Many critics have noticed that fundamentalist religion spends a lot of time reacting out of apparent fear. Rather than simply and confidently laying out a positive program of beliefs, too often fundamentalism is more concerned with raising an alarm over alleged dangers lying in wait all around us. If fundamentalism is indeed based on fear, what might this tell us?

In Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, Daniel C. Maguire writes:

The desire for simple, absolute truth is a constantly-beckoning security blanket, and not all Protestants could resist the allure. We see this today in those called right-wing fundamentalists. The term fundamentalist is tossed about promiscuously, but [Beverly] Harrison sees the nub of it in an "insistence on a religious monopoly of knowledge grounded in fear of alternative knowledges, particularly 'scientific' modes of knowledge generated in modernity, which the 'God-knowledge' people cannot control."

Fear, then, is at the very pulse of fundamentalism. There is a lot of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States and increasingly in Latin America — to the point where it has the pope and others very worried about the loss of these Latin American "Catholic countries."

Simple truths, not to mention black & white moral choices, probably appeal to everyone. Religion can readily offer such things, though not always and it's possible for religion to present a more complex vision of reality. That seems to be the exception rather than the rule, which may be one reason why religion seems to succumb to dogmatism and absolutism more readily than other belief systems.

Even more serious than the desire for easy answers, though, is the desire to possess the only source of answers — what Harrison above describes as an insistence on a religious monopoly of knowledge. When there are alternatives to religious authorities, it's possible for people to make decisions outside the context of religion — and even worse, outside the boundaries of what religion considers acceptable. When there are sources of knowledge and authority outside of religion, it becomes possible for people to find out that religion is sometimes wrong.

It can be argued that the efforts of religious conservatives to undermine science is predicated in part on the desire to remove alternatives sources of knowledge and thus elimination their religion’s biggest source of competition. Systems like science cannot be controlled by religion, but perhaps they can be discredited so that people won't turn to them. Perhaps they can also be co-opted and have religion smuggled inside so that they pose less of a threat. That's probably a motivation behind efforts to introduce supernatural premises into naturalistic science — for example, with Intelligent Design.

Fear of complicated answers and alternatives sources of knowledge are not the only problems within fundamentalism, though. It's surely not a coincidence that around the world, fundamentalism in various religions consistently works against the equality of women — men are conceived of as having a divine sanction to lead while women must be content to follow.

Cherchez la femme ("look for the woman") finds an application here. Part of fundamentalism is a reaction to the emergence of free women and the loss of male monopoly. In [Beverly] Harrison's [former professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York] view, "fundamentalism always involves the reinscribing of male supremacy within religion."

Male supremacy used to be standard throughout Western society. Every aspect of culture, politics, and religion reinforced the idea that men must lead and dominate. Today, though, much of that has been lost — both culture and politics, at least, no longer send that message in quite such an overt and unambiguous manner as they used to. Women don't yet have full equality and there are many ways in which society keeps women unequal, but there are also many ways in which women are told that they should be equal.

Religion has followed along with this trend, although only slowly and hesitantly. Religion continues to be the largest and most powerful bastion of male supremacy both in the West and around the world. Even so, religious institutions tend to be less securely on the side of male supremacy as they once were and this seems to bother fundamentalists. Even the most conservative of mainstream religious groups are insufficiently patriarchal for some and this is what makes fundamentalism attractive: it seeks to recreate an era of unquestioned male domination within the context of traditional religion. This is an important reason why fundamentalist religion can at times be a threat to equality and democracy in the modern world.

 

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