Introduction

The intifadah impressed both the rest of the Arab world and the international community; it also strengthened the hand of the Israeli peace movement, since it powerfully demonstrated the Palestinians’ determination to achieve independence and liberation from Israeli hegemony at all costs. The intifadah also made an impression upon such relative hard-liners as Yitzhak Rabin, who as a soldier now appreciated the impossibility of using the I.D.F.
to batter women and children into submission. When he became prime minister in 1992, Rabin was prepared to enter into negotiations with the PLO, and, the following year, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords.
But in the early days of the intifadah, a new organization was formed which gave the Palestinian struggle a disturbingly nihilistic Islamic dimension.
The leadership of the intifadah was secularist, but some members of Mujamah founded HAM AS (Haqamat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah:
Islamic Resistance Movement), which fought both the Israeli occupation and the Palestine nationalist movement. They were fighting the secularists for the Muslim soul of Palestine, and young men joined HAM AS in droves.
Many came from the refugee camps, but others were middle-class and white collar workers. It was a violent movement that, yet again, was born of oppression. HAM AS terrorism escalated after the killing of seventeen Palestinian worshippers on the Haram al-Sharif on October 8, 1990. Impelled by a fear of annihilation, HAM AS also attacked Palestinians whom they judged to be collaborators with Israel.
“Our enemies are trying with all their might to obliterate our nation,” a spokesman explained in 1993, so any cooperation with Israel was “a terrible crime.” Like Islamic Jihad, HAM AS saw the Arab-Israeli conflict in religious terms. The Palestinian tragedy had, members believed, come about because the people had neglected their religion;
Palestinians would only shake off Israeli rule when they returned to Islam. HAM AS believed that the success of Israel was due to Jewish faith, and that Israel was dedicated to the destruction of Islam. They claimed, therefore, to be fighting a war of self-defense. After Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinian worshippers at Hebron, HAM AS vowed to take a life for a life. Activists waited until after the forty-day mourning period and then a suicide bomber killed seven Israeli citizens not in the occupied territories but in Afula, in Israel proper. A week later, on April 13, 1994, another suicide bomber killed five Israelis on an Egged bus in Hadera. Violence had bred new violence.
These suicide bombings made many Israelis wary of the Oslo Accords signed the previous year, by which the PLO recognized Israel’s existence within its 1948 borders, and promised to put an end to violence and terror. In return, Palestinians were offered limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza for a five-year period, after which final status negotiations would begin on such issues as the Israeli settlements in the territories, compensation for Palestinian refugees, and the future of Jerusalem. But the suicide bombings in Israel indicated that Arafat could not control the Islamic militants opposed to his secularist regime, and some Israelis, especially those on the right of the political spectrum, accused Rabin of having jeopardized Israeli security at Oslo.
The Kookist rabbis were especially incensed by the Oslo Accords: by signing away the sacred land, the government had committed a criminal act.
So in July 1995, Rabbi Avraham Shapira and fourteen other Gush rabbis ordered soldiers to disobey the commands of their superior officers when the I.D.F. began to evacuate the territories. This was tantamount to a declaration of civil war. Other Gush rabbis raised the question whether Rabin had become a We/’(“pursuer”), one who actively threatens the life of a Jew, and so is deemed worthy of death under Jewish law.
On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a former student of a hesder yeshiva, an army veteran, and a student at Bar Ilan University, assassinated Rabin during a peace rally in Tel Aviv. His study of Jewish law, he said later, had persuaded him that Rabin was just such a rodef, an enemy of the Jewish people; he had a duty to kill him.
Like the murder of Sadat, the assassination of Rabin showed that two wars are being fought in the Middle East. One is the Arab-Israeli conflict;
the other is a war within such individual countries as Israel and Egypt, between secularists and religious. Religious Jews are not alone in feeling outraged and attacked at a profound level. Secularists in Israel likewise feel repelled and assaulted by religious Jews. Walking around a Haredi district in Jerusalem, the celebrated Israeli novelist Amos Oz recalled that the early Zionists detested Orthodox Judaism and “would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of hatred and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls.” To this secular hatred the Haredim have responded in kind. On the walls of the districts inhabited by members of Neturei Karta, Oz noted the black swastikas and graffiti: “Death to the Zionist Hitlerites.”
“To hell with [the Laborite mayor of Jerusalem] Teddy Kollek.” Oz was also reminded of his teacher, Dov Sadan, who had argued that secular Zionism was just a passing episode in Jewish history, and that Orthodox Judaism would reemerge, “swallow Zionism and digest it.” Now as he wandered around the streets of this ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, Oz felt claustrophobic and overwhelmed by the vitality of Haredi Judaism, “for as it grows and swells, it threatens your own spiritual existence and eats away at the roots of your own world, prepared to inherit it all when you and your kind are gone.” Secularist Israelis, it appears, also fear annihilation and feel irrational dread when confronted with their religious enemies.
Oz touched upon the core of the problem. Fundamentalists and secularists--of whatever faith--are at war because they have entirely different conceptions of the sacred. When speaking about Gush Emunim, Oz called it “a cruel and obdurate sect” which had emerged “from a dark corner of Judaism, and is threatening to destroy all that is dear and holy to us.”
For secularists and liberals--be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim--such Enlightenment values as the autonomy of the individual and intellectual liberty, are inviolable and holy. They cannot compromise or make concessions on such issues. These principles are so central to the liberal or secular identity that if they are threatened, people feel that their very existence is in jeopardy.
Just as fundamentalists fear annihilation at the hands of the secularist, a liberal like Oz saw the Gush as threatening “to bring down upon us a savage and insane bloodlust.” The real aim of the Gush, he continued, was not the conquest of Nablus or Hebron, but the imposition of an ugly and distorted version of Judaism upon the State of Israel. The real aim of this cult is the expulsion of the Arabs so as to oppress the Jews afterwards, to force us all under the brutality of their false prophets.
Each, the religious and the secularist, gazes at the other with horror.
Neither can see the other clearly. Both recall the excesses, cruelties, and intolerance of the “other side” and, wounded to the core, they cannot make peace.
there was also polarization and hostility in America. In the United States, religious fundamentalists seemed more restrained and law-abiding. Fundamentalists did not assassinate their presidents, lead revolutions, or take hostages. But a deep ravine ran through American religion nonetheless.
Polls showed the religious population of the United States to be neatly divided into two almost equal and mutually antagonistic camps. A Gallup Poll carried out in June 1984 revealed that 43 percent of Americans called themselves “liberals” and 41 percent “conservatives”;
and that the major denominations were split down the middle. Most of the respondents argued that the rift was “serious” and had a negative image of the “other side,” which did not, as did other forms of prejudice, recede when there was greater contact. Other polls showed that even though only 9 percent of Americans identified themselves as “fundamentalists,” core tenets of Protestant fundamentalism were more widely held.
44 percent believed that salvation comes only through Jesus Christ.
30 percent describe themselves as “born-again.” 28 percent believe that every word of the Bible must be read literally.
27 percent denied that the Bible could contain scientific and historical errors.
The success of American fundamentalism was not entirely due to the adroit marketing of Jerry Falwell and other televangelists. There were elements in American culture and religious life that were favorable to this literalistic form of faith, and which provided it with a fertile soil.
During the 1980s, however, fundamentalism received a severe setback.
There was no murder of a president, no terrorist campaign. Instead the fundamentalist cause was damaged by a scandal that was just as destructive and nihilistic in its own way, threatening to drown the televangelists in a sea of triviality, money-grubbing, and sexual intrigue. Was there anything about the nature of American fundamentalism that contributed to the Television Scandals of 1987?
Because of the Christian concern with doctrine, Protestant fundamentalism had set out in a different direction from the other movements we have considered. The Jewish and Muslim emphasis on practice had meant that fundamentalists in these faiths had turned the myths of their traditions into ideologies. Some of their worst excesses had come about because they had tried to realize these mythologies literally in the practical world of affairs. They had sought to meet the modern criterion of efficiency, in which a “truth” had to work effectively in order to be taken seriously. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists had turned their mythoi into pragmatic logoi designed to achieve a practical result. Protestant fundamentalists had perverted myth in a different way. They had turned the Christian myths into scientific facts, and had created a hybrid that was neither good science nor good religion. This had run counter to the whole tradition of spirituality and had involved great strain, since religious truth is not rational in nature and cannot be proved scientifically. Because Protestant fundamentalists tended to overlook the intuitive and the mystical, they had also lost touch with the unconscious, deeper impulses of the personality. As a result, American revivalism had sometimes been anarchic and neurotic. By the late 1980s, some fundamentalists were ready to revolt against the constraints of this rationalistic faith. Sex, as we have seen, was problematic for fundamentalists, many of whom appeared to be anxious about potency and gender boundaries. It was not surprising, perhaps, that the rebellion, when it came, took a sexual form.
Television and the public adulation that sometimes comes with it are also traps for the spiritually unwary. Not only is the narcissism involved in a personality cult incompatible with the transcendence of ego that should characterize the spiritual quest, but the televangelist could also lose touch with reality. The vast sums of money that the more successful networks could command sat uneasily with the Gospel demand to abandon the pursuit of material wealth. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of PTL (Praise The Lord and People That Love) network in North Carolina had attracted adverse criticism for their extravagant lifestyle. The Charlotte Observer had for some years been pointing out that while they urged their viewers to make sacrifices and give their money to the needy, the Bakkers themselves had spent $375,000 on an ocean-front condominium and $22,000 on floor-to-ceiling mirrors. All this was a far cry from Jerry Falwell’s regime in Lynchburg, which was characterized by sobriety and self-restraint.
The Bakkers were chiefly known for their Christian theme park, Heritage USA, which portrayed the evangelical experience of North America Disney-style, and attracted huge numbers of visitors. In an intriguing article, the American anthropologist Susan Harding suggests that the Bakkers were quite consciously staging a revolt against Falwell’s commonsense religiosity and pushing fundamentalism into a new, postmodern phase. Since the late nineteenth century, American fundamentalists had responded to the challenge of modernity by trying to make their faith wholly rational. They had emphasized the virtues of reason and plain sense; they had embraced a sober literalism that eschewed imagination and fantasy; they had organized the world into watertight compartments in which right was utterly and obviously distinct from wrong, and true believers in an entirely different category from secularists and liberal Christians. Theirs had been an ethic of separation; fundamentalists had created a counterculture that was supposed to be everything that the Godless mainstream was not: it was a faith that offered cast-iron certainty and hierarchy to challenge the doubts, open questions, and shifting roles of the modern world.
Heritage USA, however, like other forms of postmodern culture, was characterized by a mixing of genres, play, indulgence, and vivid spectacle.
By trying to make their faith scientific and rational, the fundamentalists had pushed religion into an unnatural mode. As fundamentalists had rebelled against the scientific rationalism of Darwin, based on hypothesis and free inquiry, by clinging to the Baconian ideal, so now the Bakkers revolted against the rationalism of the old-style fundamentalists like Falwell. As Harding points out, in its depiction of American Christian history, Heritage USA was an ensemble of categories in a wild melange. Instead of insisting that truth was factual, the exhibits in Heritage USA drew attention to their artificial and unnatural assemblage in the park. The shopping mall was a hodgepodge of Victorian and colonial architecture, an eclectic mix of styles and periods that did not attempt verisimilitude. At the entrance, Billy Graham’s “actual” home was displayed, but there were photographs on the walls showing its dismantling and rebuilding in the theme park, its displacement from the original site being part of the point. There was an “exact replica” of the Upper Room in Jerusalem (where Jesus was believed to have eaten the Last Supper and instituted the Eucharist), but it was deliberately made to look like a reproduction. Church services were held in a television studio, and, unlike Falwell, the Bakkers never televised a regular communion service or a sermon. The emphasis was always on performance, spectacle, and fantasy rather than on the literal fundamentalist Word.
Harding suggests that the Bakkers, who emphasized the endless love of God, were also evolving a folk theology of infinite forgiveness, which almost seemed to sanction sin, since it promised divine pardon beforehand.
We have seen that in the past, an antinomian rebellion has sometimes erupted during a time of transition. The old rules and lifestyle no longer suit the changing circumstances of some of the faithful, who feel restricted and reach out for something new. They find relief in the breaking of old taboos. Some have even gone so far as to evolve a theology of “holy sin.” When the scandal which held the nation enthralled finally broke in March 1987, it appeared that something of the sort may have been going on in PTL circles. The Charlotte Observer alleged that in 1980, Jim Bakker had drugged and seduced Jessica Hahn, a church secretary from Long Island, and then paid her $250,000 to keep quiet. On the heels of this revelation, it emerged that Tammy Faye had become so infatuated with country-and western singer Gary Paxton that she had broken up his marriage. When the sordid truth was out, however, the Bakkers did not slink away in shame, but went public with their contrition, chattering to huge television audiences about God’s love and forgiveness.
Falwell’s regime in Lynchburg had been an attempt to hold on to the restraints of the conservative, premodern religion, which had helped oeople to accept necessary limitations. The Bakkers’ story shows what happens when these restraints are entirely cast aside. Where other fundamentalist movements sprang from the experience of suppression, the Bakkers’ postmodern Christianity expressed the late-twentieth-century conviction that “anything goes.” With vast sums of money at their command, the Bakkers felt they could make anything happen. There were no limitations, and old categories of right and wrong could be dissolved as easily as truth and fiction in Heritage USA. That this was all a distortion of Christianity goes without saying.
Then new horrors came to light. Jim Bakker resigned from PTL and asked Jerry Falwell to rescue the network by acting as temporary caretaker. Jim then turned on Jimmy Swaggart, who had brought the scandal to light, claiming that Swaggart had been plotting to take over PTL.
Swaggart, for his part, had been making his own foray into antinomianism. At this time, Swaggart was probably the most successful of the televangelists. His shows were screened in 145 countries and, so he claimed, were available to half the homes on the planet. But he had taken to visiting a prostitute in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The woman, who later sold her story, made it clear that Swaggart was less interested in sex than in ritual humiliation and abasement.
He also seemed to be courting self-destruction, since he knew that people had seen and recognized him at the motel and yet continued to go there until all hell broke loose. His misconduct was revealed by another minister, Marvin German, whom Swaggart had attacked on his show.
Swaggart was a Pentecostalist. In its early days, Pentecostalism had been the polar opposite of fundamentalism, attempting to bypass reason and give voice to the ineffability of divine truth. As such, it had always courted the danger of an undisciplined entry into the unconscious world and the perils that always attend an abdication of reason. But early Pentecostalism at its best had been characterized by inclusion and a compassionate breaking down of racial and class barriers. Swaggart, however, preached a religion of hatred. He had become famous for his foulmouthed attacks on homosexuals, an obsession that almost certainly revealed buried anxieties about his own sexual proclivities. He had also turned viciously on other ministers and rival televangelists, and joined the judgmental crusade of Moral Majority.
By casting off the restraints imposed by the discipline of charity as well as those of reason, Swaggart had embraced a religiosity that was, in its way, as self-destructive and nihilistic as some of the other movements we have considered.
American journalist Lawrence Wright found himself attracted to Swaggart’s emotional preaching style. He sensed that Swaggart was rebelling against the strictures of rational modernity; it was “defiantly emotional,” light-years away from the “arid intellectual refinements” of Wright’s own childhood religion. He found that a part of himself craved Swaggart’s “ecstatic abandonment of my own busy, judgmental, ironic mentality. “ And so did Swaggart’s audience, who responded ecstatically to his orgasmic preaching:
He would sink deeper and deeper into his subconscious, he would journey past reason and conscious meaning into the slashing emotions and buried fears and unnamed desires that bubble below. His voice would rise and tremble, his grammar would fall away, but still he stumbled toward that cowering raw nerve of longing. He knew where it was. One watched him with both dread and desire, because this is the nerve that is attached to faith.
Longing to be loved and saved--it is when he finally touches this nerve that the tears flow and the audience stands with its hands upraised, laughing, wailing, praising the Lord, speaking in unknown languages and quivering with the pain and pleasure of this thrilling public exposure.
The best premodern spirituality, such as that of John of the Cross, Isaac Luria, or Mulla Sadra, had eschewed such emotional excess, claiming that it had nothing to do with religion; they had insisted that the interior journey was calm, disciplined, and complemented by reason. No one was initiated into the Kabbalah until he was at least forty years old and married, and had achieved sexual equilibrium. The modern world, which had neglected the more intuitive paths to knowledge, had for the most part lost this mystical lore. Swaggart’s success shows that people longed for ecstasy in an over rationalized world, but also shows that such a quest can become unbalanced.
Swaggart’s frenzy seemed to have more to do with the sexual needs that drove him (to use Wright’s words in a different context) to the “thrilling public exposure” in the Baton Rouge motel than with spirituality.
Yet the failure of fundamentalist faith is most plainly demonstrated in the rage and hatred that the televangelists displayed toward one another during the scandal. When Swaggart got wind of Bakker’s sexual relationship with Jessica Hahn, he “took on Jim Bakker like a pit bulldog taking on a French poodle,” one of Swaggart’s former aides recalled.
“Just ripped him to shreds, destroyed the man. Next, Bakker turned on Jerry Falwell, who had come to the rescue of PTL, and accused him of exploiting the situation to get control of the network. Falwell retaliated by calling a press conference where he produced sworn affidavits by men who claimed to have had homosexual relations with Jim Bakker, together with a note from Tammy Faye listing what she wanted from PTL in return for going quietly: $300,000 a year for Jim, and $100,000 for herself; royalties on all PTL records and books; their $400,000 mansion, two cars, security staff, legal fees, plus the fees of the accountants who were trying to sort out the Bakkers’ highly irregular finances. The grand fundamentalist enterprise seemed to have ended in a barren, unedifying cul-de-sac. The year before the scandals, Falwell had been full of confidence. He had renamed the Moral Majority “the Liberty Federation,” and declared that many of its members would be running for office in the 1988 elections at the local, state, and federal levels. But after the PTL debacle, Falwell resigned on November 4, 1987, from the presidency of the Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation and announced that his political career was over. He would never again work for a candidate as he had for Ronald Reagan, and never again lobby for legislation. In the wake of the scandals, the income from his own Old Time Gospel Hour had declined, and Falwell felt compelled to return to his private Gospel ministry.
He would still surface from time to time to fulminate about the nation’s ills, but he could no longer look forward to the imminent creation of a coalition of religious conservatives that would take America by storm.
When Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidency failed, the fundamentalist offensive, which had started in 1979 with such great hopes, seemed to have failed. The New Christian Right, discredited, appeared to have ignominiously fizzled out, and though Christians would individually continue to lobby and try to bring voters to the polls, it was generally assumed by secularists that the fundamentalist threat was over.
However, fundamentalism was not dead; it had, in fact, entered a new and more extreme phase in America. On November 28, 1987, Randall Terry, a horn-again Christian from upstate New York, led three hundred “rescuers” to an abortion clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. They held a service on what Terry described as “the doorstep of hell” for almost eleven hours, praying, singing psalms, and preventing women and staff from entering the clinic. By the end of the day, 211 of the “rescuers” had been arrested, but, Terry recorded triumphantly, “no babies died.”
This was the first action of Operation Rescue, which declared war on mainstream culture by depicting it as inherently murderous. The imagery was militant. During the Democratic Convention in Atlanta in 1988, the movement began what Terry called the “siege of Atlanta,” in which over thirteen hundred demonstrators were arrested for blockading the city’s abortion clinics. They have since held Days of Rescue all over Canada and the United States, and held training days to lecture potential rescuers on the evils of feminism and liberal government and to give them instruction on lobbying techniques.