Secular fundamentalism and anti-Americanism

I can only speak on this topic on the basis of a rather inchoate, personal, and anecdotal basis. If I had to generalise on the basis of that admittedly dubious basis, this is what I'd say about secular fundamentalism as it manifests itself in the British context.

Firstly, the 'subject supposed to believe' - i.e. the template for the Christian fundamentalist so reviled by British secular fundamentalists - tends either to be a North American or an Americanised Christian Evangelical, i.e. somebody in the thrall of an inalienably American world view.

Secondly, for as long as his term of office lasted, the most recent cultural embodiment of the archetypal 'subject supposed to believe' and all of its supposed dangers, was George W. Bush. I get the impression that, for many British secular fundamentalists, the war in Iraq has to be explained as a hybrid of an irrational and religiously bigoted Crusade and a purely venal 'Black Gold Rush'.

Thirdly, there seem to be some British secular fundamentalists who seem to assume that there is a significant danger of certain issues from the US cultural agenda gaining a secure foothold in the British political agenda - above all in debates about the restriction of the availability of legalised abortion and the possibility of the teaching of Creation Science/Intelligent Design in secondary education.

Is the UK literally programmed to adopt the US political agenda?

I think it was Arnold Toynbee who, in his Reith Lectures given in the early 1950's (not unprecedentedly) suggested that artefacts cannot be wholly separated from the culture that produces them. I think the example he gave was of Turkish reconstruction after the First World War in which technological and administrative reform had to be accomplished with the assistance of secularisation. His suggestion seemed to be that, when a man who has never seen a firearm picks up a gun to use it, he must actually adopt some of the culture that produced the gun if he is to use it to any effect.

In an analogous way - and in a manner that I'm not competent to define - it seems that, when people in the UK consume cultural and technological products that are propagated from the US, they also pick up certain aspects of the cultural milieu in which those products are developed. It's as though issues from the US political and cultural agenda adhere to the software and the soap operas.

The truth is that I just don't see US style debates about the educational value of Creation Science taking any significant grip on the UK educational agenda. I don't see Church schools in England becoming transmitters of Christian fundamentalism in the foreseeable future any more than they have been such in the past. What intrigues me is the way that these ghosts seem to be able to transport themselves across the Atlantic.

The symmetry of religious and secular fundamentalism

It seems to me that non-religious and anti-religious reactions to religious faith in general tend towards one of two directions.

The first is an outright rejection of every conviction and attitude that seems to originate from religious belief. This approach seems to assume that religion poisons anything it originates: everything founded on the unprovable, arational, or irrational is necessarily suspect. This is, of course, the common characteristic of the secular fundamentalisms I have encountered.

The second tends to maintain that religion (whilst hopelessly muddled with false assumptions and conclusions) contains truths that are encoded by the individual or social unconscious. Such a view might say that Easter must be at least partially explained by the time of year at which it tends to fall – that it is a symbolic or ritualised expression of the anxieties and hopes tied into the end of winter and the arrival of spring and the coming-to-life of dormant, vegetable life forms.

The second approach produces a variety of results. Some will sometimes use technical, religious concepts as metaphors for non-religious phenomena (often with the intention of pointing out a certain kinship between the two), e.g. literary scholars talking about the ‘canon’ of Literature, the list of apparently ‘approved’ texts with an almost quasi-religious status in the field of education and culture. Although this approach is more congenial to less fundamentalist forms of secularism, it is also compatible with secular fundamentalism – although, on the lips of the secular fundamentalist, the concepts borrowed are often used pejoratively.

Others will set out to demythologise religious beliefs, seeking their “real”, sublimated kernel with psychological or sociological tools, e.g. Lacan’s contention that belief in God is a particular, cultural manifestation of ‘the big Other’, the symbolic order which shapes so much of human consciousness embedded in language. On the whole, this approach seems to be less congenial to secular fundamentalists.

Are secular fundamentalists anti-humanists?

My main problem with the tendency of secular fundamentalism to reject wholescale any concept that seems to originate in religious faith or practice – or to treat such concepts by default as suspect – is that it has an oddly anti-humanistic tendency. I can understand why secular fundamentalists think of religion as profoundly mistaken, but they tend to do it so radically that they seem to deny certain general human characteristics to the religious believer. It is possible, for example, for a religious believer to be fundamentally mistaken in her belief in the existence of a particular god/gods, but even people so mistaken do not always lose the full extent of their rationality.

For some secular fundamentalists, the slightest whiff of a concession that religion might bear some truths - albeit tangled up with error – seems to be too big a concession to make. In this, they seem to be mirror images of their religious equivalents (thus justifying the soubriquet of ‘fundamentalist’).

Christian fundamentalists tend, by default, to be suspicious of any value or affirmation that can’t ultimately be rooted in the bible. In this they are distinct from other Christians (including both the doctrinally liberal and the doctrinally orthodox) who believe that the secular world is not so hopelessly depraved as to be incapable of discovering any moral or intellectual truth.

North Korea: the ghost of an older form of secular fundamentalism

The Living Dead of the Cold War

Recent events in North Korea - another experimental nuclear explosion, the test launching of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the repudiation of the armistice that brought hostilities to an end in 1953 - are all a ghostly reminder of a form of secular fundamentalism probably more dangerous than anything any current religious fundamentalism threatens to visit on the human race. The North Korean regime is, of course, a sort of zombie remnant of the so-called "Cold" War.

It's worth saying at this point that I do NOT bundle the average Western secular fundamentalist in with Stalin and Pol Pot or the current North Korean leadership - I do NOT believe that Stalin and Pol Pot represent some kind of inevitable, logical conclusion of secular fundamentalism.

A quibble about terminology

However, recent events in North Korea remind me of something that has been niggling at me for some time. For quite a while now, I have felt very uncomfortable about the name given to the rivalry between various Western powers and what used to be known as the "Communist bloc". Surely the "Cold" War was only "cold" in places like the USA and Western Europe? It wasn't cold in Vietnam or Cambodia or Korea or Malaya. The victims of oppressive regimes in South America and elsewhere that were armed and supported by Western or Communist bloc policy on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend" presumably wouldn't have characterised their situation as "cold".

By comparison with the Cold War, the current state of tension between between some Western states and some Islamic States and some radical Islamicist paramilitary organisations is relatively minor. This does not justify the state of affairs - or the abuses committed either in the name of religion or of Western security - but it does draw attention to a rather important dimension of ideological rivalry: the problem of measuring anger and fear.

A calculus of anxiety

One of Aldous Huxley's characters observes somewhere in Eyeless in Gaza that nobody really remembers pain or pleasure: if we did, said that character, what woman would ever go through childbirth a second time? who would ever bother to sniff a gardenia a second time? who would ever bother to kiss again after the most ecstatic first kiss? If these experiences could really be recalled in all of their vividness, who would need - or want - to repeat them? I think that the same problem extends to anger.

It seems that humans (both singly and collectively) have a tendency to escalate their anger to a pitch that often bears no clear relationship to its cause - for example, in the UK, it seems that it's easier to generate substantially higher volumes of collective anger about fox hunting or MP's making extravagant expenses claims than it is about the ongoing genocide in the Congo or the devastating effect of the AIDS epidemics in poorer countries. And if this is true, it seems that we carry within us no objective measure of anger or an ability to keep it in proportion to its causes - maybe this is partly because we never recall the experience of past rage or fear in all of its fullness (although it has to be admitted that the disproportion of anger on the subject of fox hunting and MP's allowances has causes that are not all to do with our fallible memory of emotion).

Where is the anger at the fact that there are governments throughout the world desperately trying to obtain or maintain arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons at an enormous cost? I find it hard to imagine how a strategic nuclear weapon could be used without simultaneously committing a crime against humanity. And it seems to me that there is a crime of omission against humanity in the squandering of these vast resources on objects that will most likely collect dust in silos and be decommissioned in years to come. How many lives could be saved or enriched if those resources (both economic and technological) were used for humanitarian ends?

Secular fundamentalism and anger

What has this got to do with secular fundamentalism? One of the characteristics of secular fundamentalism is its tendency to lapse into an anger that eradicates any distinction between the elements in a religious ideology that it vehemently rejects and those it might actually agree with. For example, many a secular fundamentalist might respect a charity that tries to relieve poverty with "no strings attached" - an action respected and undertaken by many religiously motivated charitable organisations. Secular fundamentalists, however, often tend to have a rather undifferentiated anger and suspicion of anything undertaken in the name of religion.

Religious fundamentalists - certainly of the Christian variety - have a tendency to see all non-fundamentalist forms of their religion as irredeemably corrupt and effectively indistinguishable from non-religion (or, from their perspective, even worse than non-religion). If you're not within the cantonment, you're an enemy.

Religious fundamentalists are sometimes driven or subliminally conditioned by anger or fear - although not always to the extent that their critics would like to claim. Some Western secular fundamentalists, by contrast, seem to carry a higher volume of anger and fear, and to wear that anger more openly. If that is true, then the dangers of undifferentiated anger need to be attended to and explained and engaged with.

The debate about homosexuality

The Church of Scotland finds itself debating the doctrinal significance of homosexuality. I gather that the outcome of the debate is that the General Assembly has imposed a moratorium on the appointment of ministers in openly acknowledged same-sex relationships for the next two years.

In the news this morning, Scott Rennie, the minister of Queen's Cross Church, Aberdeen, whose appointment has sparked off this controversy in the Church of Scotland, said words to the effect that,

"If a major company announced that it was going to have a moratorium on the appointment of gay employees for the next two years, there would be an outcry".

(I'm quoting the Rev. Rennie from memory and on the basis of a sound bite, so I beg his pardon if I have misconstrued him.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Northern Hemisphere, the Supreme Court of the State of California has upheld the constitutionality of the the recent referendum banning gay marriages in that State.

Competing intrinsic goods

As one would expect, these debates can often be reduced to the a calculation of the pecking order of what a Natural Lawyer might call "Intrinsic Goods". The Californian Supreme Court seems to have made its decision on the basis that, in the case of the legalisation of gay marriages, democracy as an intrinsic good - expressed by a referendum - trumps the possible intrinsic good of gay marriage as a civil right.

My judgement of Scott Rennie's position is based on a very scant knowledge of the facts of the case. I assume that it assumes the intrinsic good of a committed same-sex relationship and I assume that it also assumes that this can, from the Christian point of view, be guaranteed by propositions found in revelation (i.e. scripture). What was curious was his supplementary appeal to the intrinsic good of the employment policies of large, private corporations. He seems to be arguing that the Church should use "the world" (which has specialised meanings in Christian discourse) as a source of doctrinal guidance.

Trying to decipher aspects of the debate

The debate about the status of same-sex relationships seems to have assumed a highly symbolic - and rather complicated - role in the conflict between religion and secularism. I'd like to suggest what may be a couple of the complicating factors in this phenomenon.

• Firstly, in Western societies, the appointment of clergy is one of the few areas in which Churches maintain some degree of direct power - Churches have long since given up being the gatekeepers of entry to education, the franchise, or the military hierarchy. (Once upon a time, in England and Wales, a woman seeking a licence to practice as a midwife had to apply to the bishop of the diocese.) So, from the perspective of many a secular fundamentalist, ecclesiastical employment policies are an expression of what Churches would like to do if they had a more direct influence on employment policies in the secular world.
• Secondly, for many orthodox Christians, one of the things at stake in the debate about same-sex relationships is the value of the Christian revelation: amongst other things, capitulation on this question to prevailing secular views is a nearly unequivocal admission that the orthodox Christian must beware of trusting specifically Christian lights.

And yet there's an unresolved irony underlying the decision of the California Supreme Court: that certain gay rights do not have the same status as an intrinsic good as the simple will of the majority - two goods that many secular fundamentalists otherwise regard as intrinsic.

Homophobia, sectarian violence, and Christian anxieties about the BNP

The news in the UK seems to offer fruitful material for reflection in the debate about the issues that shape secular fundamentalism.

It's been reported on the BBC today that a man was murdered in Northern Ireland yesterday for purely sectarian reasons following Glasgow Rangers' victory in the Scottish Premier League. Also in the headlines in some news outlets is the controversy in the Church of Scotland surrounding the appointment of a practising homosexual minister in Aberdeen and the declaration of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York against the the BNP.

All of these events are symptomatic of the kinds of phenomena that feed the animus of secular fundamentalism. Each of them, of course, can become events in the secular fundamentalist narrative of religious belief, confirming its foundational assertion that religion is - despite all its protestation to the contrary - an engine of irrational hatred.

Even the Archbishops' declaration - an ostensible denunciation of religious hatred - must appear to some secular fundamentalists as a kind of rearguard action by a retreating and compromised religious establishment in England, edgily aware of the fact that Islamophobia can be fed by appeals to historic Christianity, and ultimately appearing to rely on secularist premises for the relative vehemence of their declaration.

How do Christians respond to the secular fundamentalist version of these events?

So what has Christianity to object to the secular fundamentalist version of these events? The main line of argument is, of course, that sectarian murder and Islamophobia are, by definition, inauthentic expressions of Christianity. Christ taught his disciples to love their enemies and, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, taught that the authentic fulfilment of the commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself involves compassion for any human who it's in your power to help, irrespective of their religious or ethnic identity.

It's harder to pursue this line in the case of the condemnation of homosexual acts - the historically decisive authorities for most Christians for all of Christian history (scripture for all, with the addition of Tradition and Natural Law for others) speak with one voice on the subject of homosexual acts (although it must be remembered that they are silent on the subject of sexual orientation). The toleration of homosexual relationships within Christianity almost certainly involves an act of doctrinal repression - inconvenient scripture and Tradition must either be ignored or syncretically assimilated by a "spiritualised" extension of other texts or principles not hitherto used to justify homosexual acts.

But, leaving aside the tricky case of the toleration of homosexual acts for the moment, the Christian line against the secular fundamentalist generally involves variations on the theme that hate crime and the politics of hatred are inauthentic expressions of Christianity. And there are at least two versions of this line. The first is the most obvious - you can't be truly Christian and found your world view on the basis of hatred. A second line is a great deal more subtle: the theory espoused by the Catholic, Rene Girard.

Does Rene Girard provide an answer?

Girard accepts one of the key assertions of the secular fundamentalist: religion is a social mechanism that is founded upon, and attempts to manage, the human impulse to act violently. He argues that the central mechanism in this process is the practice of scapegoating - and that the essence of the Christian revelation is the assertion that, in Christ, the true God exposes, rejects, and repudiates the scapegoating mechanism. Girard also argues that this has not stopped many Christians from using Christianity in precisely the manner repudiated by the God they claim to worship.

If Girard is right, then the concept of the "secular fundamentalist" takes on a new significance - the terminology, of course, is designed to impute precisely the kind of bad faith to certain forms of anti-religious feeling that the secularist imputes to religion. If Girard is right, then the phenomenon of religious belief is actually a scapegoat for the secular fundamentalist. This would then prompt the question, "When the secular fundamentalist seeks to scapegoat religion, with whom will this sacrificial act achieve a temporary truce? Who is the offering of the sacrificial victim of religion going to appease?"

The collateral damage from Islamicism

At first sight, there seems to be an inconsistency about the penchant that secular fundamentalism has for bundling all religion in with Islamicism – after all, there are many Muslims, and members of other faiths, who utterly repudiate the beliefs and actions of Islamicism.

Perhaps the secular fundamentalist can argue that all religion is, in essence, as irrational as Islamicism – perhaps the implication of their position is that, “If Islam can produce such extremism, there’s no brake of rationality in any other religion to hold it back from the same possibility”. After all, recent events in Sri Lanka remind us that it wasn’t Islamicists who sparked off the contemporary practice of suicide bombing. In other words, it can be argued that all religions are potentially as dangerous as each other.

There’s also another dimension to this issue that the religiously minded need to take to heart: using the abuse of one faith as an excuse for expressions of interfaith contempt is an invariably ugly spectacle to the non-religious.

It has been argued that the antidote to “bad” religion is not necessarily no religion – instead, one antidote may be “good” religion. Perhaps “good religion” needs to distance itself from “bad religion”? But, in so doing, it falls into the secular fundamentalist trap of providing evidence of the view that, “All religion inevitably fosters conflict”.

When those who subscribe to “good” religion speak against “bad” religion, they appear to be adding fuel to the flames of religious conflict; when they remain silent, they fail to show that there is a religious critique of “bad” religion – that there’s a kind of moral and epistemological equivalence between all religious world views. It seems that the religious are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

What is secular fundamentalism?

What do I mean by "secular fundamentalism"? Without googling a definition to find out what others are saying, I mean the following by the term: "an aggressive - and often rationalised - antipathy to religion per se".

For people like myself, I suspect that there's a very clear distinction between the secular fundamentalist and the thoughtful and convinced atheist. One of the hallmarks of the former is his/her tendency to dismiss as corrupt at source more or less any utterance that emerges from the constellation of religious commitments.

So, what stokes the boiler of secular fundamentalism? From the perspective of an adherent of organised religion, it seems to be the result of a confluence of a variety of issues.

Firstly, secular fundamentalism seems to have been emotionally galvanised by a reaction to Islamicism — whose totemic realisation is the suicide bomber.

I am at pains to distinguish between the Islamicist and the Muslim. I assume that an "Islamicist" is one for whom Islam seems to be first and foremost a means for radical and violent resistance to the domination of Western culture and the policies of Western governments in Islamic majority countries. By "the Muslim" - in the very narrow sense as someone distinguished from the Islamicist - I mean all Muslims, however residual or however devout, for whom violent, unilateral action, without the sanction of official state policy is at the very least morally questionable.

Secondly, the reaction to Islamicism seems to have played a role in helping to crystallise a long pent-up frustration with hypocritical forms of state-imposed religious observance, from arguments about compulsory school assemblies and the place of religion in school curricula to the issue of the establishment of the Church of England.

Thirdly, all of this seems to have been framed or facilitated by those cultural and ideological trends that go under the name of "Postmodernism".