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.