Fundamentalist Agenda

If you pay close attention, you’ll find that Muslim fundamentalists hate the same things about modern American culture that Christian fundamentalists (not to mention conservative evangelicals, conservative Pentecostals, conservative Catholics, etc.) do: feminism, sexual liberation, secularism, equality for all religions, individuals freedoms that contradict traditional religious mores, and so forth. These are, in fact, the complaints of fundamentalists everywhere and says something very important about religious fundamentalism.

Davidson Loehr wrote a couple of years ago in UU World:

The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors are familiar because we've all seen them so many times. These men are acting the role of “alpha males” who define the boundaries of their group's territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children; there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected; outsiders are expelled or fought.

What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods as its projected champions.

Fundamentalism is absolutely natural, ancient, powerful... and inadequate. It's a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it's completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure humane societies.

Loehr argues that modern liberalism is in part responsible for the rise of American fundamentalism because it fails to respect the instinctive drive towards territoriality. For example, emphasizing individual rights without acknowledging the need to balance rights against community needs ends up driving others to cling to “the needs of the community” without regard for individual rights.

I can accept that perhaps some of the rhetoric in modern liberalism may exacerbate trends in fundamentalism, and it is true that religious fundamentalism is very much a modern political movement that targets modernity as its primary enemy. However, I don’t think that Loehr makes a good case that “liberal visions have been too narrow, too self-absorbed, too unbalanced“ and this is why fundamentalism is the way it is. The examples he uses (abortion Vietnam, protests) are all from the latter half of the 20th century when most fundamentalisms - and especially Christian fundamentalism, which is the original religious fundamentalist movement - developed in the first half of the 20th century. Where was “modern liberalism” then?

Those early fundamentalists didn't concern themselves with abortion, contraception, or anti-war protests; they were concerned with modern interpretations of the Bible coming from German scholars, evolutionary biology telling a different story about human origins than they learned in the Bible, and progressives trying to perfect human society. Since this was the context in which fundamentalism originally developed in America, why doesn't Loehr complain about that as "unbalanced" or "self-absorbed"? Perhaps it's because it would look bad arguing against them.

I think it's more accurate to say that modern fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity as a whole, not simply modern liberalism. Fundamentalism would not exist without modernity and, as such, fundamentalism is in many ways a mirror image of modernity - though one which highlights many of its darker and more intolerant aspects. Politically fundamentalists are not inclined towards democracy and liberty because such notions are theologically anathema. They are convinced that they possess the Truth from God; insofar any of that truth can or should be applied to the political realm, what motivation could there be to introduce Falsehood in its place?