Introduction
Vociferous advocates of atheism like Richard Dawkins (2006), Sam Harris (2004) and Christopher Hitchens (2007) claim that religion has been the leading cause of war and violence throughout history. This has been challenged factually by critics who point out that while religion was the central factor in wars like the Crusades, there are much larger death tolls from wars and ideologies that are not religious in the conventional sense (for example the two world wars, Nazism and Stalinism). Another criticism comes from a study which found that all three of these atheists supported the 2001 war on Afghanistan, and Hitchens supported the 2003 war on Iraq, which between them resulted in millions of deaths (Megoran 2018). This suggests that their real objection is only to religion, rather than to violence and war.
My purpose in this paper is not to examine the statistics of religion and violence but to challenge the use of the term ‘religion’ as though its meaning were monolithic and unproblematic, arguing instead that within each religion there are currents that embue it with very different and even diametrically opposed meanings. I conclude that any sweeping generalisations about religion as such are bound to be wrong, and that versions of almost every religion span the entire spectrum from life-affirming love and respect for all humans to destructive hatred and violence against those who are defined as being inferior or different. What is important, then, is neither to support nor to oppose religion as such, but to identify and oppose those strands which endorse or encourage oppression and cruelty.
Defining religion
It would be useful to begin by clarifying what I mean by religion. I understand ‘religion’ to be the practice of a faith which is not based on scientific evidence. This does not necessarily mean that it is contradicted by scientific evidence; only that it cannot be proved scientifically. A few religions are not theistic: Buddhism, for example, is agnostic about the existence of God. In the case of theistic religions, it is, of course, easy to refute the existence of an old man in the sky, if that is the conception of God. But what about more spiritual conceptions of God, which are internally consistent and do not contradict scientific knowledge? It may not be possible to prove the existence of such a God, but it would not be possible to prove the non-existence of such a God either. Whether such a God exists is a matter of faith, but that does not necessarily make belief in such a God irrational. It is important to recognise that denial of the existence of God is also a matter of faith, since it cannot be proved. Radical humanism could be seen as a religion, in that it involves faith in values such as fundamental human rights and equality, which are not based on scientific evidence. Forms of hardline atheism which deny the validity of everything that cannot be proved scientifically have to conclude that acts of pure kindness which are dictated by morality but do nothing to propagate one’s genes are ‘misfirings’, while ethics is ‘an illusion’, since morality and ethics cannot be validated by science (Holt 2006).
In his book Dyanmics of Faith, theologian and philosopher of religion Paul Tillich states that ‘Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned’(Tillich 1957, 1), and religion is thus the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern. He observes that the objects of faith might be diverse; thus, ‘If a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate concern… Everything is centered in the only god, the nation – a god who certainly proves to be a demon, but who shows clearly the unconditional character of an ultimate concern’ (Tillich 1957, 2). Thus, according to this definition, nationalism is a religion, just as success or money could be for others the ultimate concern. However, he distinguishes between true faith – faith in the truly ultimate, which is infinite – and idolatrous faith, in which finite realities like nation, wealth and success are elevated to the rank of ultimacy (Tillich 1957, 13). Given this definition, as he explains in Chapter 5, faith is completely compatible with scientific, historical and philosophical truths, and is sustained rather than being contradicted by reason.
If we turn our attention to the historical religions, even a cursory examination of the mainstream varieties shows them to have many internal differences. The place of women in worship is an obvious example. The ordination of women rabbis has been accepted in Progressive and Conservative Judaism, and the ordination of women priests and consecration of women bishops is accepted in most branches of Protestant Christianity, but there is still resistance to recognising full equality for women in both these religions. The struggle for Buddhist nuns to be considered the equal of Buddhist monks is ongoing, and women imams who lead Friday prayers are rare, but they do exist despite opposition from more conservative Muslims. The menstrual taboo is an obstacle to women of childbearing age becoming Zoroastrian priests (mobeds), just as it has become a hotly contested issue in the struggle of Hindu women for access to the Sabarimala temple. Thus in each of these religions, there is an internal split between those supporting gender equality and those who oppose it.
In fact, the attitude to war is also contested terrain. The founders of Jainism, Buddhism and Christianity were opposed to killing human beings for any reason and therefore could be seen as totally opposed to war, although their teachings have not always been implemented by their followers. From very early times, there have been Christians who were ready to sacrifice their liberty and even their lives in order to refuse compulsory military service; from the fourth century onwards, however, theological arguments that would allow Christians to participate in a ‘just war’ (in defence of one’s community, not hurting civilians, etc.) began to be put forward (Forest 2005). While conscientious objectors may be a minority in all religions, it would surely be wrong to conclude that the majority are killers or war-mongers.
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is defined both by the content of the faith that is practised and by the manner in which it is practised. It is in many ways a misnomer, since there are, in every single case, basic disagreements about what fundamentalists claiming allegiance to a particular religion regard as ‘fundamental,’ and what others claiming allegiance to that same religion regard as fundamental. Fundamentalists take literally stories that were never intended to be understood in this way, seize on obscure passages and make them central, or even insist on practices that are nowhere to be found in the scriptures of the religion they supposedly follow. Nonetheless, the term has now passed into common usage, and will therefore be used here in its accepted sense. The content of the beliefs held by fundamentalists is not very different from those on the conservative end of the spectrum of mainstream religion; it is the manner in which the faith is practised that really distinguishes fundamentalism from religious conservatism, which is less dogmatic about its beliefs, more open to change.
The object of faith, for fundamentalists, is clearly defined, absolute, and cannot be questioned. In that sense, it provides a stable point of reference in a world which is otherwise changing rapidly, creating all manner of insecurities. This characteristic of fundamentalism has led to its being explained as a response to capitalism, imperialism or modernity: a clinging to certainty in a world where, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, ‘All that is solid melts into air’. Thus Karen Armstrong notes that ‘Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of our modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Buddhism, fundamentalist Sikhism, and even fundamentalist Confucianism’ (Armstrong 2001, 140). As she correctly points out, ‘The western media often give the impression that the embattled and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as “fundamentalism” is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is not the case’ (Armstrong 2001, 140). She also notes that different manifestations of it ‘share certain characteristics… Wherever modernity takes root, a fundamentalist movement is likely to rise up alongside it in conscious reaction. Fundamentalists will often express their discontent with a modern development by overstressing those elements in their tradition that militate against it. They are all – even in the United States – highly critical of democracy and secularism. Because the emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modern culture, fundamentalists tend to emphasise conventional, agrarian gender roles, putting women back into veils and into the home’ (Armstrong 2001, 141).
While she is not uncritical of fundamentalism, Armstrong expresses considerable sympathy with it. She sums up her position like this: ‘These are essentially rebellions against the secularist exclusion of the divine from public life, and a frequently desperate attempt to make spiritual values prevail in the modern world. But the desperation and fear that fuel fundamentalists also tend to distort the religious tradition, and accentuate its more aggressive aspects at the expense of those that preach toleration and reconciliation’ (Armstrong 2001, 142).
This sounds balanced, but is it? So many questions remain unasked, and therefore unanswered. An obvious one is: why should a struggle against capitalism or imperialism require women to be shrouded in veils or sent back to the home? I would have thought that if such struggles are to be successful, they must involve all the oppressed people, including women, to the greatest possible extent, instead of wasting their potential by shackling them to subordinate roles. Furthermore, feminist theologians and philosophers from all religions interpret their faith in a diametrically opposite way, seeing the liberation of women as an essential part of it. So we are not talking about a general response to capitalism, imperialism or modernity. Fundamentalism is a very specific type of response: a reactionary, backward-looking response. Its purpose is not to make spiritual values prevail in the modern world but to provide justification and reinforcement for the domination of those who have traditionally exercised power within a community: men, religious leaders, community elders, and so on. Far from bringing the divine back into public life, it seeks to exclude certain sections of the public from full participation in the divine. It speaks for the oppressors whose power to oppress would be challenged by modernity, not for those who seek universal liberation from oppression.
Thus fundamentalism promotes patriarchy and authoritarianism within a religious community, endorsing punishment, which may involve violence, of women, children, and dissidents who break the rules imposed by community leaders. There are other problems with it too. Rigid and literal belief in religious scriptures or myths often entails denial of the discoveries of science, thus imposing compulsory ignorance. Worse still, the texts central to all religions contain within them contradictions which are in some cases blatant, making it logically impossible to agree with a proposition in one part of a text (or one text) without disagreeing with a proposition in another part (or another text). Mainstream believers acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, that these texts were written by fallible human beings who often had amazing insights but also sometimes got things horribly wrong. However, since fundamentalists cannot question any part of the texts, they have somehow to reconcile these logical contradictions. Thus fundamentalism entails a rejection of science, logic, and reason in general. These characteristics make fundamentalism dangerous, habituating its followers to authoritarianism, irrationality, and in some cases violence, even though these characteristics may not be very visible to others outside the community.
Political and economic fundamentalism
Karen Armstrong and many others subsume the fusion of religion with party politics or state power[1] under religious fundamentalism, but I would like to distinguish between them for two reasons. Firstly, depending on which texts they regard as fundamental, some fundamentalists may actually oppose militarism and participation in state power. For example, Christian fundamentalist sects like the Church of the Brethren and many Seventh Day Adventists are conscientious objectors and reject political violence on principle (Call of Conscience, n.d.; Religious Tolerance n.d.). Similarly, ultra-orthodox Jewish sects like Naturei Karta and the Satmar Hasidim are bitterly opposed to the Zionist state of Israel and support the Palestinian struggle for freedom (Ravitsky n.d.). Even excluding these cases, many fundamentalists do not engage in or endorse political violence, even if they tolerate violence within their families and communities. Secondly, many Zionists, including founders of the state of Israel, have been atheists (Sand 2017), while V.D. Savarkar, a founder of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, and M.A. Jinnah, a founder of Islamic Pakistan, were both atheists (Sen 2010). Thus some fundamentalists are opposed to the fusion of religion with politics, while some atheists use religion in politics.
However, the characteristics of fundamentalism noted above – namely authoritarianism, patriarchy and irrationality – predispose its proponents to accept political violence in the name of religion: violence directed not just at oppressors but at helpless members of their own and other communities. Because they are trying to reverse history and recreate an idealised past, they cannot be as relaxed about their values as their forefathers were; they have to fight against secularism and democracy in every way possible. What does this mean? The most basic definition of secularism is that it advocates a separation between religion and state power or political parties. What happens to politics when it is mixed up with religion can be seen from the violence that has engulfed Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar and many other countries, but a more interesting question is: What happens to religion when it gets mixed up with party politics and state power? In every single case where this has happened, whether we look at Buddhism, Christianity, Islam or Sikhism, a religion which started out progressive and subversive becomes conservative or reactionary, its spirituality drowned out by an extremely worldly and often violent pursuit of political power. If Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu, insisted that the Indian state should be secular, it was as much out of concern for Hinduism as out of concern for the Indian state. What happens in such cases is that a historical religion is merely used as a cover for the worship of a different god: state power.
We therefore come to the paradoxical conclusion that secularism is essential for the preservation of the sacred or divine in both private and public life. Similarly democracy, not in its narrow electoral sense but in the broadest sense of equal respect for all human beings, is the essential basis for any spiritual values worth the name. If fundamentalists genuinely wanted to put spiritual values and the divine back at the centre of modern life, they would be fighting for secularism and democracy, not against them.
The history of slavery, colonialism and capitalism illustrates the destructive consequences of worshipping another god: money, wealth or capital. From the tens of millions of Africans who perished in the slave trade, to the millions who died as the colonies were plundered of their wealth and subjected to man-made famines, to the child labourers whose lives are destroyed in the 21st century, the single-minded pursuit of money-making has inflicted as much violence as the pursuit of state power, and indeed the two are often linked, as in capitalist imperialism. Here too, historical religions often provide a cover for worship of the money-god, as in the case of the Crusades and the civilising mission of European colonialism bringing Christianity to the benighted ‘natives’. More recently, there have been TV evangelists and gurus who have used religiosity as a cover for blatant self-enrichment.
There have indeed been people of faith who fought against imperialism, fascism and capitalist exploitation while at the same time fighting for secularism and democracy, but they have been inspired not by fundamentalism but by liberation theologies. We are then left with the question: Why do so many people choose to fight against oppressive conditions using fundamentalist ideologies which are, in their own way, equally oppressive?
The Flight from Freedom
This was the question taken up by
the psychologist Erich Fromm in his attempt to understand ‘the reasons for the
totalitarian flight from freedom’ (Fromm 1960, x). According to him,
The physiologically conditioned needs are not the only imperative part of man’s nature. There is another part just as compelling, one which is not rooted in bodily processes but in the very essence of the human mode and practice of life; the need to be related to the world outside oneself, the need to avoid aloneness. To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. This relatedness to others is not identical with physical contact. An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “ belonging”. On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent. This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness. The spiritual relatedness to the world can assume many forms: the monk in his cell who believes in God and the political prisoner kept in isolation who feels one with his fellow-fighters are not alone morally. Neither is the English gentleman who wears his dinner jacket in the most exotic surroundings nor the petty bourgeois who, though being deeply isolated from his fellow-men, feels one with his nation or its symbols. The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation. (Fromm 1960, 14–15)
This dread of isolation confronts every child with a dilemma as it grows up. ‘The more the child grows and to the extent to which primary ties are cut off, the more it develops a quest for freedom and independence. But the fate of this quest can only be fully understood if we realize the dialectic quality in this process of growing individuation. This process has two aspects: one is that the child grows stronger physically, emotionally, and mentally… The other aspect of the process of individuation is, growing aloneness’ (Fromm 1960, 23). There are two ways of dealing with this dilemma. One is to give up one’s individuality and overcome the feeling of aloneness by submission to an external authority, and the other is to create new relationships to others and to nature through love and productive work.[2]
This sequence of growing individuation occurs not only in an individual’s development but also in the development of society. The development of capitalism creates a major upheaval in societies which were previously governed by hierarchical but stable social relations. In Europe, for example, ‘The medieval social system was destroyed and with it the stability and relative security it had offered the individual. Now with the beginning of capitalism all classes of society started to move. There ceased to be a fixed place in the economic order which could be considered a natural, an unquestionable one’ (Fromm 1960, 49–50). Insecurity and uncertainty were the fate not only of the lower strata of society as they became proletarianised, but even of capitalists, who could find their wealth wiped out in a crisis. Thus, although people were freed from the earlier bonds of dependence in the old society, they were also ‘freed’ from the social relations which gave them a sense of identity and security.
The upheaval was, if anything, even more painful in the Third World, where capitalism was introduced by colonial domination. A positive solution, as mentioned earlier, would be the creation of relationships of love and solidarity, which unite a person with others (if not with the world, as Fromm suggests), not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, ‘if the economic, social and political conditions, on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty’ (Fromm 1960, 29–30).
Fundamentalism provides precisely this escape from freedom. Its demand for unquestioning acceptance of certain beliefs promises relief from uncertainty, even while it deprives the individual of freedom of conscience and expression. Leaders are appointed (or sometimes self-appointed), with the authority both to define the content of the beliefs and to enforce compliance with them. The violence implicit – or sometimes explicit – in fundamentalist movements stems from the impossibility of banishing doubt altogether, and the necessity, therefore, to suppress it whenever it surfaces. The privileged access of leaders to knowledge of what the deity demands – whether it be a supernatural being or the nation – ensures that this system is based on inequality; and the compulsion to enforce conformity and to control also means that it has to be a clearly bounded community, which sees as outsiders those who do not conform.
Contrasting attitudes to the same story illustrate the difference between a fundamentalist notion of faith and a more open-minded one. Many years ago, when I had a visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex University, I used to stay over with a woman who offered me free space in her flat. She was a Christian fundamentalist, but also such a kind person that I ventured to ask her what I had never asked a fundamentalist before: How can you possibly believe that the story of creation in the Bible is literally true? And she replied, ‘ I have to believe it, because if you start questioning, where do you stop?’ This, it seems to me, reveals a fear of one’s own reason. Having heard that, I didn’t want to upset her by asking the next question on the tip of my tongue: if you believe everything in the Bible, how do you explain the totally opposite portraits of God in it? Is God a genocidal tyrant or a loving parent to all humankind? It seems clear that the only way that fundamentalists can deal with such contradictions is by putting their minds to sleep.
Contrast the way in which Fromm, who
was Jewish, treats a later part of the same story:
One particularly telling representation of the fundamental relation between man and freedom is offered in the biblical myth of man’s expulsion from paradise.
The myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but it puts all emphasis on the sinfulness of this first act of freedom and the suffering resulting from it. Man and woman live in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with each other and with nature. There is peace and no necessity to work; there is no choice, no freedom, no thinking either. Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God’s command, he breaks through the state of harmony with nature of which he is a part without transcending it. From the standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God’s orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of pre-human life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. In the myth the sin in its formal aspect is the acting against God’s command; in its material aspect it is the eating of the tree of knowledge. The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason. (Fromm 1960, 27–28)
Fromm is talking about the church’s interpretation of an ancient myth that long predates the church, but what he points out is that in the story, prior to this act of disobedience, there is no knowledge of evil but no knowledge of good either, and therefore no need for imagination or reasoning to distinguish one from the other; in fact, everything that distinguishes us as humans dates from after this incident: the pain of childbirth, which is a result of the relatively narrow pelvis required for walking on two legs combined with the large brains – and therefore heads – of our babies, as well as work, which certainly entails effort and drudgery, but also opens the door to creativity and scientific discovery. It is also interesting that in the period from which the myth originates the serpent – who persuades the woman (who then persuades the man) to eat the fruit – was seen as a symbol of wisdom, and the woman eats the fruit because she wants to be wise.
Fromm is ambiguous about the age at which a fear of freedom
develops, but Alice Miller, another psychologist, is very clear that the
problem begins with the punishments meted out to children, supposedly ‘for
their own good,’ in order to make them conform and bow down to adult authority.
As she explains,
For their development, children need the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world… When these vital needs are frustrated and children are instead abused for the sake of adults’ needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated, neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired… Later… their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide)…
People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be – both in their youth and adulthood – intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel the need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves but not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than to respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. (Miller 1990, 167–170)
The implication is that children who were treated with love and respect will instinctively treat others in the same way when they grow up, and there is almost certainly an element of truth in this. Yet it is best not to leave this to chance, but to specify that not only must children be protected, respected and treated with honesty, they must also be taught to treat others, without exception, in the same way, which is precisely what religious faith, at its best, teaches. One can surmise that children who have been brought up like this would have a strong sense of individual identity, which would not leave a void that can be filled with communal, racist, sexist, nationalist or other toxic identities. Moreover, having had their natural curiosity and critical reasoning respected and encouraged, they will not grow up with the irrationality that is essential to fundamentalism.
Miller observes that some adults who have been abused as children without the intervention of any witness may use their children as scapegoats on whom to avenge their own mistreatment in childhood, and also suggests that whole communities can be used as scapegoats, pointing out that both Hitler and Stalin were severely abused as children (Miller 1990, 50–54, 62–68). She is surely right to emphasize the importance, not only for the children themselves but also for society as a whole, of ensuring that children are loved and taken seriously, and that those who have been abused in childhood should receive psychological therapy: equal respect for all human beings must include equal respect for children, no matter how small. However, Miller’s explanation of political authoritarianism and violence is somewhat reductive and simplistic. Most children go to school after a certain age, and all too often, especially in countries like India, they are subjected to rote-learning and blind obedience, with creativity and critical thinking discouraged or even punished. The abuse of children is linked to the structure of patriarchy, which is equally oppressive towards women and LGBT people. Patriarchy in turn is part of all religious fundamentalisms, which endorse or even encourage violence against religious minorities: antisemitism was endemic in both Germany and Russia. Communalism and fundamentalism can also feed into authoritarian ultra-nationalism where the ‘nation’ is the object of faith, leading to the ‘othering’ of everyone who is ‘different’ (including people with disabilities), and to fascism and totalitarianism. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of families probably fall somewhere between the two extremes, with children neither being treated with consistent love and respect, nor being subjected to violent abuse or neglect. They would therefore grow up to resist oppression in some situations, but possibly also to be oppressors in others.
Thus tackling the problem of the oppression and abuse of children by their parents, although vitally important, cannot succeed on its own. It needs to be linked to a fight against these other forms of oppression, and solidarity with all struggles against them, even if those who engage in these struggles are partially damaged individuals who may in some situations be oppressors too. On their own, Hitler and Stalin would have been, at worst, serial killers. It was their capacity to plug in to social structures of authoritarianism and oppression which enabled them to become genocidal mass murderers, by providing them with millions of active and passive accomplices.
Confronting fundamentalism and religious violence
If this analysis is correct, then atheists like Dawkins and Harris, by assimilating all religious faith to religious fundamentalism, actually assist the agenda of fundamentalists by supporting their claim to be the authentic representatives of their religion. In the 21st century, with anti-Muslim bigotry proliferating in so many countries, it is especially reprehensible that they confuse ‘Islam and Islamism’, thereby denying ‘some of the Muslim traditions’ greatest values – mercy, compassion, peace, tolerance, study, creativity, openness’ (Bennoune 2013, 9). It is equally important to distinguish between Hinduism and Hindutva, Judaism and Zionism, and so on. Some religions like Buddhism and Christianity have no name for the toxic political versions of them, but it is imperative to recognise that in all such cases, the politics that are being advocated belong to the extreme right. Therefore the sympathy for fundamentalism displayed by Karen Armstrong is misplaced, as is the tendency of multiculturalists to portray religious communities as though they constitute monolithic blocs rather than being internally riven by contradictions. If we are opposing imperialism or a repressive state and a fundamentalist political movement is doing the same, it may be tempting to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but that would be a disastrous mistake. That was what most communist opponents of the Shah in Iran thought about Khomeini, and they ended up getting slaughtered by the latter. There are some cases where the enemy of our enemy is equally our enemy, and we have to fight on both fronts.
But how does one fight fundamentalism? This is a truly baffling question, because fundamentalist beliefs are not based on reason, and therefore rational arguments alone cannot convince a fundamentalist that he or she is wrong. The only foolproof way to tackle fundamentalism it to attack the psychological problem at its root: initially by creating an emotional connection with the fundamentalist, and more durably by creating communities of love in which people can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of their selves: ‘not love as the dissolution of the self in another person, not love as the possession of another person, but love as spontaneous affirmation of others, as the union of the self with others on the basis of the preservation of the individual self. The dynamic quality of love lies in this very polarity: that it springs from the need of overcoming separateness, that it leads to oneness – and yet that individuality is not eliminated’ (Fromm 1960, 225).
These would be real communities, consisting of people who know and care for one another. While some may be restricted to people who share a certain characteristic, friendship groups can and should be open to people of different ethnicities, religions, nationalities, abilities, sexual orientations, etc., because spontaneous affirmation of others is incompatible with choosing one’s friends on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, caste or other particular characteristics. Each person could belong to multiple communities, which would therefore overlap, creating the possibility of their coming together in the face of a threat to all of them. They would also be communities where adults encourage the natural spontaneity of children, reinforce their originality rather than demanding their conformity, patiently answer their endless questions instead of forcing them to accept the authority of parents, teachers or other adults unquestioningly.
If we can build such communities and reach out to those who are contemplating their freedom somewhat fearfully, if we can convince them that they are not alone in an insecure and terrifying universe, and that they need not cede their individuality in order to be loved and accepted, fundamentalism, and the political violence that often accompanies it, might begin to wither away.
(This paper started as a presentation on ‘Religious Fundamentalism’ at a conference on ‘Religion’ in the Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue, Colombo, on 12–13 March 2009, which was published in Dialogue XXXV and XXXVI, 2008–2009, pp.46–58. I then developed it into this paper on ‘Religion, Fundamentalism and Violence,’ which was published in the Indian Journal of Secularism Vol.22, No.3, 2018, pp.13–29.)
Notes
[1] It is important to clarify at this point that it is impossible to separate religion from politics in a general sense. Politics, especially if we accept the feminist slogan that ‘the personal is political,’ pervades our whole lives, and so does faith, in Paul Tillich’s sense of ‘ultimate concern’; there is no way we can separate one from the other. But party politics and state power can, and should, be separated from organised religion.
[2] Too many people fail to distinguish between individualism – an ideology that valorises the pursuit of self-interest – and individuality, the unique identity of each individual. Criminal justice depends critically on the recognition of individuality: the individual who commits a crime is held accountable for it and punished. In the absence of this recognition, the barbaric doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment holds sway, with innocent people from the same community as the perpetrator of the crime being ‘punished’ for a crime they never committed.
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