Fundamentalists: ‘Bulls in the china shop of rational human beings’
By Don Michael

Don Michael is opinion page editor at the Northwest Arkansas Times. This editorial is reprinted from the Arkansas Times’ edition of Nov. 15, 2001.

Religious fundamentalism quickly became a key element in the discussion of religion and violence Monday at an interfaith seminar hosted by the Middle East Studies Center at the University of Arkansas. The tendency of some followers to reduce life to a dogmatic semblance of the world’s major religions and reduce others to enemy status has unquestionably served as a stumbling block to peaceful faith relations.

The six diverse scholars who headed up the panel discussion Monday provided the best definitions of fundamentalism and fundamentalists I’ve ever heard. The one that took the cake, however, had to be Muslim and Howard University professor Sulayman Nyang’s side-splitting assertion that fundamentalists are “bulls in the china shop of rational human beings.”

Nyang had deeper insights to support his claim: Fundamentalists — be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu — are totalitarian, believing their brand of faith and world view is the one that must prevail, and they combine this with fanaticism and an “exploitation of metaphysical reality.” That is, they lack the humble capacity to acknowledge they are not gods and cannot thrust meaning and decisions onto the supreme being they worship.

He also termed fundamentalism a fragile paper that covers a wall riddled with cracks, and said the ethic of democracy is the best weapon against such delusions, because it allows people to question the nature of the wall and expose the cracks in logic that exist there.

Michael Sells, a Quaker and professor of comparative religion at Haverford College, also touched on a profound characteristic of fundamentalism: The reduction of human beings into a single identity. This was later discussed as transforming the world into a one-denominational place.

And Vince Cornell, the director to the UA’s Middle East Studies Center, pointed out what those outside of fundamentalist circles know well: Fundamentalism is theologically unsupported in every faith tradition, and was denounced by the founders of most of the world’s religions. It reduces people and all of life to the lowest common denominator, and then works to eliminate all else and all others unwilling to subscribe to the simplistic doctrines it establishes.

Tom Ehrich, an Episcopalian minister who writes for Religion News Service, explored Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in a recent commentary. Through the continual learning of Islamic fundamentalism, Ehrich says Christians are presented with a mirror image of fundamentalists in their own faith, especially in regard to how both view the Quran and the Bible and their constant attempts to bring government and society into compliance with their interpretation of those books.

Ehrich writes that both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism are built on the same pillars: “…a book, a worldview shaped and bound by that book, a distrust of reality that doesn’t fit within the book, a desire to have the book answer all questions, preferably for all people, and a hostile attitude, verging on contempt, for others.”

If the holy books, which are perfectly admirable in their own rights, are taken too far, Ehrich says they “draw (people) deep within fearful confines where modernity is feared, other-ness is feared, knowledge is feared and diversity is feared.”

Many westerners mock the Taliban’s puritanical rules on forbidding music and television and requiring modest dress, as well as the nature of classrooms in Afghanistan, where young boys have been forced to read the Quran and only the Quran and to obsessively recite prayers. But how far is it from those in the United States who wish to force prayer on children in schools, ban books they dislike from shelves, control the content on television and deem rock music the work of the Devil?

“The passion of Christian fundamentalists,” Ehrich continues, “to take control of government, to ‘cleanse’ American institutions, to restore some former era’s simplicity and values and to withdraw tolerance of certain ways of living doesn’t sound remarkably different from the drive of Islamic fundamentalists to overthrow moderate regimes.”

In other words, both Muslim fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists want a return to the past. They long to turn back the clock on social evolution, scientific knowledge and advances in human rights, like the freedom to think and live as one wishes without the fear of reprisal. And they detest questions that lift the paper veil to expose the cracks in their orthodox teachings, because one crack, one flaw, one unanswered question threatens the validity of the world they have concocted for themselves.

Fundamentalists scorn historical analysis of their faiths because it weakens the blindly accepted truths they are afraid to scrutinize, and they are hesitant, suspicious and frightful of building bridges between themselves and those of other religions. Finding out someone who follows a different teaching or ascribes to another philosophy might be a good person with a good heart is a troubling prospect indeed. It jeopardizes the fundamental theory that everything about their beliefs is good and everything about all others is bad.

It is not only the inclination of Fundamentalists to reduce the world to a one-dimensional“absolute truth” that is worrisome. Rather, it is the arrogant assumption that they alone can know this truth, this all-powerful reality, this God they simultaneously claim goes far beyond the conceptions of the fragile human mind.

The reduction of this omnipotent God to a series of exclusive words, catch-phrases and recitations is perhaps the biggest challenge facing modern religious thought, and the biggest hindrance to peace between faiths world-wide.

April 2002