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.