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".
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I've been asked to post the following response by somebody who's still working out the technicalities of posting to this site:
ReplyDelete"If it is true that much of this secular anger boiled up from the 9/11 attacks, then I find one aspect extremely surprising. Immediately after that attack Dawkins wrote a passionate article in the Guardian denouncing all religion, and especially trading on the business about the promise of virgins in paradise, of which we have heard rather a lot.
"I was struck then, as I continue to be, by the complete absence of political discourse from critics of religion. The history of Afghanistan in the post WWII era alone has been one of foreign influence, domination and violent invasion. This generally doesn't leave people very happy with the outside world. The position of Middle Eastern countries in the 20th century certainly hasn't been rosy.
"What has happened to Marx? Do those who blame all the world's evils on religion simply not see the facts of poverty, corruption, oppression, (climate change)? Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in a letter that we would never again fail to understand the political and social forces underlying change and violence "after the French Revolution". But it seems it has been all too easy to forget that too.
"There is a link here with that absurd man Fujiyama who wrote the book on the End of History. History seems quite determined not to end. This blindness is one which can easily be criticized as self-satisfaction. Those who proclaimed that history was ended didn't wish to see the sufferings of other people, or discounted them as finally meaningless.
We have a parable about that, incidentally - and one which never fails to terrify me: the parable of Dives and Lazarus.
"The huge insight of Marx was surely to extend the ways in which it is possible to see the world from the perspective of other people, especially people without much voice or power. And in this it is indeed true that he remains in the line of the Old testament Prophets, by which I mean that - even for those not convinced by the claims of religion, or its results - there has been a strand of critical social and economic thought reaching down through the ages, and which has found a place of respect and privilege within the Jewish and Christian traditions (I speak of what I know best); and that to act as if such criticism or interpretation were worthless, passé, or meaningless poses some very strange questions indeed."