but that slight instability of the genes in random mutations also give the living organism adaptability, new ways to cope with environmental change. So it is too with humanity as a social species and any political, economic or religion system which cannot adapt will eventually fail.
Extreme fundamentalism hijacks our ability to hold a reasonable perspective of politics, science and religion in a secular society. It has done this not just by suicide bombers whose politicisation of their extreme religious beliefs has justified in their eyes the use of murderous means to impose religious laws. It is also hijacked by the Christian fundamentalists who can tolerate the existence of a pluralistic society and yet reject the validity of demonstrable scientific principles and conclusions. A reasonable perspective has also been hijacked by scientists who cannot admit of anything beyond the end of their microscope, telescope or particle accelerator. Commerce usually provides quick punishment of any failure to adapt.
Many, perhaps most of us, enjoy the stability of proven ways and understandings but fortunately for us all, there are imaginative, creative, investigative minds which seek new and better understandings and we are all the better for that, even those of us who might tend to be fundamentalists.
©William Joseph, Gresham College 2010
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Made in America Christian Fundamentalism
Dr John A Dick
Noam Chomsky: “We must bear in mind that the U.S. is a very fundamentalist society, perhaps more than any other society in the world – even more fundamentalist than Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. That's very surprising.”
Overview:
(1) Introduction
(2) Five-stage evolution of fundamentalism in the United States
(3) Features common to all fundamentalisms
(4) What one does about fundamentalism
INTRODUCTION:
In 1980 the greatly respected American historian, George Marsden published Fundamentalism and American Culture, a history of the first decades of American fundamentalism. The book quickly rose to prominence, provoking new studies of American fundamentalism and contributing to a renewal of interest in American religious history.
The book’s timing was fortunate, for it was published as a resurgent fundamentalism was becoming active in politics and society.
The term “fundamentalism” was first applied in the 1920’s to Protestant movements in the United States that interpreted the Bible in an extreme and literal sense. In the United States, the term “fundamentalism” was first extended to other religious traditions around the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1978-79.
In general all fundamentalist movements arise when traditional societies are forced to face a kind of social disintegration of their way of life, a loss of personal and group meaning and the introduction of new customs that lead to a loss of personal and group orientation.
Regardless of the religious tradition to which they belong, all fundamentalists follow certain patterns:
• Religious ideology is the basis for their personal and communal identity.
• They insist upon one statement of truth that is inerrant, revealed and unchangeable
• They see themselves as part of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.
• They seize on historical moments and reinterpret them in the light of this cosmic struggle.
• They demonize their opposition.
• They are selective in what parts of the religious tradition and heritage they will stress.
Fundamentalist Christianity is defined by Marsden as "militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism." Marsden explains that fundamentalists were evangelical Christians who in the 20th century "militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed. Militant opposition to modernism was what most clearly set off fundamentalism."
Although we have not usually thought of Roman Catholics as fundamentalists, the term can certainly be applied to a number of Roman Catholic movements and/or organizations….. And a certainly large number of today’s American Roman Catholic bishops are starting to resemble fundamentalists more and more……
(1) THE FIVE-STAGE EVOLUTION OF FUNDAMENTALISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Fundamentalism in the United States has so far gone through five stages, while maintaining an essential continuity of spirit, belief, and method.
A. FIRST STAGE – 1920s
The earliest phase of fundamentalism in the USA involved articulating what was fundamental to Christianity and initiating an urgent battle to expel the enemies of orthodox Protestantism from the ranks of the churches.
American Christian fundamentalism, therefore, was a reaction by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century evangelical Christians against modernizations in American society, such as industrialization, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and changes in popular mores.
Fundamentalists resented modernization because it clashed with their worldview and their literal interpretations of the Bible and of Christian doctrine. Within the American denominations, fundamentalists fought modernists about the Bible as an historical document, biblical inspiration, and the biblical explanation for the creation of the world.
Fundamentalists also launched a campaign to safeguard “authentic Christian values” in American society, most notably through laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
The term "fundamentalist" was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws in the Baptist Watchman - Examiner, but it seemed to spring up everywhere in the early 1920s as an obvious way to identify someone who believed and actively defended the “fundamentals of the faith.”
Throughout the 1920s, fundamentalists waged battles in the large northern church denominations in a struggle for what they perceived as true Christianity at war against a new non-Christian religion that had crept into the churches. In his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923), George Gresham Machen (Presbyterian minister and professor of New Testament studies at Princeton Theological Seminary) called the new naturalistic religion "liberalism," but later followed the more popular fashion of calling it "modernism."
Church struggles occurred in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and even in the Southern Presbyterian Church, but the grand battles were fought in the Northern Presbyterian and Northern Baptist denominations. Machen was the undisputed leader among Presbyterians. Baptists created the National Federation of the Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists (1921), the Fundamentalist Fellowship (1921), and the Baptist Bible Union (1923) to lead the fight. The battles focused on instruction in seminaries and the formation of missionaries. In many ways, however, the real strongholds of the fundamentalists were the Southern Baptists and the growing number of new independent churches spreading across the American South and Midwest.
In politics fundamentalists opposed the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, leading up to the famous Scopes trial (1925) in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, a Presbyterian layman and three times candidate for the American presidency, was the acknowledged leader of the anti-evolution battle.
The Scopes Trial, informally known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” was an American legal case in 1925 in which an American high school biology teacher John Scopes was accused of violating a law in the State of Tennessee which made it unlawful to teach evolution. John Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality and he was never brought back to trial. The trial drew intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to the small town of Dayton, to cover the big-name lawyers representing each side. William Jennings Bryan, three time presidential candidate for the Democrats, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes.
The trial revealed a growing chasm in American Christianity and two ways of finding truth, one "biblical" and one "scientific." Liberals saw the trial as underlining a growing division in the United States: a division between educated, tolerant Christians and narrow-minded, obscurantist Christians.
In contemporary America, the spirit of the Scopes Trial is alive and well in the Intelligent Design movement, promoted and greatly funded by the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. The Discovery Institute is the driving force behind the movement and the Institute directs its campaigns through its Center for Science and Culture division with guidance from its public relations firm Creative Response Concepts.
The Discovery Institute seeks to promote intelligent design while discrediting evolutionary biology, which the Institute terms "Darwinism.” The Institute strongly asserts that teaching evolution leads to eugenics and Nazism. Intelligent design, a form of creationism, on the other hand, safeguards the belief that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by supernatural intervention -- by an intelligent cause -- not an undirected process such as natural selection.
B. SECOND STAGE: LATE 1920s to EARLY 1940s
By the late 1920s, it seemed that militant fundamentalists had failed to expel the “modernists” from American Protestant Christianity and had lost the battle against evolutionism.
Orthodox Protestants, who still numerically dominated all the denominations, now began to struggle among themselves. During the Depression of the 1930s the term "fundamentalist" gradually shifted meaning as it came to apply to only one party among those who believed the traditional fundamentals of the faith. Meanwhile, neo-orthodoxy associated with Karl Barth's critique of liberalism found strong adherents in America.
During this period the distinctive theological point made by the fundamentalists was that they represented true Christianity based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, and that de facto this truth ought to be expressed organizationally and clearly distinct from any association with “liberals and modernists.” Fundamentalists also identified themselves with what they believed was a pure personal morality and a pure American culture. Thus, the term "fundamentalist" came to refer largely to orthodox Protestants outside the large Northern denominations, whether in the newly established church denominations, in the Southern churches, or in the many independent churches across the United States.
C. THIRD STAGE: FROM 1940s to 1970s
In the 1940s, especially after the Second World War, fundamentalists divided gradually into two camps. There were those who continued to use the term “fundamentalist” to refer to themselves and to equate it with “true Bible-believing-Christianity.” There were others who came to regard the term as undesirable, with a connotation of being divisive, intolerant, anti -intellectual, and not at all unconcerned with social problems. This second group wished to regain fellowship with those orthodox Protestants who still constituted the vast majority of clergy and people in the large Northern churches: Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians. They began to call themselves "evangelicals" and to equate that term with true Christianity. In 1948 a few began, to call themselves “neo-evangelicals.”
The term "fundamentalist" was carried into the 1950s by a vast number of Southern and independent churches. It was proudly used by such schools as Bob Jones University, the Moody Bible Institute, and the Dallas Theological Seminary, and by hundreds of evangelists and radio preachers. The International Council of Christian Churches (1948) sought to give the term worldwide currency in opposition to the World Council of Churches, which by that time was considered far too liberal.
The term "fundamentalist" therefore took on special meaning in contrast to evangelicals or neo-evangelicals.
Nevertheless, fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s shared much. Both adhered to “traditional” literal interpretations of Scripture and Christian doctrine; Both promoted evangelism, revivals, missions, and a personal morality that strongly opposed smoking, drinking alcoholic beverages, the theater, motion pictures, and card playing. Both identified “American values” with “Christian values.” Both believed in creating organizational networks that separated themselves from the rest of (decadent) society.
Fundamentalists, however, believed they differed from evangelicals and neo-evangelicals by being more faithful to “Bible-believing-Christianity” and more militant against atheistic communism. They tended to oppose the popular evangelist Billy Graham, not to read Christianity Today, which was considered far too liberal. Instead they favored their own evangelists, their own radio preachers, newspapers, and schools. Fundamentalists still tended to differ greatly among themselves and they found it difficult to achieve widespread fundamentalist cooperation across the country.
D. FOURTH STAGE: LATE 1970s and 1980s
By the late 1970s and in particular by the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, American fundamentalists entered a new phase.
American fundamentalists became nationally prominent as offering an answer for what many regarded as a major social, economic, moral, and religious crisis in America. They identified a new and more pervasive enemy, secular humanism, which they believed was responsible for eroding churches, schools, universities, the government, and above all families. They fought all enemies which they considered to be subversive supporters of secular humanism, evolutionism, political and theological liberalism, loose personal morality, sexual perversion, socialism, communism, and any lessening of the absolute, literal and inerrant authority of the Bible. They called Americans to return to the “fundamentals of the faith” and to the “fundamental moral values of America.”
A new generation of television and print fundamentalists, notably Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye, Hal Lindsey, and Pat Robertson, led the newly energized American fundamentalist movement.
The base for this new fundamentalism was Baptist and Southern, but it reached into all denominations across North and South. The new fundamentalists benefited from three decades of post-World War II fundamentalist and evangelical expansion through evangelism, publishing, church extension, and radio ministry.
And the new fundamentalists tended to blur the distinction between fundamentalist and evangelical.
Statistically, the new fundamentalists could claim that perhaps one fourth of the American population was fundamentalist - evangelical. However, not all fundamentalists accepted these new leaders, considering them to be neo-fundamentalists.
The fundamentalists of the early 1980s were in many ways very different from their predecessors, but they maintained important elements common to fundamentalists from the 1920s through the early 1980s. They were certain that they possessed “true knowledge” of the “fundamentals of the faith” and that they therefore represented “true Christianity” based on the authority of a literally interpreted Bible.
The new fundamentalists believed it was their duty to carry on the great battle of history: the battle of God against Satan, of light against darkness, and to fight against all enemies who undermined Christianity and therefore undermined America.
Faced with this titanic struggle the new fundamentalists were inclined to consider other Christians, who were not fundamentalists, as either “unfaithful to Christ” or “not genuinely Christian.” They called for a return to an inerrant and infallible Bible, to the traditional statement of the doctrines, and to a traditional morality which they believed once prevailed in America. To do all this, they created a vast number of separate organizations and ministries to propagate fundamentalist belief and practice.
As fundamentalists became even more active politically, we began to refer to them as the Christian Right.
E. FIFTH STAGE: TODAY – FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN RIGHT
Today the terms Christian Right and Religious Right are often used interchangeably, although the terms are not synonymous. Religious Right can refer to any religiously motivated conservative movement, whether specific to one religion or shared across religious lines. The term Christian Right is used by people from a wide range of conservative political and religious viewpoints. Some 15% of the electorate in the United States tell pollsters that they align themselves with the Christian Right, which serves as an important voting bloc within the U.S. Republican Party. In presidential elections that put George W. Bush in the White House for eight years, conservative American Catholics joined the Christian Right to insure a Bush victory.
Certainly one can credit this fundamentalist Christian political activism to people like Jerry Falwell, and other well-known fundamentalist clergy, who began urging American Christians to become involved in politics in the 1970s.
Beginning with Rob Grant's “American Christian Cause” in 1974, the Christian Voice throughout the 1970s and Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980s, the Christian Right began to have a major impact on American politics.
By the late 1990s, the Christian Right was influencing elections and policy with groups like the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council helping the U.S. Republican Party to gain control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and a more conservative Supreme Court by the mid-1990s.
The power of the Christian Right cannot be overestimated in the most recent mid-term elections that have brought a strong voice of opposition to the Democratic party and policies of President Barack Obama.
In recent years, Christian right groups have appeared in other countries such as Canada and the Philippines. However, the Christian right remains an idiosyncratic phenomenon most commonly associated with the United States.
(2)A SUMLMARY OF FEATURES COMMON TO ALL FUNDAMENTALISM
Fundamentalism is fundamentally flawed because it takes one element of the truth and proclaims it as the WHOLE TRUTH. Religious fundamentalists place such a high priority on doctrinal conformity and obedience to doctrinaire spokespersons that they sacrifice values basic to the great religious traditions: love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance and caring. In their overwhelming seriousness about religion, fundamentalists do not hesitate to intervene in political and social process to ensure that society is forced to conform to the values and behaviors the fundamentalist worldview requires. Fundamentalists are their own justification.
Fundamentalism appeals for a variety of reasons:
•For people who feel unimportant or insignificant, fundamentalism says you are important because you are God’s "special messenger.”
•For people who are fearful, fundamentalism says “you can’t be saved without us…join and be saved.”
•For the confused, fundamentalism says one doesn’t have to think about doctrine nor even be educated in it. Just believe.
•Fundamentalism makes the fundamentalist feel good about himself or her. It is self-stroking.
•Fundamentalism justifies hatred of one group of people for another, because it believes that God hates those who do not conform to the fundamentalist’s worldview.
•Fundamentalism appeals to people burdened by guilt and shame because it exempts them from responsibility for situations or actions that cause guilt and shame. Fundamentalism says…if you are one of us, you are OK.
•Fundamentalism excuses people from honest self-examination; and it justifies their prejudices, zealotry, intolerance and hatefulness.
(3) WHAT DOES ONE DO ABOUT FUNDAMENTALISM?
•The best way to confront ignorance is through real education that emphasizes critical, analytical thinking skills.
•Real education teaches students the importance of gathering evidence and then proceeding to conclusions. Fundamentalists work in opposite fashion.
•We need to establish channels for dialogue and institutions that promote multi-cultural knowledge and understanding.
•We in West need to practice a genuine humility that enables us to see the rest of the world and the rest of the world’s needs.
•We need to translate our vision-gained-from-humility into concrete and achievable actions and strategies.
©Dr John A Dick, Gresham College 2010
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John A Dick is an American who has lived in Belgium for more than twenty-five years. He holds licentiates in historical theology from the University of Nijmegen and the K U...
After completing studies in philosophy and theology and ordination as a Catholic priest, he rounded off his interests with degree work in physics. For the next twenty years, he...
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite studied in Jerusalem, Jinan, and the Los Angeles. He is the author of two books, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China,...
Professor Michael Mainelli is Emeritus Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College,...
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