THE GLORY AND THE POWER: The Fundamentalist...

THE GLORY AND THE POWER: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Beacon Press: $15; 225 pp . , illustrated, paperback original). Traditionally, extremely religious people have dismissed the secular world as an irrelevant distraction to be shunned, mentally and even physically. In this intelligent and often disturbing companion volume to the PBS and NPR series, Marty and Appleby examine the methods and ideologies of Fundamentalist Protestants in America, the militant Gush Emunim movement in Israel and Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (“the Islamic Group”) in Egypt. Surprisingly, these groups employ similar strategies in their ongoing battles to transform the secular humanist mentality of the West. The authors note that in all three cases, the Fundamentalists’ “powerful appeal is based in part on a claim that they are the defenders of an ancient faith, but their presentation of that faith is selective, partial, highly polemical and creative, and thus not truly traditional at all.”