Back a ways, in comments on a post I wrote called "Shall We Call This One 'Wildmon's World?'" several of our Red Rovers voiced their irritation that The Blue Voices spend too much time writing about the right-wing Christian fundamentalism in this country while ignoring the waves of violent Muslim anger against Europeans both in Europe and in Muslim countries. By now these commenters may have been appeased by the fact that other Voices here have written on this subject, or our posts may not have been as virulent as they would have wished. Whatever. I don't really care.
This subject is far too complicated for any simplistic sort of ranting. The more I hear on the issue, the more I read, the more I listen to, the more complicated it appears to me. I watched Margaret Warner and her two guests on a segment of the Newshour w/Jim Lehrer last night called "Clash Over Cartoons." I listened to a segment of Talk of the Nation today, "Political Cartoons, Protest and Freedom of Speech," I've read newspaper articles and editorials on the subject, I've talked to Muslim students at the college where I work.
One of the guests on the Talk of the Nation program was Martin Marty, one of the founders of The Fundamentalism Project. When I Googled The Fundamentalism Project I discovered that it is an extensive work of multiple volumes by numerous scholars written between 1987 and 1993. While googling on that subject I ran across this essay by Davidson Loehr, The Fundamentalist Agenda ...is absolutely natural, ancient, and powerful—but the liberal impulse makes us humane. Loehr tells us that a powerful result of the research done for the above work was the discovery that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.
There are five characteristics shared by pretty much every form of religious fundamentalism. These characteristics, interestingly enough, are also shared by the political philosophy of fascism, in fact Loehr says: " One scholar suggested that it's helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. "
The fundamentalists' agenda starts with insistence that their rules must be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of life. The rigid rules of God—and they never doubt that they and only they have got these right—must become the law of the land.
Men are on top. Men are bigger and stronger, and they rule not only through physical strength but also and more importantly through their influence on the laws and rules of the land. Men set the boundaries. Men define the norms, and men enforce them. They also define women, and they define them through narrowly conceived biological functions. Women are to be supportive wives, mothers, and homemakers.
Since there is only one right picture of the world, one right set of beliefs, and one right set of roles for men, women, and children, it is imperative that this picture and these rules be communicated precisely to the next generation. Therefore, fundamentalists must control education by controlling textbooks and teaching styles, deciding what may and may not be taught.
Fourth, fundamentalists spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed.
Fundamentalists deny history in a radical and idiosyncratic way.
It is not all of Islam that is burning buildings and rampaging in the streets of Europe, Syria, Afghanistan. It is a radical core of fundamentalists with young followers whom they have influenced. Adapting to life in European cities - Amsterdam, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Brussels, Munich, etc - has not been very successful for many Muslims. They have taken their own fundamentalist religion, and the culture it dictates, with them and tried desperately to retain it, in the midst of a pluralistic, heterogeneous, liberal, democratic society. Wanting to leave an old life behind, they have inadvertantly taken it with them and recreated in their communities a microcosm of the society they were escaping.
I am not excusing the events of the day with the above comment, there is no excuse for such damage and violence, I am saying that I have some understanding of the tinder these cartoons heaped on a fire that was waiting to be unleashed. Muslims have been held in suspicion and contempt universally throughout the Western world ever since the events of 9/11, and in some places even before. They are the unwanted immigrants of Europe, as our Latino immigrants are here, accepting menial jobs no one else wants - when, that is, they can find jobs at all. They live in those cities, but they are not of them. Through their own choice, but in all probability also through the choice of the Dutch, British, German, Belgian, Danish, citizens already in residence.
This is a clash of cultures that has been simmering for quite some time. I have no answers for this situation. I doubt that any of our commenters have the answers. None of the pundits have the answers. How do we solve a situation where people who see headscarves as an important expression of their faith (freedom of expression) but whose girl children have been denied the right to wear them to school, who now are outraged by the freedom of expression that publishes what to them is sacriligious art in a newspaper that last year refused to publish cartoons demeaning Jesus Christ for fear it would offend Christian leaders?
Read back through the five features of all funtamentalisms - see how many of them apply to Dominionism, to the hopes of the 700 Club, to the American Family Association and its goals, to Fred Phelps and his Family, ad nauseum. We write here about Christian fundamentalism in this country because we ardently wish to prevent its growing power and political influence from creating the sort of theocracy that not only enables but encourages the sort of violence and rage we are seeing now on other continents.
This post is now way past lengthy, and I always suppose people aren't going to read all of truly long posts. I will continue my thoughts in a second installment at some point.
