Fundamentalism Today

“I started out three, four years ago being very critical. I felt, ‘I hate these people,’ ” the author said. But her hostility waned as work progressed on a book about religious fundamentalists in Israel, Egypt, Iran and the United States. “I could smell the fear and outrage and despair. I found myself feeling much more sympathetic.”

British author Karen Armstrong, 55, was speaking about “The Battle for God” (Knopf, 442 pages, $27.50). It’s something of a sequel to “A History of God,” in which she surveyed how Jews, Christians and Muslims have conceived of the deity over four millenniums.

The appearance of that serious work of religious history on 1993 best-seller lists caused a minor sensation and left Armstrong herself in “complete astonishment. I felt religious people would not want to read it, and secularists wouldn’t be interested.”

“The Battle for God” might provoke interest too, because almost everyone seems thrilled, appalled or puzzled by right-wing religion’s ability to thrive in modern culture.

“Fundamentalism” is a slippery term that is rejected by many of those commonly grouped under that label. Armstrong admits the difficulties of defining it, but writes that it’s an apt designation for “embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis,” namely the fear that modernity will eradicate faith and morality.

Although Armstrong presents fundamentalists as paranoid, she also writes that “the idea of a divinely revealed law is profoundly incompatible with the modern ethos” and downright “repellent” to modern secularists.

The new book focuses on Protestants and skips Armstrong’s childhood faith--Roman Catholicism--which she said is only partially fundamentalist. Pope John Paul II is pushing “radical traditionalism,” she remarked, but simultaneously “has a positive, pluralist outlook against the intolerance of the past.”

In true fundamentalism, tolerance is sin.

Armstrong begins her tale in 1492, the fateful year in which Spain expelled the Jews, seized the Muslims’ last stronghold and dispatched Christopher Columbus to spread Christendom to the New World.

Soon the European Enlightenment began putting intellectual culture at odds with traditional supernaturalism.

Armstrong sees an obvious “family resemblance” among the resulting fundamentalists in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (as well as parallel movements in world religions that the book does not treat).

The chronological connections are intriguing. Was it mere coincidence that the Baal Shem Tov established Hasidism, the ecstatic form of Judaism, in 1735, a year after the similarly emotional Great Awakening erupted in Protestant Massachusetts? Or that U.S. fundamentalist Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority only months after the Ayatollah Khomeini established Iran’s radical Islamic regime?

But things should not be carried too far. Falwell never thought of taking part in government and he employed ballots, never bullets. The tactic that secularists used against Falwellian fundamentalists was ridicule, says Armstrong, while Muslim insurgents in Egypt and pre-revolutionary Iran suffered prison, or worse.

Fundamentalist groups are innovative and modern in their thinking and use of technology, Armstrong observes. As they leave their purist enclaves to enter politics they often violate the faiths they claim to preserve. She says this constitutes religious “defeat,” no matter what gains the groups achieve.

For instance, Iran sent hordes of children into combat, took U.S. civilians as hostages and issued a death sentence against author Salman Rushdie without a formal trial--all actions that violated Muslim teaching. Khomeini’s Iran also abandoned the long-standing belief of Muslim Shiism that the clergy should be strictly nonpolitical.

Armstrong says she feels more kindly toward Israel’s Haredim and the Muslim radicals than U.S. Protestant right-wingers, because they’ve suffered more. That could explain the book’s glaring omissions (e.g., Christian Coalition), superficial analysis and inadequate contexts when it turns to the Protestants.

Readers will find more depth in works on U.S. fundamentalists by Nancy Ammerman, George Marsden or William Martin.

Armstrong, who just completed a forthcoming brief biography of the Buddha, has had personal ties with all three faiths she writes about in “The Battle for God.”

She is a teacher at a Reform Jewish seminary in London, belongs to a Muslim scholarly group and spent seven youthful years in a strict Roman Catholic convent without taking final vows. After the convent experience, “I was very opposed to religion. By study of the faiths I came back to a new sense of the divine,” she says.

Today, she does not worship or identify with any religious community. She calls herself “a freelance monotheist. I draw nourishment from all three faiths and can’t see one of them as superior.”