BY Karen Armstrong

So what is fundamentalism? It is essentially a revolt against modern secular
society.

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As part of their campaign, fundamentalists tend to withdraw from mainstream
society to create enclaves of pure faith. Typical examples are the
Ultraorthodox Jewish communities in New York or Bob Jones University in
South Carolina. Here fundamentalists build a counter-culture, in conscious
defiance of the Godless world that surrounds them, and from these
communities some undertake a counteroffensive designed to drag God or
religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in modern
secular culture, and bring them back to center stage.

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The ubiquity of the fundamentalist revolt shows that there is widespread
disappointment with modernity. But what is it about the modern world that
has provoked such rage and distress? During the sixteenth century, the
peoples of the West began to develop a new type of civilization that was
without precedent in world history. Instead of basing their economy on a
surplus of agricultural produce, as did all premodern cultures, they relied
increasingly upon technology and the constant reinvestment of capital, which
freed them from the inherent limitations of agrarian society. This demanded
radical change at all levels of society ~ intellectual, political, social,
and religious. A wholly new way of thinking became essential, and new forms
of government had to be evolved to meet these altered conditions. It was
found by trial and error that the best way of creating a productive society
was to create a secular, tolerant, democratic polity.

It took Europe some three hundred years to modernize, and the process was
wrenching and traumatic, involving bloody revolutions, often succeeded by
reigns of terror, brutal holy wars, dictatorships, cruel exploitation of the
workforce, the despoliation of the countryside and widespread alienation and
anomie. We are now witnessing the same kind of upheaval in developing
countries presently undergoing modernization. But some of these countries
had had to attempt this difficult process far too rapidly and are forced to
follow a Western program rather than their own.

This accelerated modernization has created deep divisions in developing
nations. Only an elite have a Western education that enables them to
understand the new modern institutions. The vast majority remains trapped in
the premodern ethos; they experience the incomprehensible change as
profoundly disturbing, and cling to traditional religion for support. But as
modernization progresses, people find that they cannot be religious in the
old way and try to find new means of expressing their piety. Fundamentalism
is just one of these attempts, and it therefore develops only after a degree
of modernization has been achieved.

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Perhaps the most important factor to understand about this widespread
religious militancy is that it is rooted in a deep fear of annihilation.
Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism,
Christianity and Islam is convinced that modern secular society wants to
wipe out religion ~ even in the United States. Fundamentalists, therefore,
believe that they are fighting for survival, and when people feel that their
backs are to the wall, some can strike out violently, like a wounded animal.

…

Thus fundamentalism usually develops in a symbiotic relationship with a
secularism that is experienced as hostile and invasive. Every single
fundamentalist movement that I have studied in each of the three
monotheistic traditions has developed in direct response to what is
perceived as a secularist attack. The more vicious the assault, the more
extreme the fundamentalist riposte is likely to be. Because fundamentalists
fear that secularists want to destroy them, aggressive and military action
will only serve to confirm this conviction and exacerbate their fear, which
can spill over into ungovernable rage.

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In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists in the smaller towns and
rural areas often feel “colonized” by the alien ethos of Harvard, Yale and
Washington DC. They feel that the liberal establishment despises them, and
this has resulted in a fundamentalism that has gone way beyond Jerry Falwell
and the Moral Majority of the 1970s. Some groups, such as the Christian
Reconstructionists, look forward to the imminent destruction of the federal
democratic government: the blazing tours of the World Trade Center would not
be alien to their ideology. But when liberals deplore the development and
persistence of fundamentalism both in their own societies and worldwide,
they should be aware that the excesses of secularists have all too often
been responsible for this radical alienation.

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