Fields of Blood (57 page)

This
secular war for the nation had given some of the participants experiences associated with the religious traditions: an
ekstasis,
a sense of liberation, freedom, equanimity, community, and a profound relationship with other human beings, even the enemy. Yet the First World War heralded a century of unprecedented slaughter and
genocide that was inspired not by religion as people had come to know it but by an equally commanding notion of the sacred: men fought for power, glory, scarce resources, and above all, their nation.

11

D
uring the twentieth century, there would be many attempts to resist the modern state’s banishment of religion to the private sphere. To committed
secularists, these religious efforts seemed like so many efforts to turn the clock back, but in fact all were modern movements that could have flourished only in our own time. Indeed, some commentators have seen them as postmodern, since they represented a widespread dissatisfaction with many of the canons of
modernity. Whatever the philosophers, pundits, or politicians claimed, people all over the world expressed a wish to see religion playing a more central role in public life. This type of religiosity is often called
fundamentalism
—an unsatisfactory term because it does not translate easily into other languages and suggests a monolithic phenomenon. In fact, though these movements share certain family resemblances, each has its own focus and trigger. In almost every region where a secular government has been established, a religious countercultural protest has developed as well, similar to the
Muslim and
Hindu reform movements that had emerged in British-controlled India. The attempt to confine religion to the individual conscience had originated in the West as part of Western modernization, but to others it made no sense. Indeed, many would find the expectation unnatural, reductive, and even damaging.

As I have written elsewhere in detail, fundamentalism, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, is not in itself a violent phenomenon.
¹
Only a tiny
proportion of
fundamentalists commit acts of terror; most are simply trying to live a devout life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith, and nearly all begin with what is perceived as an assault on them by the secular, liberal establishment. These movements tend to follow a basic pattern: first they retreat from mainstream society to create an enclave of authentic faith, rather as the
Deobandis did in the subcontinent; at a later stage, some—but by no means all—engage in a counteroffensive to “convert” the broader society. Every one of the movements I have studied is rooted in fear—in the conviction that modern society is out to destroy not only their faith but also themselves and their entire way of life. This is not simply, or even mainly, paranoid. Fundamentalism first became a force in Jewish life, for example, after the
Holocaust,
Hitler’s attempt to exterminate European Jewry. Moreover, we have seen that in the past when people fear annihilation, their horizons tend to shrink, and they can lash out violently—though most “fundamentalists” have confined their antagonism to rhetoric or
nonviolent political activity. It will be our concern to consider the reasons why those exceptional cases turn out as they do.

We can learn a great deal about fundamentalism generally from a crisis in one of the first of these movements, which developed in the
United States during and immediately after the
First World War. The term itself was coined in the 1920s by American Protestants who resolved to return to the “fundamentals” of Christianity. Their retreat from public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused on biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so their enemy was no longer social injustice but the German
Higher Criticism of the
Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems. For all the claims that fundamentalisms make of a return to basics, however, these movements are highly innovative. Before the sixteenth century, for instance, Christians had always been encouraged to read scripture allegorically; even
Calvin did not believe that the first chapter of
Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life, and he took severely to task those “frantic persons” who believed that it was.
²
The new fundamentalist outlook now required a wholesale denial of glaring discrepancies in scripture itself. Closed to any alternative and coherent only in its
own terms,
biblical inerrancy created a shuttered mind-set born of great fear. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” warned
Charles Hodge, who formulated this dogma in 1874.
³
This embattled preoccupation with the status of the biblical text reflected a wider Christian concern about the nature of religious authority. Just four years earlier the
First Vatican Council (1870) had promulgated the new—and highly controversial—doctrine of papal infallibility. At a time when
modernity was demolishing old truths and leaving crucial questions unanswered, there was a yearning for absolute certainty.

Fundamentalisms are also often preoccupied by the horror of modern warfare and violence. The shocking slaughter in Europe during the
First World War could only be the beginning of the end, the evangelicals concluded; these times of unprecedented carnage must be the battles foretold in the book of Revelation. There was a deep anxiety about the
centralization of modern society and anything approaching world rule. In the new
League of Nations, they saw the revival of the
Roman Empire predicted in Revelation, the abode of
Antichrist.
⁴
Fundamentalists now saw themselves grappling with satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. Their spirituality was defensive and filled with a paranoid terror of the sinister influence of the
Catholic minority; they even described American democracy as the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.”
⁵
The American fundamentalists’ chilling scenario of the end time, with its wars, bloodshed, and slaughter, is symptomatic of a deep-rooted distress that cannot be assuaged by cool rational analysis. In less stable countries, it would be all too easy for a similar malaise, despair, and fear to erupt in physical violence.

Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science. They became obsessed with
evolutionary theory. There was a widespread belief that German wartime
atrocities were the result of the nation’s devotion to Darwinian social theory, according to which existence was a brutal, godless struggle in which only the strongest should survive. This was, of course, a vulgar distortion of Darwin’s hypothesis, but at a time when people were trying to make sense of the bloodiest war in human history, evolution seemed to symbolize everything that was most ruthless in modern life. These ideas were particularly disturbing to small-town Americans who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist
elite—almost as though they were being colonized by a foreign power. This
distress came to a head in the famous
Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, when the fundamentalists, represented by the Democratic politician
William Jennings Bryan, tried to defend the state legislature’s prohibition of the teaching of
evolution in the public schools. They were opposed by the rationalist campaigner
Clarence Darrow, supported by the newly founded
American Civil Liberties Union.
⁶
Even though the state law was upheld, Bryan’s bumbling performance under Darrow’s sharp interrogation thoroughly discredited the fundamentalists’ cause.

Their response to this humiliation is instructive. The press mounted a virulent campaign exposing Bryan and his fundamentalist supporters as hopeless anachronisms. Fundamentalists had no place in modern society, argued the journalist
H. L. Mencken: “They are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden for human minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouses.” He mocked Dayton as a “one-horse Tennessee village” and its citizens the “gaping primates of the upland valleys.”
⁷
Yet whenever a fundamentalist movement is attacked, either with violence or in a media campaign, it almost invariably becomes more extreme. It shows malcontents that their fear is well grounded: the secular world really
is
out to destroy them. Before the Scopes Trial, not even
Hodge had believed that
Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail, but afterward “creation science” became the rallying cry of the fundamentalist movement. Before Dayton, some leading fundamentalists still engaged in social work with people on the left; afterward, they swung to the far right, retreating altogether from the mainstream and creating their own churches, colleges, broadcasting stations, and publishing houses. They grew and grew below the mainstream cultural radar. Once they became aware of their considerable public support, in the late 1970s they would reemerge from the margins with
Jerry Falwell’s
Moral Majority.

American
fundamentalism would ever after vie to be heard as a decisive voice in American politics—with notable success. It would not resort to violence, largely because American Protestants did not suffer as greatly as did, for example, the
Muslims of the
Middle East. Unlike the secular rulers of
Egypt or
Iran, the U.S. government did not confiscate their property, torture and assassinate their clergy, or cruelly dismantle their institutions. In America secular
modernity was a homegrown product, which was not imposed militarily from outside but had evolved organically over time, and when they arrived on the public scene in the late
1970s, American fundamentalists could use well-establi
shed democratic channels to make their point. Although American Protestant fundamentalism was not usually an agent of violence, it was, to a degree, a response to violence: the trauma of modern warfare and the psychological assault of the aggressive disdain of the secularist establishment. Both can distort a religious tradition in ways that reverberate far beyond the community of the faithful. Nevertheless, fundamentalism in America shares with other disaffected groups the sensibility of the colonized, in its defiant self-assertion and in a determination to recover one’s own identity and culture against a powerful Other.

Muslim fundamentalism, by contrast, has often—though again, not always—segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant
Christianity but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to
modernity. Before the birth of the modern state in the crucible of
colonialism, Islam had continued in many Muslim lands to operate as the organizing principle of society. In 1920, after the
First World War and the defeat of the
Ottoman Empire,
Britain and
France divided Ottoman territories into Western-style nation-states and established mandates and protectorates there before granting these new countries independence. But the inherent contradictions of the nation-state would be especially wrenching in the Muslim world, where there was no tradition of nationalism. The frontiers drawn up by the Europeans were so arbitrary that it was extremely difficult to create a national “imaginary community.” In
Iraq, for example, where
Sunnis were a minority, the British appointed a Sunni ruler to govern both the Shii majority and the
Kurds in the north. In
Lebanon, 50 percent of the population was Muslim and naturally wanted close economic and political relations with their Arab neighbors, but the Christian government selected by the French preferred stronger ties with Europe. The partition of
Palestine and the creation of the Jewish State of
Israel by the
United Nations in 1948 proved no less mischievous. It resulted in the forcible displacement of 750,000 Arab
Palestinians, and those who remained found themselves living in a state that was hostile to their nation. There was the added complication that Israel was a secular state founded for adherents of one of the world’s ancient religions. Yet for the first twenty years of its existence, the Israeli leadership was aggressively
secular, and the violence inflicted on the Palestinians, Israel’s wars with its neighbors, and the Palestinian riposte were fought not for religion but for secular
nationalism.