Introduction

They described their “operations” as acts of “biblical disobedience.”
Unlike Falwell and Robertson, Terry was prepared to work outside the law. His aim was fundamentalist: to create “a nation where once again the Judeo Christian ethic is the foundation for our politics, our judicial system, and our public morality; a nation not floating in the uncertain sea of humanism, but a country whose unmoving bedrock is Higher Laws.”
The campaign is not just about abortion, any more than the Scopes trial was just about evolution. Like William Jennings Bryan in the 1920S, Terry and his rescuers believe that they are fighting one of the most brutal manifestations of secular modernity. Terry is convinced that if Operation Rescue does not succeed, “America is not going to make it.”
But he is confident:
“We have an army of people,” he insisted, and, as a result of these operations,
“child-killing will fall, child pornography and pornography will follow, euthanasia, infanticide ... we’ll take back the culture.” It is a war to stave off imminent catastrophe and rescue American civilization.
The Reconstruction movement, founded by the Texan economist Gary North and his father-in-law, Rousas John Rushdoony, is also engaged in a war against secular humanism, in a more extreme form than that waged by the Moral Majority. Reconstructionists have abandoned the old premillennial pessimism for a more galvanizing ideology. Like Muslim fundamentalists, North and Rushdoony are principally concerned about the sovereignty of God. A Christian civilization must be established that will defeat Satan and usher in the millennial Kingdom. The key concept of Reconstructionism is Dominion. God gave Adam and later Noah the task of subduing the world. Christians have inherited this mandate and they have the responsibility of imposing Jesus’ rule on earth before the Second Coming of Christ.
There will be no need, however, for Christians to take action to achieve this, since God himself will bring the modern state down in a terrible catastrophe.
Christians will simply reap the victory that God will effect.
In the meantime, the Reconstructionists are training themselves to take control when the secular humanist state is destroyed. Their vision is a complete distortion of Christianity in its abandonment of the ethos of compassion.
When the Kingdom comes, there will be no more separation of church and state; the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished, and society reorganized on strictly biblical lines. This means that every single law of the Bible must be put literally into practice. Slavery will be reintroduced;
there will be no more birth control (since believers must “increase and multiply”); adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers, astrologers, and witches will all be put to death. Children who are persistently disobedient must also be stoned, as the Bible enjoins. A strictly capitalist economy must be enforced; socialists and those who incline to the left are sinful. God is not on the side of the poor. Indeed, as North explains, there is a “tight relationship between wickedness and poverty.” Taxes should not be used in welfare programs, since “subsidizing sluggards is the same as subsidizing evil.” The same goes for the Third World, which has brought its economic problems on its own head because of its addiction to moral perversity, paganism, and demonology. Foreign aid is forbidden by the Bible. While waiting for victory--which, North admits, may be some time off . Christians must prepare to rebuild society according to God’s blueprint and must support government policies which approximate to these strict biblical norms.
The Dominion envisaged by North and Rushdoony is totalitarian.
There is no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom. The chances of this theology’s achieving much popularity in the United States are, to be sure, remote;
but it has been suggested that in the event of an environmental or major economic catastrophe, an authoritarian state church could replace the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. Christianity, after all, was able to adapt to capitalism, which was alien to many of the teachings of Jesus. It could also be used to back a fascist ideology that, in drastically changed circumstances, might be necessary to maintain public order.
Some of the more conservative Pentecostalists have shown an interest in Reconstruction theology, even though Rushdoony regards Pentecostalism with distaste. Pat Robertson seems to be a transitional figure. He is a Baptist with leanings toward Pentecostalism and revivalism. Like North, he believes that the Second Coming may be far off--a belief which separates him from traditional premillennial fundamentalism.
Meanwhile, Christians, Robertson believes, should try to win positions of power to build a society based on biblical norms. He changed the name of his university in Virginia Beach to Regent University; a regent, he explained, is someone “who governs in the absence of a sovereign.” The purpose of the college is to prepare its seven hundred students to take over when the Kingdom arrives. Fundamentalism has changed in America since the publication of The Fundamentals (1910--15). It has exhibited postmodern, antinomian tendencies on the one hand, and a more hard-line, totalitarian vision on the other.
Fundamentalism is not going to disappear. In America, religion has long shaped opposition to government. Its rise and fall has always been cyclical, and events of the last few years indicate that there is still a state of incipient war between conservatives and liberals which has occasionally become frighteningly explicit. In 1992, Jerry Falwell, who still adheres to the old style fundamentalism, announced that with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Satan had been let loose in the United States. Clinton, Falwell thundered, was about to destroy the military and the nation by letting “the gays” take over. Executive orders permitting abortion in federally funded clinics, research on fetal tissue, the official endorsement of homosexual rights, were all signs that America “had declared war against God.”
In 1993, the war claimed casualties. On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stormed David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, because he was said to be stockpiling arms. In fact, though like many Texans the Branch Davidians (an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists) had an impressive arsenal, they seemed to have no plans for revolutionary action against the government. The offensive was designed to demonstrate the power and legitimacy of the United States government, but it backfired. It led to the compound’s being besieged by the FBI, the burning of the Davidian buildings, and the deaths of eighty men, women, and children. What had actually been demonstrated was the government’s ignorance of the sect, its powerlessness before the besieged Davidians, and its tragic inability to control events.
On their side, more extreme Christians are certainly preparing to fight the secular government. Christian Identity, a fascist group, has not been mentioned in this book because it has left fundamentalism far behind, and, indeed, disapproves of fundamentalism. Members of Identity hate the idea of Rapture, which they believe has emasculated American religion: they want to be there to fight the forces of evil during Tribulation. Viciously antiSemitic, they hate the fundamentalists’ support for Zionism, which they regard as a great sin.
In their view, the Jews have usurped the title of Chosen People from the Aryan race, and now they have stolen the Holy Land, which should have remained under a British mandate. They do not believe that the wars of the Last Days will be fought in the Middle East, but in America.
They predict a new holocaust in which the white race and the United States will be annihilated. They are, therefore, preparing themselves for the catastrophe.
They foresee the imminent destruction of the federal government, which they call ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), which is dominated by Satan and Jews, and dedicated to the destruction of the Aryan nation.
Some have formed themselves into militant groups in remote corners of the northwestern United States, where they learn survival techniques, collect guns and ammunition, and prepare for the last war. Some make paramilitary raids on ZOG, killing state officials. Others bomb and set fire to abortion clinics. It is this type of ideology that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
It is difficult to chart the activities and ideals of Christian Identity, which is not a monolithic movement but a constellation of affiliated organizations.
Their numbers are small; there are probably no more than 100,000 members, and could be as few as 50,000. But as a trend, Christian Identity is worrying.
Like fundamentalists, they have retreated from the world in contempt and fear, and plan to take it over. Like the most extreme types of fundamentalists, members see conspiracy everywhere and cultivate a theology of rage and resentment. But they have outdone the fundamentalists in their overtly fascist ideology, their pure hatred of the United States government, and the extremity of their withdrawal from modern life. No longer concerned with problems of doctrine and biblical in errancy the Identity groups want to carve out for themselves a separate Aryan state in America. Christian Identity has developed an ideology of alienation and terror unparalleled in American history. Like Reconstructionism, this loose confederation of Identity communities is a small but disturbing indication of the way religion could be used to articulate helplessness, disappointment, and discontent in the future. The secularist establishment and mainstream denominations may feel that the fundamentalist threat is receding in the United States, but as far as some Christians are concerned the war is still on, the federal government must be destroyed, and the conflict will certainly continue into the twenty-first Christian century.
Religion did not disappear after all, and in some circles it has become more militant than ever. In all three of the monotheistic faiths, fundamentalists have reacted angrily to attempts to privatize or to suppress religion, and have, as they believe, rescued it from oblivion.
It has been a hard struggle and in the course of it, the faith has often been distorted; this represents a defeat for religion. But fundamentalism is now part of the modern world. It represents a widespread disappointment, alienation, anxiety, and rage that no government can safely ignore. So far, efforts to deal with fundamentalism have not been very successful; what lessons can we learn from the past that will help us to deal more creatively in the future with the fears that fundamentalism enshrines? Afterword
We cannot be religious in the same way as our ancestors in the premodern conservative world, when the myths and rituals of faith helped people to accept limitations that were essential to agrarian civilization. We are now oriented to the future, and those of us who have been shaped by the rationalism of the modern world cannot easily understand the old forms of spirituality.
We are not unlike Newton, one of the first people in the Western world to be wholly imbued by the scientific spirit, who found it impossible to understand mythology. However hard we try to embrace conventional religion, we have a natural tendency to see truth as factual, historical, and empirical. Many have become convinced that if faith is to be taken seriously, its myths must be shown to be historical and capable of working practically with all the efficiency that modernity expects. An increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe, which has experienced such tragedy during the twentieth century, have rejected religion. For those who see reason as providing the sole path to truth, this is a principled and honest position. As scientists would be the first to insist, rational logos cannot address questions of ultimate meaning that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry.
Confronted with the genocidal horrors of our century, reason has nothing to say.
Hence, there is a void at the heart of modern culture, which Western people experienced at an early stage of their scientific revolution.
Pascal recoiled in dread from the emptiness of the cosmos; Descartes saw the human being as the sole living denizen of an inert universe;
Hobbes imagined God retreating from the world, and Nietzsche declared that God was dead: humanity had lost its orientation and was hurtling toward an infinite nothingness. But others have felt emancipated by the loss of faith, and liberated from the restrictions it had always imposed. Sartre, who acknowledged the God-shaped hole in modern consciousness, argued that it was still our duty to reject deity, which negated our freedom. Albert Camus (1913--60) believed that rejecting God would enable men and women to concentrate all their attention and love upon humankind. Others put their faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, looking forward to a future in which human beings will become more rational and tolerant;
they venerate the sacred liberty of the individual instead of a distant, imaginary God. They have created secularist forms of spirituality, which bring them insight, transcendence, and ecstasy, and which have developed their own disciplines of mind and heart.
Nevertheless, a large number of people still want to be religious and have tried to evolve new forms of faith. Fundamentalism is just one of these modern religious experiments, and, as we have seen, it has enjoyed a certain success in putting religion squarely back on the international agenda, but it has often lost sight of some of the most sacred values of the confessional faiths. Fundamentalists have turned the mythos of their religion into logos, either by insisting that their dogmas are scientifically true, or by transforming their complex mythology into a streamlined ideology. They have thus conf lated two complementary sources and styles of knowledge which the people in the premodern world had usually decided it was wise to keep separate.
The fundamentalist experience shows the truth of this conservative insight. By insisting that the truths of Christianity are factual and scientifically demonstrable, American Protestant fundamentalists have created a caricature of both religion and science. Those Jews and Muslims who have presented their faith in a reasoned, systematic way to compete with other secular ideologies have also distorted their tradition, narrowing it down to a single point by a process of ruthless selection. As a result, all have neglected the more tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate teachings and have cultivated theologies of rage, resentment, and revenge. On occasion, this has even led a small minority to pervert religion by using it to sanction murder.
Even the vast majority of fundamentalists, who are opposed to such acts of terror, tend to be exclusive and condemnatory of those who do not share their views.
But fundamentalist fury reminds us that our modern culture imposes extremely difficult demands on human beings. It has certainly empowered us, opened new worlds, broadened our horizons, and enabled many of us to live happier, healthier lives. Yet it has often dented our self-esteem. At the same time as our rational worldview has proclaimed that humans are the measure of all things, and liberated us from an unseemly dependence upon a supernatural God, it has also revealed our frailty, vulnerability, and lack of dignity. Copernicus unseated us from the center of the universe, and relegated us to a peripheral role. Kant declared that we could never be certain that our ideas corresponded to any reality outside our own heads. Darwin suggested that we were simply animals, and Freud showed that far from being wholly rational creatures, human beings were at the mercy of the powerful, irrational forces of the unconscious, which could be accessed only with great difficulty. This, indeed, was demonstrated by the modern experience.
Despite the cult of rationality, modern history has been punctuated by witch-hunts and world wars which have been explosions of unreason.
Without the ability to approach the deeper regions of the psyche, which the old myths, liturgies, and mystical practices of the best conservative faith once provided, it seemed that reason sometimes lost its mind in our brave new world. At the end of the twentieth century, the liberal myth that humanity is progressing to an ever more enlightened and tolerant state looks as fantastic as any of the other millennial myths we have considered in this book. Without the constraints of a “higher,” mythical truth, reason can on occasion become demonic and commit crimes that are as great as, if not greater than, any of the atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalists.
Modernity has been beneficial, benevolent, and humane, but it has often, especially in its early stages, felt the need to be cruel. This has been especially true in the developing world, which experienced modern Western culture as invasive, imperialistic, and alien. In the Muslim countries we have considered, the modernization process was very different and difficult. In the West, it had been characterized by independence and innovation; in Egypt and Iran, it was accompanied by dependence and imitation, as the Muslim reformers and ideologues were acutely aware. This would alter the tenor of modernity in these countries. If you bake a cake using the wrong ingredients (dried eggs instead of fresh, rice instead of flour) and with incorrect equipment, the end result will not conform to the ideal in the cookbook;
it could be delicious, if different, but it could be very nasty indeed.
It might be better to use techniques and ingredients that are ready to hand to create a closer approximation to the norm, using local expertise and culinary skill. Islamists such as Afghani, Abdu, Shariati, and Khomeini wanted to use Muslim ingredients to bake their own distinctive and modern cake.
But it has been hard for some Westerners, who no longer think in a religious way, to appreciate this resurgence of faith, especially when it has expressed itself violently and cruelly. Frequently, modern society has become divided into “two nations”: secularists and religious living in the same country cannot speak one another’s language or see things from the same point of view. What seems sacred and positive in one camp appears demonic and deranged in the other.
Secularists and religious both feel profoundly threatened by one another, and when there is a clash of two wholly irreconcilable world views as in the Salman Rushdie affair, the sense of estrangement and alienation is only exacerbated. It is an unhealthy and potentially dangerous situation. Fundamentalism is not going away. In some places it is either going from strength to strength or becoming more extreme. What can the liberal, secular establishment do to build bridges and avert the possibility of future battles?
Suppression and coercion are clearly not the answer. They invariably lead to a backlash and can make fundamentalists or potential fundamentalists more extreme. Protestant fundamentalists in the United States became more reactionary, intransigent, and literal-minded after their humiliation at the Scopes trial. The most extreme forms of Sunni fundamentalism surfaced in Nasser’s concentration camps, and the shah’s crackdowns helped to inspire the Islamic Revolution. Fundamentalism is an embattled faith; it anticipates imminent annihilation. Not surprisingly, Jewish fundamentalists, be they Zionist or ultra-Orthodox, are still haunted by fears of holocaust and antiSemitic catastrophe. Repression has bitten deeply into the souls of those who have experienced secularization as aggressive, and has warped their religious vision, making it violent and intolerant in its turn.
Fundamentalists see conspiracy everywhere and are sometimes possessed by a rage that seems demonic.
And yet, attempting to exploit fundamentalism for secular, pragmatic ends is also counterproductive. Sadat courted the Muslims of Egypt and wooed the jamaat al-islamiyyah to give legitimacy to his regime and build his own power base. Israel supported HAM AS initially, as a way of undermining the PLO. In both cases, the attempt to manipulate and control recoiled tragically and fatally on the secularist state. A more just and objective appraisal of the meaning of these religious movements must be sought.

First, it is important to recognize that these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at one time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out. The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning, and even satanic to a fundamentalist.

If a patient brought such paranoid, conspiracy-laden, and vengeful fantasies to a therapist, he or she would undoubtedly be diagnosed as disturbed.
The premillennial vision, which views some of the most positive institutions of modernity as diabolic, harbors genocidal dreams, and sees humanity as rushing toward a horrific End, is a clear indication of the dread and disappointment that modernity has inspired in many Protestant fundamentalists.
We have seen the nihilism that can inform the fundamentalist program.
It is impossible to reason such fear away or attempt to eradicate it by coercive measures. A more imaginative response would be to try to appreciate the depth of this neurosis, even if a liberal or a secularist cannot share this dread-ridden perspective.

Second, it is important to realize that these movements are not an archaic throwback to the past; they are modern, innovative, and modernizing.

Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible in a literal, rational way that is quite different from the more mystical, allegorical approach of premodern spirituality. Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih was a shocking and revolutionary overturning of centuries of Shii tradition.
Muslim thinkers preached a liberation theology and produced an anti-imperialist ideology that was in tune with other Third World movements of their time. Even ultra-Orthodox Jews, who seemed resolutely to turn their backs upon modern society, found that their yeshivot were essentially modern, voluntarist institutions. They adopted a novel stringency in their observance of the Torah and learned to manipulate the political system in a way that brought them more power than any religious Jew had enjoyed for nearly two millennia.
Throughout we have seen that religion has often helped people to adjust to modernity. Shabbateanism, Quakerism, Methodism, and Islamic mysticism helped Jews, Christians, and Muslims prepare for major change, and gave them a context in which they could approach the new ideas. Americans who had no time for the deism of the Founding Fathers of the republic were prepared for the revolutionary struggle by the Great Awakening. Muslims also developed an appreciation for such modern ideals as the separation of religion and politics by means of the dynamic of their own spirituality.
Indeed, in Europe, too, secularism and scientific rationality were both at first seen as new ways of being religious. Some of the more recent movements we have considered have also been modernizing. Hasan al-Banna, Shariati, and even Khomeini all sought to bring Muslims to modernity in an Islamic setting that was more familiar to them than the imported ideologies of the West. Only thus could they “return to themselves” and help those who had perforce been left out of the modernizing process to make sense of such institutions as representative government and democratic rule. This was also an attempt to relocate modernity within the ambit of the sacred. Premodern religion had always seen mythos and logos as complementary. Islamic reformers would site the pragmatic tasks of government within a religious and mystical framework.
This was also part of the fundamentalist rebellion against the hegemony of the secular. It was a way of bringing God back into the political realm from which he had been excluded. In various ways, fundamentalists have rejected the separations of modernity (between church and state, secular and profane) and tried to re-create a lost wholeness. Religious Zionists were “revolting against the revolt” of the secularist Zionists, who had declared their independence of religion. They wanted to have more God and more Torah in the Holy Land than had been possible in the Diaspora.
Khomeini and Shariati both insisted that it was impossible to exclude the sacred from politics; Qutb condemned the Godlessness of the secularist regime in Egypt, which he designated jahili. Those who had not fully imbibed the secular rationalism of modernity were still aware of the Unseen dimension of existence and wanted it reflected in the polity. They did not see why that should make them less modern, though they tacitly recognized that this would mean a break with some of the old conservative aspects of premodern religion.
The fundamentalist reformation of the faith meant that an activism that had hitherto been seen as irreligious was now presented as crucial.
Religious Zionists and fundamentalist Christians and Muslims all insisted on the need for dynamism and revolutionary transformation in keeping with the forward thrust and pragmatic drive of modern society.
This battle for God was an attempt to fill the void at the heart of a society based on scientific rationalism. Instead of reviling fundamentalists, the secularist establishment could sometimes have benefited from a long, hard look at some of their countercultures.
Shukri Mustafa’s communes were a reverse image of Sadat’s Open Door policy; the charitable empires created by the Muslim Brothers and the practical measures taken by the members of the jamaat al-islamiyyah threw into harsh relief the current government’s lack of concern for the poor, a crucial value in Islam. The popularity and power of these movements showed that the people of Egypt still wanted to be religious, despite the secularist trend. So did the cult of Khomeini in Iran: as the confrontation with the regime accelerated, Khomeini took on more and more of the characteristics of the Imams, providing in his own person a Shii alternative to the despotic persona of the shah which was clearly attractive to many of the Iranians. Similarly, the ]ewish yeshivot provided a contrast to the pragmatic nature of secularist education; in a society which seemed to have cast God and his Law aside, yeshiva students studied in order to have an encounter with the divine, not simply to acquire useful information, and made the study of the Torah more central to their lives than ever before.
When they created these alternative societies, fundamentalists were demonstrating their disillusion with a culture which could not easily accommodate the spiritual.
Because it was so embattled, this campaign to re-sacralize society became aggressive and distorted. It lacked the compassion which all faiths have insisted is essential to the religious life and to any experience of the numinous.
Instead, it preached an ideology of exclusion, hatred, and even violence.
But the fundamentalists did not have a monopoly on anger. Their movements had often evolved in a dialectical relationship with an aggressive secularism which showed scant respect for religion and its adherents. Secularists and fundamentalists sometimes seem trapped in an escalating spiral of hostility and recrimination. If fundamentalists must evolve a more compassionate assessment of their enemies in order to be true to their religious traditions, secularists must also be more faithful to the benevolence, tolerance, and respect for humanity which characterizes modern culture at its best, and address themselves more em pathetically to the fears, anxieties, and needs which so many of their fundamentalist neighbors experience but which no society can safely ignore.
The End