Digging in on Doctrine

The children of Abraham, the heirs of Jerusalemaic faith, the Peoples of the Book: Call them what you will, they are witnesses to the power of peace and reconciliation. They witness, that is, to a God who can wear a benign face. That same God can also scowl, however. God makes and licenses war. In the modern world, God's peoples--Muslims, Jews, and Christians--often forget peace and benignity. They become fierce, sometimes restricting themselves to verbal expressions but oft-times, in a world made more dangerous with the advance of weaponry, using lethal expression aimed at the death of "the other."

This last type of expression is referred to by most scholars, by people in statecraft, and by the media as "fundamentalism." In her brisk and creative synthesis on the fundamentalist phenomenon, "The Battle for God," the British author Karen Armstrong doesn't spend much time hassling over the appropriateness of the term. She could call it "X" or "Btlfsk," and it would still offend those who don't want to see themselves synthesized with any other group. Fundamentalists see themselves as distinctive, even unique. But Armstrong's fairness to each of her three religions is a hallmark of the book, as she bows and bends to do justice to their idiosyncracies. Along the way, she also manages to be very illuminating.

Not to say that her attempt to place the three fundamentalisms on the same time line doesn't show signs of strain. But she never strains so much that the reader will lose the plotline, of which Armstrong is a dedicated and lively manager.

One example of strain comes at the beginning of Armstrong's section on Protestant fundamentalists, which she starts in 1492, before there was Protestantism. This is a bit forced. The term "fundamentalism" was invented in the United States early in the 20th century by Protestant leaders who wore it as a badge of honor, a badge they wore on a suit of spiritual armor as they set out to "do battle for the Lord." But in a few pages, we begin to romp through the Reformation and make our way into modernity and into North America and fundamentalism's beginnings.

I stress the modern here, since Armstrong sees fundamentalism rightly as a reaction to modernity and modernism, however these get defined. And precisely how the faithful define modernity has determined what in their bag of basics--which "fundamentals"--they would parade and use as barricades. For the American Protestants, modernism has specifically meant biblical criticism and scientific theories of evolution. Jews and Muslims, also getting their fundamentalist acts together early in the 20th century, were untroubled by both. Therefore Jews fundamentalized story, and Muslims fundamentalized law, while Protestants fundamentalized doctrine.

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