Used to describe a particular variant of religious belief, the concept of fundamentalism has its origins in relatively recent US Protestantism, where it was positively connoted by those who identified as fundamentalist in reaction to liberal theology and biblical criticism. Scholars have pointed out that its widespread use as an epithet for Islam is somewhat misplaced, although it has now been translated literally into Arabic. In the context of Islam the term is used to designate extremists who resort to violence, not how different believers interpret scripture, although adherents to different denominations of Islam obviously emphasize different parts of the Qur'an and interpret Islamic law differently. In "An Uncertain Faith," I redefine fundamentalism as an underlying attitude toward the world that can support either of these religious usages, or indeed many other non-religious usages. The essential point is that what one believes, while obviously important, is often not as influential on behavior as how one believes. Any number of different faiths or creeds can and do provide the content for the former; whether one can be called a fundamentalist would depend on the latter. A fundamentalist, to wit, implicitly holds that what he believes corresponds to a single, underlying code that explains everything about the world, in its totality. The alternative to that position, what I call moderation, implicitly understands its beliefs to be at times competing but not necessarily exclusive interpretations of the world. This distinction is what explains the fact that there are vast numbers of believers in faiths that ostenisbly require of them strict adherence to the "word" of their sacred text, who nonetheless coexist with members of other communities and function perfectly well in societies and even in a physical world that would seem to be hopelessly at odds with the claims of that text.
What is fundamentalism?
Dear Bill,
As I read your thought-provoking posting, I wondered about your take on "confessionalism" v. "laïcité" as a "statist" variation on "fundamentalism" v. "moderation." Proponents of the state-within-the-Church have historically argued that a government administration (or, alternatively, the state's legislative branch) should draw on "ius naturale" (a convenient misnomer for religious doctrine once Rome went Christian) in the making of new law. They have also written under the assumption that faith -- rather than reason -- should guide the legislator's intentions. At least in the Christian West (I confine all my comments to western Christianity), only with the 15th-century humanist Lorenzo Valla does reason come into its own -- and come also into the mainstream of the schools and public theological controversies -- as a human faculty that needs no immediate justification and no redemption by faith to claim its dignity (in philology, jurisprudence, and so forth), although snapshots of this reaction are to be found already in Aquinas and other scholastic philosophers.
But I digress. My question is this: do "fundamentalism" and "moderation" take on the same "connotations" (to use your word) when the "doctrinaire faithful" are seen as existing within a so-called "pre-political" realm (they are thus gathered as an "ecclesia" proper) as they do when the "state" makes its appearance as "the" overarching and all-encompasing form of community? Note that upon the Old Regime's demise the modern state met with gradually less resistance in the enterprise of making the universal, transnational "ecclesia" of Roman Catholicism shrink in size. Here I'm also thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy's controversial later essays extoling primitive Christianity as a community of unlimited freedom (because it as yet lacks legal boundaries) vis-à-vis the still polytheistic early Roman Empire, which he anachronistically conflates (yet only implicitly -- this is just my reading) with the homogenizing liberal-democratic state.
As a post-Catholic Spaniard who was born under Franco's Catholic confessional regime ("Nacionalcatolicismo"), I personally have no quarrel with liberalism's enforcement of universal primary instruction, secularism, equality before the law, universal suffrage, and so on. I can embrace this set of policies for as long as the liberal state also recognizes its enfranchised citizens -- and increasingly in our age of de-nationalizing "Empire(s)," its neglected or unprotected non-citizens -- their right to opt out of "some" such policies without incurring a penalty. Although this is perhaps what we should honorifically call a "civil society," don't ask me how it could be implemented without undermining liberalism itself.
Admittedly, the 19th-century liberal-democratic state's de-essentializing of nationalist feelings other than the citizens' identification en masse with the supra-nation that "comes together" as ONE under the incrementally inclusive and participatory bureaucratic state is not without its pitfalls either. That supra-nation may represent, as has been argued about Spain (yet not conclusively and not always convincingly), primarily the particular interests of a hegemonic nation or sub-nation. This hegemonic community will always be tempted to subject the weaker ones to its will in the name of a larger, hypostatic state -- a state falsely said to be faith-, class-, gender-, and race-blind. Carl Schmitt knew well that this "blindness" (the degree zero of moderation?) was in the earlier 20th century still a near-impossibility, which of course is no excuse for the fascist devotion with which he set out to de-legitimize parliamentary democracy's legal order. But this is another argument for a different blog.
As always, much thanks for the clarity of your thinking.
P.S: Do you work with Ortega y Gasset's "Ideas y creencias," an essay not very well-known outside Spain?
Hi José María,
Thanks for your detailed response and excellent question. Also for the Ortega Y Gassett reference, which I did not know. I reprint your question in its short form:
Do "fundamentalism" and "moderation" take on the same "connotations" (to use your word) when the "doctrinaire faithful" are seen as existing within a so-called "pre-political" realm (they are thus gathered as an "ecclesia" proper) as they do when the "state" makes its appearance as "the" overarching and all-encompasing form of community?
This is perhaps the key historical question the book faces, although I'm not sure how much detail I will ultimately go into given the book's intentionally popular nature. The short answer is "no." I cannot claim that these terms as I have stimulated them in the context of the modern debate would have the same currency in a pre-modern setting. One problem has to do with the concept of fundamentalism itself. As I point out in another of these posts, tightly-defined the term refers to a modern, even twentieth-century form of religious identification. Karen Armstrong has taken the point even further and argued that not just the concept, but the phenomenon itself can only be understood within the context of modernity. According to her view modernity represents the ascendancy of logos over mythos; where western and other cultures had traditionally valued both forms of knowledge, the creative, metaphoric, all-encompassing weltanschauung of mythos and the pragmatic, problem-oriented, representational thinking of logos, modernity and the success of the scientific revolution led to an almost total suppression of mythos from the realm of "serious" intellectual endeavor. Rather than valued as another realm and way of articulating beliefs, mythos came to signify a childlike and obsolete attempt to explain the world, an endeavor now pursued to far greater effect by the scientific method. It is only within this world-view, according to Armstrong, that religious fundamentalism can arise, for it is nothing other than the tendency to treat the world of mythos with the tools of logos, a kind of culture-wide category mistake. While I find this argument strong and in general accept her distinction as an important one, the history I tell in the book allows that the image of knowledge of the world-as-code has been an option in many cultures and may times, and is not limited to the modern west. So, while this image of knowledge was particular apt for scientific modernity, and certainly the fundamentalist backlash is fed by its deployment, it is also present in pre-modern forms of belief. That said, modernity's privileging of logos over mythos, in Armstrong's terminology, has paved the road for fundamentalism in another, very specific way: it has weakened religious traditions of the most effective critical weapon they have against the fundamentalist impulse, namely, the apophatic tradition that I identify as being central to moderate religious faith.