Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 24, 1993 TAG: 9304240085
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GEORGE W. CORNELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
It has shocked modern secular states, overturned prior analyses and sent splintering tremors through societies around the Earth, according to an international team of experts.
They say the unforeseen, religion-linked turmoil seems most everywhere - in biblical "inerrancy" and Operation Rescue crusades in this country, Christian violence in Ireland, West Bank Jewish expansionism, Buddhist militancy in Sri Lanka, Christian-Muslim battling in ex-communist states, Muslim absolutisms in Iran and Sudan and Hindu rampages in India.
"We have hurricane-force winds of the spirit, blowing in unpredictable places," says the Rev. Martin E. Marty, noted church historian and editor of a massive, multivolume examination of the rash of modern fundamentalisms.
"No one ever foresaw this a few years ago," he added in an interview. "It inevitably will take down a lot of things in its path."
Although the study doesn't deal with the Branch Davidians who died in a fire at their compound outside Waco, Texas, they are among the many sometimes fanatic fundamentalisms current in the world.
Marty of the University of Chicago and historian-research associate R. Scott Appleby are directing a monumental fundamentalism project sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
With more than 100 scholars of various specialties contributing to the undertaking, three large volumes so far have been issued by the University of Chicago Press, with three more due in the next 18 months.
"Fighting back" is what the various fundamentalisms are described as doing to resist the overwhelming, modern tide of secularizing influences seen as threatening ethnic-religious identities and beliefs.
"Traditional cultures, with values based in religious teachings, are finding that those values are undermined by the push to modernize societies according to the `Western' model," Appleby said.
"It's not simply a revival of religion that was dead and is now coming back. Fundamentalists see it as a crisis in which normal procedure must be suspended and they must fight back or their tradition will be lost."
He said those behind some of the movements enlist religion as "a very vital and rich resource for mobilizing people," recognizing it as useful "for getting political goodies" and claiming "God's behind it."
However, motivations and methods of the various fundamentalisms differ widely. While some are seen as exploiting religion for power, most are considered committed to religion, yet distortingly narrowing it to defend it.
"We underestimated the attachment people have to religion," Marty said. "When you need an explanation for what's going wrong, or need a motivation for what you hope goes right, nothing beats calling your cause God's cause."
Not long ago, he said, the world was regarded as moving into ever more inclusive unity, characterized by such terms as "global village," "interfaith," "ecumenical" and "racial integration."
"Every image was toward the center," he added. "Now it's just the opposite. It's out toward the margins, the edges. In that chaos, fundamentalists are more zealous and more efficient organizers than others.
"You don't go to the barricades ready to die unless you're sure God is counting on you. They're people who can't tolerate ambiguity, paradox or compromise, that you win some, lose some and God takes care of himself.
"Fundamentalists say the Great Satan, the devil, anti-religion and the secular humanists will simply overwhelm us and will overwhelm all of God's purposes unless we become God's instruments."
The industrialized West "unwittingly had thought the rest of the world eventually would think the way we thought and that religion would go away or turn very moderate" but just the reverse has happened.
"We lived off the enlightenment and thought everything would be reasonable and rational and that our investments in science would pay off," but events have shattered that vision, he said.
"Now the West is uncertain. All kinds of forces are filling the vacuum . . . . Everyone started going into their own cause, women, gays, left, right, Hispanic-American, Native-American, Asian-American, pro-choice, pro-life. Everybody gets hyphenated.
"Here, not many get killed, but they hate each other. The lucky thing about America is we live in such a mixed up pattern. In the rest of the world, groups are mostly on one side of the hill or the other. It's not hard to see who to shoot.
"Here, you don't know where to shoot. Shoot a feminist, it might be my wife. Shoot a Hispanic, it might be my foster daughter. Shoot a Jew, it might be my colleague. Shoot a gay, it might be a best friend." Outside the West, "the rest of the world never made the move to our style of rationality" and church-state separation. "Muslims didn't. Buddhists, Sikhs and Hindus didn't."
In many cases, the antagonisms surfaced dramatically with the collapse of the communist bloc and lifting of repressive controls on dismembered states, unleashing latent ethnic-religious friction and conflicts.
Marty, 65, author of about 40 books on religion, also is working on the last two volumes of a four-volume opus, "Modern American Religion." He said the fundamentalism project seeks to inform people and spur the media and government intelligence to recognize the potency of religion in world affairs.
by CNB