Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (13 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

Tags: #Religion, #General, #Fundamentalism, #Comparative Religion, #Philosophy, #test

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
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belief that the survival of America as a nation requires the predominance of conservative Protestant beliefs and values is still too strong for the new mask of moderation not to slip. Changing Moral Majority Inc., to the Liberty Federation does not stop fundamentalists dreaming of the righteous empire. It is almost asking too much of committed conservative Protestants to expect them, in Falwell's words, to "coalesce with fellow Americans with whom they have theological disagreements for the purpose of effecting moral and social change" (1986: 1). However inelegantly Falwell may put it, conservative Protestants do not have theological disagreements with other people. They have the truth and other people are wrong. It is difficult for them now to deflate their self-image from that of a "moral majority" to that of a minority which asks nothing more than the right to do what is right in its own eyes.
The problem from the point of view of the audience is the authenticity of this new character. That many white, heterosexual, male Americans accepted that blacks, homosexuals, and women had been relatively disadvantaged was an important element in the limited success these groups have enjoyed in presenting themselves as minorities deserving of first tolerance and then positive discrimination. Conservative Protestants once played a major part in setting the social and moral tone of the nation; they succeeded in making alcohol consumption illegal. They have often been in the forefront of campaigns to prevent the extension of toleration to other groups. They were anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-homosexual, and anti-feminist. Groups that have never enjoyed power have not had the opportunity to behave badly toward others. Hence they can appeal to fairness without having that appeal undermined by the record of their own previous actions. Conservative Protestants once enjoyed considerable power (and are still powerful in some regions). While their exercise of power was not consistently malign, neither was it uniformly benign. It is easy for uncommitted observers to be suspicious of the change of the title of Falwell's organization. While Falwell would always have denied imperialist and impositional ambitions, the word "majority" always carried the sense that, even if conservative Christians were not a majority, they
 
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would behave as if they were by imposing their views on society as a whole. Liberty Federation is more consistent with the minority rights strategy, but many spectators doubt the sincerity of the new posture.
To summarize, any balanced assessment of the NCR has to consider the internal weaknesses of the movement as well as its strengths. It must also consider the effectiveness of liberal opposition. I have suggested that the failure of the earlier grand designs for cultural reformation has led the NCR to experiment with the potentially more fruitful strategy of claiming social space for its beliefs, values, and practices on the grounds that it represents a legitimate minority against which the modern secular state discriminates. The difficulty with that rhetoric is that many other groups have good reason to remember the lack of generosity of conservative Protestants when they were in the ascendant.
Religious Particularism and Modernity: Concluding Thoughts
Twenty years from now, scholars will be in a much better position to judge the impact of the new Christian right. This study has argued that the power and influence of the movement have been greatly exaggerated, by its enemies as much as by its friends. The NCR has failed to achieve any significant legislative success, it has failed in its main goal of re-Christianizing America, and there are few reasons to suppose that it will at some future time succeed. Thus far the movement's failure has been explained in terms of complex relationships between the interests of potential NCR supporters and the circumstances in which they must work. In concluding, I want to draw attention to a more abstract concern: the problem of modernity. Underlying the particular organizational and motivational problems already discussed is the fundamental difficulty that what has brought the NCR into being is so amorphous as to be barely identifiable while at the same time being irreversible. What troubles supporters of the NCR is modernity, and it will not go away.
 
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What is Secular Humanism?
It is not usually the job of the sociologist to correct people's apprehensions of the world. If people define situations as real, then they are, for them, real. As a dictum for explaining why people do what they do, this is excellent. But when we move from explaining action to explaining why those best-laid schemes "gang aft agley," a contrast between the way people define situations and our understanding of them is useful.
Most NCR leaders and supporters suppose that their grievances are the result of a conspiracy by an identifiable group of secular humanists. They are wrong. The Humanist Manifestos are red herrings, the credos of a small handful of not especially influential intellectuals.
4
Godless America of the 1980s is no more the creation of secular humanists than the America of the 1950s was the creation of communists. Were major social changes the result of identifiable people acting deliberately, consciously, and in concert, there would be better reasons to suppose the NCR might succeed in reversing them. A more accurate understanding of the source of the changes that disturb the NCR allows us to see the impossibility of the mission. What is required for that understanding is some notion of the distinctiveness of the modern world.
Berger et al. reasonably define modernization as the "institutional concomitants of technologically induced economic growth" (1973: 15). The most important of these are directly related to the economy, and closely related to them are "the political institutions associated with what we know as the modern state, particularly the institution of bureaucracy" (1973: 16). Many things could be said about the consequences of technology and the modernity that accompanies it; this brief description will concentrate on professionalism and pluralism.
Taking the second point first, modernity brings with it a near-inconceivable expansion of the area of human life which is open to choice.
5
Premodern man lived in a world of
fate
. In a world of only limited technology, the one tool was accompanied by a belief in the one way:
One employs this tool, for a particular purpose and no other. One dresses in this particular way and in no other. A traditional society is one in which
 
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the great part of human activity is governed by such clear-cut prescriptions. Whatever else may be the problems of a traditional society, ambivalence is not one of them. (Berger 1980: 12)
This is not to say that traditional societies are static; they do change, but their institutionstheir routinized patterns of actionare marked by a high degree of certainty and "taken-for-grantedness." In most areas of life, things are done this way, and have always been done this way, because "that is how we do things." Modernity
pluralizes:
''Where there used to be one or two institutions, there are now fifty. . . . Where there used to be one or two programs in a particular area of human life, there are now fifty'' (Berger 1980: 15).
Pluralization brings the need for choice. In contrast to the world of fate inhabited by traditional man, in innumerable situations of everyday life modern man must choose, and the necessity of choice reaches into the areas of beliefs, values, and world views. For the modern society as a whole, pluralization requires that the state become ever more universalistic. Increased social differentiation and migration make populations less homogeneous. The gradual expansion of economies and of the state makes variations in ethnos, in religion, in race, and in language ever more troublesome. In traditional economies people trade preferentially and particularistically. In the modern capitalist economy, production and distribution are universalized. Although the process is never complete, the tendency is for modernizing societies to treat ever-larger proportions of the people in "the same way." The expansion of citizenship rights sees the universalizing of the franchise, of property rights, and of welfare provisions. The expansion of bureaucracythe application of technological rationality to the processing of peoplesees increasing slices of identity being reduced to files consisting only of data relevant to "the business in hand."
A modern democratic nation-state which contains a variety of religious, racial, and ethnic groups and which wishes to be regarded as legitimate by the bulk of its population has to push religious, racial, and ethnic particularism out of the public arena and into the private "home" world of individuals and their families. Only in the home is there sufficient consensus to prevent strongly held views
 
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and social identities being sources of social conflict. Put simply, a major consequence of pluralization is privatization.
The NCR sees the state imposing a coherent ideology which it calls "secular humanism." This is profoundly mistaken. What is actually imposed (and that term already suggests an inappropriately directed and conscious cause) is not so often the alternative dogma but the
dogma of alternatives
.
The main exceptions to this relativism occur when powerful professional groups claim dominion over some area of knowledge or action. Then the state may impose a particular view, as the Supreme Court has tacitly permitted in refusing to see creation science as a legitimate alternative to naturalistic explanations of the origin of species. However, the state endorsement of knowledge which competes with fundamentalist views is not the sole source of grievance, and it may not be the most threatening. To offer a flippant but nonetheless useful analogy, more cars are destroyed by rust than by crashes. The large obstacle that one can see is the obstacle one can avoid. As the strength of religion in Poland or the Soviet Union demonstrates, the state's attempts to produce its own functional equivalent of religion inadvertently encourages a reaction and makes it possible to continue to believe that there can be one truth, one shared vision, one world view. The
contents
of competing visions can be ignored, or considered and then rejected. What cannot so easily be ignored is the constant evidence that there are many alternative visions. In the early stages of pluralism, some of the alternatives can be dismissed by invidious stereotyping of the proponents of those views. Especially when the carriers are foreign or largely confined to a status group quite different from one's own, the alternative world views can be neutralized: Catholicism is the creed of Rome and rebellion; unitarianism and humanism are the creeds of degenerate upper classes; enthusiastic pentecostalism is the faith of the lumpenproletariat. The problem with late pluralism (to coin a parallel to the Marxists' late capitalism) is that a combination of proliferation of alternatives and social mobility makes such sanitizing-by-stereotype increasingly difficult. When there is so much variation in and across all social strata, even the most successful techniques for "cognitive insulation" fail to disguise the reality of choice.

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