Religious Fundamentalism and Social Identity

Peter Herriot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415416764
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724094
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the United States of September 11th, 2001 brought the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism to the world's attention.Sociological research has clearly demonstrated that fundamentalists are primarily reacting against modernity, and believe that they are fighting for the very survival of their faith against the secular enemy. But we understand very little about how and why people join fundamentalist movements and embrace a set of beliefs, values and norms of behaviour which are counter-cultural. This is essentially a question for social psychology, since it involves both social relations and individual selves.

Drawing on a broad theoretical perspective, social identity theory, Peter Herriot addresses two key questions: why do fundamentalists identify themselves as an in-group fighting against various out-groups? And how do the psychological needs for self-esteem and meaning motivate them? Case studies of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, and of the current controversy in the Anglican Church about gay priests and bishops, demonstrate how fruitfully this theory can be applied to fundamentalist conflicts. It also offers psychologically sensible ways of managing such conflicts, rather than treating fundamentalists as an enemy to be defeated.

Religious Fundamentalism and Social Identity is unique in applying social identity theory to fundamentalism, and rare in that it provides psychological (in addition to sociological) analyses of the phenomenon. It is a valuable resource for courses in social psychology which seek to demonstrate the applicability of social psychological theory to the real world.

Chapter 1

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Fundamentalism versus secularism

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Fundamentalism defined

The term fundamentalism ‘refers to a discernible pattern of religious militance by which self-styled “true believers” attempt to arrest the erosion of religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors’.¹ This definition encapsulates the conclusions of the most broad-ranging research project yet conducted on the nature of fundamentalism, the Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chicago.

The investigators established, to their own satisfaction and that of most other scholars, that it is justifiable to refer to fundamentalism as a general category which subsumes a large number of specific religious movements across the world. The term is not used to refer only to the specific Protestant religious movement in America, which gave itself the label fundamentalist in the 1920s. In order to come to such a conclusion, the Chicago investigators needed to confirm that there were features which distinguished these movements from other religious and secular social movements. They concluded that there were five such features, the most important of which is reactivity: hostility to the secular modern world. From this basic feature follow four others: dualism, the tendency to evaluate in starkly binary terms, as good or bad; authority, the willingness to believe and obey the sacred book of the movement and/or its leaders; selectivity, the choice, from the sacred book or the movement's tradition, of certain beliefs and practices in preference to others; and millennialism, the belief that God will triumph in the end and establish his kingdom on earth. Scholars have differed in the importance which they attach to each of these criteria, but all or most feature in the majority of their definitions.

Some fundamentalist movements are overwhelmingly religious in orientation, but in others the religious element is strongly associated with nationalist and/or ethnic features. For example, Muslim fundamentalist movements are generally strongly pro-Arab and anti-imperialist in tone. It is this latter type of fundamentalist movement which is more likely to engage in violent activity.² Not all fundamentalisms exhibit all of the five definitive features strongly. Of the 18 movements investigated in the research, only 4 demonstrated all five features to a high degree. These were American Protestants, Shi'ite Muslims, and Haredi and Gush Emunim Jews. A further 8 showed four features to a high degree.³ The identity of these four most fundamentalist of the fundamentalisms is not accidental. They are all based upon the three major Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. All three have ancient traditions, considering the patriarch Abraham to have been in some sense a founder of their faith. Likewise, all three are ‘religions of the book’, placing great emphasis upon their holy book as a source of belief and practice. Thus they all provide a clear opportunity to fundamentalists to criticise the apostasy of those who have fallen away from the pure and simple origins of the ancient faith; and to select their favoured beliefs and practices from the holy book, thereby conferring authority upon them.

The central and defining feature of fundamentalism is reactivity against modernism. Modernism is defined as the set of secular values and beliefs derived from modernity (the organisational and technological developments which underpin modern societies). Fundamentalists perceive modernism, and the secular societies which express it, as being hostile to their religion and intent on destroying it: This defence of religion is the sine qua non of fundamentalism; without it, a movement may not properly be termed fundamentalist'.⁴ If fundamentalism is to be construed as a modern reaction against modernism, we would expect fundamentalisms to come into existence after the effects of modernism become apparent.⁵ This does in fact appear to be the case. The first nation to modernise was the USA, and fundamentalism first appeared there (and, indeed, acquired its name) in the 1920s. The state of Israel became a modern secular state in 1945. The most dreadful outcome of rational bureaucratic modernity, the Holocaust, had just occurred. Jewish fundamentalisms started appearing soon afterwards. Islamic fundamentalisms were the last to appear, in the 1960s and 1970s, probably because secular regimes in such Muslim countries as Iran and Egypt had been relatively recently established.

The struggles of fundamentalisms with modernism are initially primarily conducted within, rather than between, societies. The contending parties are initially the fundamentalists and those whom they feel to be their most dangerous foes: religious people who have allowed secular beliefs, values and norms of behaviour (hereafter ‘BVNs’) to corrupt the pure faith - apostates, all of them. Next come other representatives of secularism: for example, the media, liberals of all persuasions and perhaps the state itself. Once again, the evidence by and large supports this implication. Most fundamentalist movements have vented their initial hostility upon liberal adherents of their parent religion. Thus for example, American Protestant fundamentalists initially attacked liberal theology and the reworking of the biblical creation myth to accord with evolutionary science.⁶ Later they attacked societal targets such as the feminist and gay movements.⁷ Militant Islamic fundamentalists initially targeted lukewarm Muslims and nominally Muslim regimes such as Egypt and Iran. More recently they have turned their attention to infidels in general and the Great Satan, America, in particular.⁸

The initial identification of mainstream liberal believers as the main enemy is today reflected throughout the world's religions. Strong fundamentalist movements are to be found, not only in all the major world religions, but also within the different forms or denominations of those religions. For example, all of the Christian denominations, except those which were fundamentalist from the start, have recently been riven by strife largely created by fundamentalist believers. Even the Anglican Church, historically a pillar of tolerance and diversity, is on the brink of schism (see Chapter 5). The fundamentalists are absolutely correct: the basic difference is that more liberal believers do not treat the secular world as their enemy. On the contrary, they see God at work in many of the features of modernity, and happily use the intellectual tools which derive from the Enlightenment in their belief and practice. Indeed, the original coinage of the term ‘fundamentalism’ was the result of liberal Christians using modern methods of textual analysis in their study of the Bible.

Thus the gulf between fundamentalist and liberal believers is indeed immense. It is manifest in the traditional liberal dilemma: do I exercise my liberal tolerance even towards those who do not tolerate me? But most important of all, the basic definitive characteristic of fundamentalisms, that they are a reaction against the secular world, is not shared by the more liberal mainstreams. As I will seek to show, this reactivity is central to any attempt to explain fundamentalism in psychological terms, for it constitutes an opportunity for the ‘us versus them’ dynamic which underpins social conflict.

Thus, historically, fundamentalisms have struggled with the mainstreams of their own religious denominations, and with the immediate secular culture in which they were located. These struggles have been localised in nature throughout most of the twentieth century. However, with the increase in the globalisation of communications and cultures, such struggles have lately become worldwide in their scope. For example, at first glance the internecine struggle of the Anglican Church over the ordination of gays, which constitutes the case study in Chapter 5, is a local religious quarrel. However, even this apparently parochial dispute is in fact global in scale. Fundamentalist African bishops have played a major role, and the fundamentalist side is supported by funds from a wealthy American conservative⁹ and by a powerful American pressure group, the Institute on Research and Democracy. Globalised communications facilitated global politicisation of the issues.

As for my first case study, concerning the leader of the 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta (Chapter 4), the global dimension of that struggle is evident from Osama bin Laden's target, and from President Bush's responsive ‘war on terror’. The very language of the conflict is expressed in apocalyptic cosmic terminology, with the forces of the ‘axis of evil’ being ranged against ‘the Great Satan’. Furthermore, the struggle is being fought out as much in the global media as it is on the ground.

These two very different twenty-first-century cases illustrate the recent increasing globalisation of fundamentalisms. However, the essence of the fundamentalist phenomenon remains the same. It is a reaction against modernism, whether that reaction is conducted on a local or a global stage. The struggle is between ‘strong religion’¹⁰ and modernism, not between different religions.

However, the major opposing theory of religious conflict argues, on the contrary, that such conflicts represent a clash of civilisations.¹¹ Samuel Huntington proposes that globalisation has rendered the world's eight major civilisations more obvious and known to each other. At the same time it has caused individuals to reaffirm their civilisational identities as Sinic, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, Western, Orthodox, Latin American, or African. Civilisations are differentiated by their respective cultures, and the most profound feature of many of these cultures is their religion. Huntington argues that the upsurge in membership of the world's major religions in the last quarter of the twentieth century is evidence of the increasing importance of civilisational identities. He locates recent and current conflicts at the geographical fault lines between civilisations (for example, in the Balkans). Analysing these conflicts in more detail, he concludes that of 28 conflicts between Muslims and others, 19 were between the Muslim and Christian civilisations. He attributes these conflicts to a variety of causal factors, but prime among them he cites the growing hostility of Muslims in general to the West and its secularism.

Thus there are two very different views of the role of religion in conflicts. Huntington perceives religions as a whole as representative of conflicted civilisational cultures. Others¹²,¹³ disagree. First, they argue that Huntington's thesis overemphasises the commonalities within civilisations. They doubt that civilisational cultures are uniform, and that civilisational identities are of particular importance to many of the world's inhabitants. Second, they believe that fundamentalisms, rather than entire religions, are by their very nature conflictual and fuel religious conflicts. In their view, these struggles may be merely institutional (within the religion), they may involve political involvement of a peaceful nature or they may become violent conflicts within or between nation states.

Huntington's thesis, on the other hand, denies the very basis of this argument: that there exist fundamentalist movements in every major religion, which are very different from the mainstream of that religion and deeply hostile to it. This clash, it is argued, is within cultures, rather than between them. It initially takes the form of a struggle within a religion, because the mainstream form of that religion has embraced various elements of modernism, whereas the fundamentalists claim to reject modernism in its entirety. Thus those issues over which within-religion conflicts are fought relate to secular BVNs which the mainstream has incorporated. This is why these battles concern such issues as sexual morality and women's roles. These issues represent some of the important values of modernism regarding the rights of individuals and the recognition of the pluralist nature of modern societies.

Historically, these conflicts have been conducted within religions, but more recently they have also occurred between fundamentalists and non-religious secularists. Thus I return to the basic proposition: that fundamentalisms are reactions against modernism wherever they occur - locally, nationally, or globally. The conflict is between different ideologies, not between civilisations, as Huntington would have it. The fundamentalist worldview is absolutist, both in terms of individual belief and also with respect to society. Many fundamentalists would like everyone to be like them, preferably under theocratic rule. Non-fundamentalists mostly recognise that they live in a pluralist society, and that other people hold different beliefs and values, to which they are entitled.

Who is the enemy?

However, while it is possible to define and describe fundamentalism with a degree of confidence, the same cannot be said for modernism as its enemy. There is some agreement about how secular modernism may be described from a scholarly and analytic perspective.¹⁴ But things become much more difficult when we seek to discover the nature of the fundamentalists' enemy. For there are certain features of modernity, and to a lesser extent of modernism, which fundamentalists embrace wholeheartedly.

First, as already noted (see p. 8), fundamentalists cannot help being intellectual children of their time. They fall, perhaps unawares, into modern modes of thought. For example, they are particularly given to a factual, empirical, historical and literalist frame of mind. This perspective is perhaps also derived from the practical technological bent of many of the more educated fundamentalists. Mohammed Atta was an engineer by training, as were a considerable proportion of the leaders of the American fundamentalist churches.¹⁵ The result is a belief system which refuses to recognise the nature and purpose of myth.¹⁶ Myths are stories which speak to people's deepest spiritual and psychological needs. Instead, some fundamentalists try to apply supposedly scientific criteria of truth to all aspects of their belief, particularly those derived from the holy book. So, for example, American fundamentalists have developed a ‘scientific’ creationism in defence of the account of creation in the book of Genesis.¹⁷ Scientific creationism is a contradiction in terms; it is trying to turn a myth into a historical and scientific account. They also believe in the literal physical resurrection and ascension into heaven of Christ, and expect Him to return to earth in a similar way.¹⁸ Ironically, by espousing a ‘scientific’ approach they have brought down the hostility of many scientists upon themselves, although such opposition only convinces them more strongly that they are right.

Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists, too, are partly modern in their belief systems. Following the example of such modern social movements as communism, they create tightly constructed and internally consistent ideologies based on selective elements of the mainstream faith.¹⁹ The writings of the radical Muslim clerics, Mawdudi and Qutb (see pp. 65–72), are notable for the internal consistency of their turgidly written arguments. As with Christian fundamentalism, once the initial assumptions are granted, the ideology is worked out with a thoroughly modern logic.

A second aspect of modernity which has been embraced by fundamentalists is the marketing emphasis of modern consumerism.²⁰ In America this has been developed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Fundamentalism versus secularism
• 2 Social identity theory
• 3 Psychological evidence
• 4 Mohammed Atta
• 5 Angry Anglicans
• 6 Social identity, Atta and the Anglicans
• 7 The management of fundamentalist conflicts
• Further reading
• Notes
• Index