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| The Battle For God Karen Armstrong, HarperCollins, 2001 Nowt as queer Reactions to it vary widely. There are those who dismiss it with a shrug and perhaps with whatever local phrase matches the Yorkshireman's "There's nowt as queer as folks!" Some lump fundamentalism together under the general heading "Religion" - something old-fashioned to which all sorts of rather silly or weird people are attracted. A greater number are those whose reactions range from irritation to anger at what they perceive is willfully vicious behaviour. How is it possible in our day and age, they ask, for people to latch on to such patently irrational ideas? More than that, how can these religious fanatics bring themselves to injure or kill others for the sake of their beliefs? There can be no just reason for the deaths of the Beslan children, to mention but one instance of fundamentalist cruelty, vengeance and unreason. Karen Armstrong remarks that for some of us it may be literally impossible to move out of our post-Enlightenment outlook on the world. We are now irretrievably fixed in a reasoning approach to problem-solving. The thought of a blessed afterlife or of a God who issues instructions for moral behaviours is interesting as something to be thought about and investigated. But it can never be the basis of the way we live. I have little doubt that she is correct in her observation. But that does not absolve the rationalist (to use a broad label for the contemporary Westerner) from trying to get into the head and heart of the fundamentalist. By now it is - or should be - quite clear that failure to understand how such people think is to risk compounding the problem through inappropriate responses. To take a specific example: Americans are often deeply offended by the label "The Great Satan" given to the United States by some Muslims. In the West the Satan figure represents overpowering evil. But for Muslims Satan is
The Muslim who believes himself trapped on the surface of life feels he has lost his soul. So it is not that Westerners are any more evil than Muslims. Indeed, according to the Koran, only God can judge at that level. Rather, it is that Westerners are shallow. They seek consolation in the material and in flaunting their bodies, unaware of the true ground of their being. The three R's Having read this book, I for one find myself reacting to events with new understanding. First, I recognise some of the aspects of fundamentalism which puzzle Westerners and cause them to react negatively. Second, I find myself annoyed by those negative reactions because they are clearly often so misguided. For example, Armstrong makes a good case for her assertion that
Secular minorities in Egypt, Iran and Turkey had attempted to force modernisation upon populations not ready for it. The way the latter perceived the world could not be changed merely because this or that visionary leader saw the writing on the wall about globalisation. Change from the pre-modern to the modern cannot be force-fed. It requires generations to come and go before the latter becomes embedded in hearts and minds. In Europe, fundamentalism was nurtured by Christianity through the persecution of Jewish people. In reaction, relatively small groups of Jews back-tracked into esoteric versions of Judaism. These groups were self-contained and harmless - until they emigrated to Israel. There they took on all the hard-hearted, irrational aspects which so puzzle the reasonable, liberal Westerner. Armstrong's analysis brings out clearly the three R's of fundamentalist reaction - rage, resentment and revenge. It is these that motivate suicide bombers and their masters. For generations now, vast numbers in Israel and Muslim countries have felt embattled and defensive. As a result, they have
But, as she points out, in the United States and some European countries the character of fundamentalism is very different. It is also driven by a fear and and a sense of conceptual displacement. However, Western fundamentalism has seldom turned violent - and even then the violence has been curiously inward-looking. Occasionally the liberal, rational enemy is attacked and killed. Far more often it is the fundamentalist who collapses - plainly because he or she is only one of many competing for power in a democratic state. The lesson is that freedom to compete for power in a democracy forces compromise. In turn, compromise diminishes a sense of absolute rectitude. And fundamentalism cannot flourish except in a climate of absolutism. Mutant turtles Christianity in the West has from the opening period of the Enlightenment been split into two main parts. The first has striven to meet the intellectual challenges of rationalism. The second has resisted it fiercely. The first has tested the Bible and Church doctrine to their limits, and seeking to express an ancient mythos anew. The second has retreated fearfully into concrete thinking, rejecting both the mythos and the logos in favour of literalism. These Christian fundamentalists have lurked in the background for centuries, emerging occasionally to wage guerilla warfare. Only in the turmoil of radical social change since the 1960s have they found enough support in the masses to become a substantial force in the USA. They have taken on the appearance of mutant turtles. Mutant because they have learned how to manage and effectively use the modern media while retaining their basic nature. In the process it has become difficult for the ordinary person to distinguish them from the salesperson hawking a new household product on the TV. And they are turtles because, despite surface changes, their pre-modern modes of thought remain like a hard shell protecting them from doubt and open-ended truths. Armstrong tells how the Moral Majority lead by Gerry Falwell in the United States reversed the fundamentalist withdrawal from society. By the 1970s they had concluded that they had a chance to put America back onto the proper path.
It occurs to me that the successes of the Moral Majority and its evangelical spin-offs have had an unfortunate impact on some mainstream churches. Until now - at least in the Anglican Church and many of its sister Protestant churches - there has been a willingness to engage the faith with the rational tools of the Enlightenment. The result has been a public face which looks more or less the same as ever it has. However, a private persona has existed alongside the public. It has been confined within academia and theological colleges. An essential element of the private persona has been open and free research and debate. The person in the pew has been barely aware of this. Now under threat of evangelical militancy, church authorities are edging towards formalising an unspoken ban on free public debate about sacred doctrines. In short, there is a backwash from fundamentalism which could curtail or even ban free development of an emerging Christianity fitted to survival in a secular world. The tides of change in the Roman Catholic Church move slowly. It is probably not coincidental that a hardening towards theological and institutional changes over the past 30 years has happened at the same time that fundamentalism has been growing. And now the election of "God's Rotweiler" as Pope Benedict XIV appears to have confirmed the Church's reactionary swing. The flip-side The book succeeds in the latter respect. It explained to me vividly the dimensions and orientation of the fundamentalist mind as it has evolved over the past three centuries. I finished the last pages with a far better idea of what the West is facing. It wasn't long, however, before I began wondering if some of the criticisms raised by fundamentalists might not have considerable weight. What if, I ask myself, the bleak outlook for reconciliation in the immediate future is not entirely the fault of fanatical death squads? What if nothing really positive can happen unless we in the West make radical changes to our own societies? I was alerted to this possibility when Armstrong pointed out that Muslim fundamentalists are as critical of some Arab countries as they are of the West. These countries, they say, are just as effete and corrupt as their customers for the oil they produce in such vast quantities. It is impossible, it seems to me, to demand that Westerners somehow revert to a pre-modern outlook on life. Simply put, this cannot happen. It's a one-way street from Medieval to modern Europe and from native America to the USA superpower of today. But does that mean that an emerging Christianity, forced to speak of its faith in secular terms, must abandon the mythos which Armstrong insists is the necessary flip-side to rational logos? I think not. The ancient mythos or "story" no longer rings bells for the modern sensibility. And rationality will remain the test of truth - that is, logos is in some sense the determining factor in what can be true of the faith. Reason can't make doctrine, but doctrines contradicted by reason can't rightly be sustained. But we tend to forget that both mythos and logos are methods. They are a how of doing something, not that what of the doing. In a nutshell, then, the West is faced with two major challenges brought to our attention by the phenomenon of fundamentalism.
Armstrong concludes by noting that pre-modern religion has always seen mythos and logos as complimentary. She writes:
In other words, the best of the West will gain true meaning only when it allows the mythos back into its life. |