The Rise of the Fundamentalists

I have been thinking a lot about the rise we seem to see in militant fundamentalism around the world and several things have occurred to me. One, there are more of us, we live in ever increasing crowds of people. Many folks have no recourse to silence or alone-ness, all of this produces stress and a sense of disorientation for many. Fundamentalism seems to offer a restoration of walls, or definite boundaries, of separateness in those most afflicted with our crowded and hectic world. In setting ourselves aside in a walled environment we reduce the world to manageable proportions once again.

The death of hero's, role models, the seeming unlimited grey areas of morality and ethics again beget an attempt to approximate a time when, and an ethos where, right and wrong, black and white, were the norm and few grey areas exist. The sense that such times may never have really existed in reality seems to fuel an even more pronounced retreat, instead of the opposite. We passionately seek what may only be a fantasy, until that fantasied era of security becomes our reality.

The internet, with its world wide scope and mega-content is viewed as threatening since it offers so many more choices than humanity has ever had to deal with before. If one can dream it, fantasize it, or maybe only dimly glimpse it...one may find it fully fleshed out on the net. One may suggest that we exist in a world of content overload devoid of relabel filters to sort things out. We have, at our finger tips, a literal Pandora's box. Though we may not cognitively realize it, there is as much threat as there is blessing in the offering of unlimited choice.

The rise of terrorism, the daily scenes of death and dying, the awareness of threat within what were previously thought to be safe parameters. We have not yet begun to grasp culturally, at least in the western world, what events like 9/11 have changed in the fundamental understandings of our lives. The world has fundamentally changed, I would suggest, from the threat of terrorism. There is not illusion of safety any more. Especially in America, we are only dimly becoming aware of how much our basic group psychology has changed. Research years hence will give rise to many books on the shift in culture following 9/11 as reflected in our political, sociological, and cultural institutions.

And so we yearn for a time, for a set of rules or ethics, which will restore our sense of balance, of safety, of equilibrium. We no longer want the Jesus who offers "love" for that is too loosey-goosey, we want again the old testament God of rules and laws. Surrounded by the "do's" and decrying the "don'ts" we feel, at least for the moment, safe and secure. There are walls, there's one right over there, God said it and so I believe it, and that wall over there is constructed from that belief. In so doing we become a prisoner of our own desire for stability and we cannot admit any contradicting thought less one wall crack, the crack lead to a collapse, and then all the other walls of our "box of safety" collapse too. That's how it seems to me at least. Fundamentalism is a reaction to a confused and chaotic world that offers little sense of safety and security, and to follow the God who offers and requires love is just too much risk in such an insecure environment.