Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective Read Online Free PDF

clearly divided under the hegemonies of Good versus Evil. This may sometimes translate to Christ versus Anti-christ, in a Christian culture, or God versus Satan. There is a war on, perhaps based on a "war in heaven," as in Milton's Paradise Lost, Book VI, based on a biblical clue, with its reflection of war on earth. The enemy is compromise or the compromiser. The potential apostate or heretic is threatened with drowning in the figurative moat.
9. On the basis of this sharp metaphysical-type division, there is then a practical division through the formation of a people. Fundamentalisms often rely on cultural "thickness," on tribalism, on people's blood relations and physical propinquity. Yet they also can rely on what has been called "convergent selectivity," as when people are summoned across distances by mass media of communication. They may wear insignia, or learn shibboleths and code words or behavior patterns which lead them to recognize each other.
In either case, something like "the party of God" or "the people of God" or "the chosen people" or "the elect" emergesa Moral Majority, if you will, that has found each other and will oppose outsiders, infidels, waverers, adapters.

 

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10. Fundamentalisms then become potentially or actually aggressive. Many newcomers to the scene of reportage equate fundamentalisms with belligerence and militancy, with terrorism or revolution, with shooting and killing or with massive efforts to take over a polity, as through constitutional amendment in a republic. Yet fundamentalist movements may long satisfy people with private interests, who may wish to be left alone, as if sectarian; they want to be free to bring up their children in their pattern, as nonfundamentalist traditionalists like the Amish or the Doukhobors choose to do.
Yet there must be a potential, if the people are agents of God or of a transcendent philosophy or force, for them to erupt from passivity into activity. Given the stakes, the scale of challenges, and the instruments of change made possible in a technological era, the move toward activism and aggression may be quite rapid. The first movementthe politics of withdrawalthen characteristically changes into a politics of resentment. Fundamentalists resent being left out, deprived, displaced, scorned, marginalized. They feel their cultures penetrated. They must take action against the infidel. There is almost always a polity implication, whether constitutional, revolutionary, or designed to stabilize a hegemony of fundamentalists.
11. Finally, the comparativist looks for and, so far as I know, finds what we might call encompassing, substantive philosophies of history in fundamentalisms. They deal with the future as if it had already occurred, measuring history and their actions from such futures. This means that they are, in many religious traditions, messianic and millennial. They may act in the name of the assured revolution of the proletariat which produces a classless society, or a coming Golden Age or Paradise, or the Second Coming of Jesus. It is possible that the philosophy of history could be progressive, but the more common pattern is for apocalyptic, dramatic upheavals in the course of events.
Such a philosophy of history for the group and the individual permits one to live with setback and postponement. While fundamentalisms are multiclass phenomenathe recent ones in America took off in middle-class cultures, and not just among the pooroften they give solace and meaning to the deprived. The future is assured, the past was grand, the present may be cloudy. Yet the philosophy of

 

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history grants to insiders enough knowledge about and motivation from a specific future and discernible past to help members follow prescriptive paths and actions in the present.
When they look thus, believe thus, live thus, and hope thus, observers call them fundamentalist, and most have cognate or analogous terms to describe themselves. They have become major