significant trend to liberalism in the American public, and young Americans are far
more liberal than the older cohorts they are replacing (1996: 144). Falk (1988) has
analysed the increasing convergence of religion and politics as a growing adherence
to postmodernism, but although postmodernism challenges the separations and
dualisms of the liberal tradition, fundamentalism does not.
For this reason, liberation theology is not fundamentalist at all, but seeks to
challenge religious conservatism in exciting and innovative ways. It stands in contrast
to what Falk himself calls a few islands of fundamentalist success that disclose the
religious revision of modernism in an oppressive direction (1988: 380). It is not the
rise of postmodern religion that is fundamentalist or cultist in character. It is rather
movements that reject or merely negate modernism. The West, as Falk puts it
graphically, has ‘killed’ God with its consumerist spirit (1988: 381) so that there
has been a remarkable surge of fundamentalist religion in the last few decades (1988:
385). This is why it is problematic to speak of American fundamentalism as
exhibiting, in Armstrong’s words, postmodern tendencies, although she is right to
note that it has ‘a hard-line totalitarian vision’ of the future (2001: 362).
Even in the 1980s, it was clear that the ‘coming out’ of US fundamentalists in
the form of the ‘moral majority’ and evangelical Christianity, represented a deter -
mined assault on the modern lifestyle of ‘secular’ Christianity. The AIDS epidemic
has been seen as a kind of objective confirmation of the fundamentalist critique of
modernism and fundamentalists express their hostility to the preoccupation with
means rather than ends associated with modernist solutions (Falk, 1988: 387). When
Falk argues that a religion with postmodern strivings links emotion to reason and
sees connections and relatedness as primary categories of knowledge (1988: 388),
he demonstrates (however unwittingly) why the fundamentalism of the religious
right in the USA cannot be seen in postmodernist terms. Indeed, what makes the
religious right fundamentalist is the violence of its language and some of its practice
(think of bombings against abortion clinics, for example), and the stark chasms it
poses between the purists ‘saved’ and those whose lifestyle and values commits them
to eternal damnation.
Chapter 17 Fundamentalism 391
- Islamic fundamentalismis not the same as devotion to Islam. Fundamentalism arises in
situations of severe social, political and economic dislocation, and as the portrait of the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood reveals, Muslims can espouse liberal and democratic values.
- American fundamentalism expresses itself as a bigoted and intolerant Christianity. Its
proponents have substantial resources, owning radio stations and targeting the Republican
party. American fundamentalism is anti-feminist, anti-Semitic and anti-Islam and it rejects
modernity. Hence it is anti-modernist rather than postmodernist in character.
- Jewish fundamentalism takes the form of a religious orthodoxy that opposes secular Zionism. It
seeks an Israel that is not bound by international law and expands to its biblically ordained
frontiers.
Differentiating religious fundamentalisms
