Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (20 page)

Read Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective Online

Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
3.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 85
scholars."
29
Daniel Alexander speaks to this point. In both cases (e.g., Protestant fundamentalism and Catholic integralism), "it is clear that right from the start the concept escapes an unambiguous social identification process as it is invested with the meaning given it by its opponents. The sociologist must, therefore, take into account the whole polemic field to which it belongs."
30
We do not have polemic-free, value-neutral terms for liberal Protestants, fundamentalists, integralists, and Catholic modernists.
4. Neither the integralists nor fundamentalists are
antimoderne
in every respect. Both groups are notorious for their willingness to adapt the latest organizational structures and technological devises to spread their message (the fundamentalists turn to the electronic church). Nor are they always naive or uncritical about the currents of modernity. French sociologist Alaine Touraine notes of reactionary social movements that their "fundamental aim contains an organized attempt on the part of some agents to control the historicity of a specific community."
31
Unlike withdrawing and world-rejecting sects, fundamentalist antimodernists seek to be in modernity (and to influence its direction) but not to be
of
it.
Alexander registers what was really at issue between the modernists and integralists:
It is not the battle between tradition and modernity, but rather a divergence in their assessment of the means the church must resort to in order to reconquer modernity. Modernists think the church must adapt itself to the republican and secular definition of public space and Catholic exegesis must embrace the presuppositions of "scientific criticism" in order to remain credible in its new situation. Integralists, like Benigni, believe it is possible for the church to be present in its time precisely because it remains aware that it alone has social legitimacy because it is always deeply rooted in society. For modernists, it is possible to get involved in the political game as it is, for integralists, intransigence demands precisely that one acts and that one appears as a church and for the church; there is no need for Catholicism to become democratic. It is rather the Christian Democracy which should become Catholic. The integralists, thus, feel that there is not a bipolar opposition between good conservatives and modernist extremists, but rather a tripartite structure: on the right are those who turn their backs on their own era whom they call traditionalists; on the extreme left are those who are ready to sacrifice everything to modernity whom they call the modernists because they
 
Page 86
misunderstand their own era. In between the two, integralists find the correct balance.
32
Thus, neither fundamentalists nor integralists typically see themselves as
antimoderne
. Nor do they see themselves as a group that rejects confrontation with its own time.
5. As social science scholars, we are mainly interested in the various fundamentalisms because of their cultural-political spin-offs and political programs. Early on, for example, the integralist program became closely linked to the antirevolutionary, paleofascist politics of the
Action Française
in France.
33
Such intransigence of the integralists is caught in the remarks of Georges Goyau in the 1898
Congres de l'Association de la Jeunesse Française,
where Goyau called for a great refusal of the inevitability of modernity, "a refusal which expresses a will to shape the world in a way which is different from that of non-Christian forces."
34
It is this active will to shape a different world that distinguishes fundamentalism from traditionalism.
Alaine Touraine notes that it is precisely because these antimodernist movements are determined by the opposition they oppose and arouseand because they organize themselves insofar as they can label their opponents"that they are open to other conflicts in society as a whole and help to stir them up by crystallizing around two competing views of the world and two antagonistic ways of achieving a better society. This is why they are often a vehicle for the specific social protest of a group which is oppressed or in decline."
35
The path followed by Msgr. Benigni, the animator of integralism, shows how integralism is basically a reactionary movement facing the crisis of legitimacy which Roman Catholicism confronted during the nineteenth century. The first enemy of integralists was liberalism and, in particular, its representatives in the church who described themselves as liberal Catholics which, in the eyes of the integralists, seemed a contradiction in terms. Both Protestant fundamentalists and integralists trained their first artillery on these enemies within, and both focused first on the seminary and church journals as the key battleground for a new orthodoxy.
Like Charles Coughlin, the integralist American radio priest in the 1930s, Benigni claimed to embody in his movement "the social ques-
 
Page 87
tion,'' enunciated by Leo XIII in the encyclical,
Rerum Novarum
. However, despite the many contradictions inherent in the authoritarian populism typical of early integralism (something integralism shares with early Protestant fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan), the Catholic integralist groups in Europe shared an affinity with fascism. In the end, Benigni supported Mussolini, not because the latter really satisfied him but "because the rise of fascism, by making a clean sweep of a political system into which the church did not fit, speeded up, in Benigni's eyes, the possibility of setting up a real party of Christian order which would usher in the final redemption of society."
36
In a similar way, Catholic integralist thinkers lent ideological support to the protofascist regimes of Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Perón in Argentina, Franco in Spain, Marshal Pétain in France, and Salazar in Portugal. In this century, Catholic integralist movements harbor anti-Semitism and support militaristic solutions. In the postwar period they have championed the cold war ideology or, in Latin America, the national security ideology. In some cases the national security ideology in Latin America explicitly draws on the writings of Catholic integralist thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s.
37
By superimposing a political dimension on its conflicts with modernity, both integralism and fundamentalism mobilize around symbols of nationalist patriotism.
Differences between Fundamentalism and Integralism
If there are important similarities between Protestant fundamentalism and Catholic integralism, there are also essential differences:
1. The political program of integralism is always mediated in and through the church. For Benigni, as Emile Poulat notes, "in both senses of the word, the Catholic cannot but get lost in the world unless he lives in it as part of the church."
38
Protestant fundamentalists, however, possess a much stronger individualist and voluntaristic mediation for action, which allows transdenominational alliances and social movements. Due to its nature, Protestant fundamentalism can take on very different forms and owes less than meets the eye to any given era, since its ability to catalyze a return to
 
Page 88
Christian civilization depends more on an additive set of individual moral decisions than on a political triumph of the corporate church as such. Whereas the ecclesiology of integralists does not accept democratic voluntarism, that of the fundamentalists does.
Integralists are constrained by their orthodoxy to be papal legitimists. Hence, as occurred in the period after World War II, if papal policy moves away from integralism toward greater accommodation with modernityfor example, toward adapting a Christian Democratic strategy in the political order, toward openness to scholarship in the biblical, patristic, and liturgical renewal movementsintegralists are constrained by their legitimist orthodoxy, at least on the surface, to go along. The Vatican has often used and cast aside integralist movements to suit its own purposes. As the excommunication of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre demonstrates, papal condemnation of integralist groups may lead to widespread defections from the group back to Rome. Integralism ceased to be a serious Catholic issue after 1940, until its recent world wide resurgence in the post-Vatican church.
2. In the end, the mainline Protestant response to Henry Emerson Fosdick's landmark sermon in 1922, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?", led them to hold the line against the fundamentalists within their midst. These latter seceded to found their own seminaries, churches, journals, mission organizations, indeed, their own enclosed social world. In Catholic terms, they went into schism. Protestant fundamentalism lost its battle to control the bureaucracies of mainline Protestantism. The Catholic case of fundamentalism, however, involved a strategic alliance between Vatican bureaucrats and dissident social movements within the church (such as
Action Française
). When the institutional church accepted nonfundamentalist teachings of the relation of tradition to modernityafter Pius XI (who condemned
Action Française
) and Pius XII (who encouraged modern biblical scholarship) and, especially, after Vatican IIthe surviving integralist groups were constrained, as papal legitimists, to go along. In a sometimes tortured rhetoric, contemporary Catholic integralist groups generally claim that they represent the authentic spirit and letter of Vatican II.
39
As long as the Vatican's curial bureaucrats are not pure integralists, it is difficult for the movements to

Other books

Frenched Series Bundle by Melanie Harlow
Assail by Ian C. Esslemont
Lone Star Holiday by Jolene Navarro
Inquisición by Anselm Audley
Guarded Heart by Jennifer Blake
The Master by Kresley Cole