Helpful Insights on Fundamentalism Despite an Anti-Religious Bias

Review of Charles B. Strozier, David M. Terman, and James W. Jones, with Katharine A. Boyd, eds., The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History (Oxford University Press, 2010), xxi, 274 pages, ISBN 978-0-19-5379-66-2,296 pages, Paperback, $19.95.

The authors of this scholarly compilation propose a typology of the “fundamentalist mindset” and delineate it as a universal phenomenon. It reveals itself in different traditions and movements, yet evinces strikingly similar psychological features. Wherever it occurs, it typically entails religious or quasi-religious apocalyptic vision and messianic aspirations; a fanatical belief in a cause; the dehumanization of heretics who do not share it; and a co-dependent relationship between charismatic ideologues and the rank-and-file, who fight the millennial struggle between good and evil.

In various settings, the proclivity to develop a dualistic mind frame is evident particularly among individuals who suffer from weak identity. Often, this is related to Robert Lifton’s traumatic paradigm of the “historical dislocation.” This is a crisis of values that occurs during periods of rapid

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disintegration of traditional ethical and aesthetic norms and conventional meanings. It is “the dark side of modernization in Muslim societies,” argues Farhad Khosrokhavar in his article on psychology of the global jihadists (p. 154). Other contributors show similar processes as a precondition for the upsurge of fundamentalist creeds elsewhere—from Hindu extremism in India to apocalyptic Christianity in America.

David Redles connects “Nazi millennialism” to “psychic fragmentation that occurs when perception of order is destroyed by rapid and radical change,” as it did in post-World War I Germany. It succumbed to a craving “to reconstruct reality into an ordered and meaningful worldview . . . through racial homogeneity” (p. 158). Redles is right on the mark when he says that the German experience was “spiritual and communal,” entailing “a desire for transcendence” (p. 162).

The same longing, “virtually indistinguishable from religious conversion” (p. 161), marked a violently atheistic variant of fundamentalism in Soviet Russia. Just as the Germans felt “constant tension in the air,” in the 1920s, so too—two decades earlier—“it was as if something was in the air hovering over each and every one of us,” remembered Russian poetess Zinaida Gippius. People “rushed about, never understanding why . . . nor knowing what to do with themselves,” and suffering from lack of purpose, exactly as would scores of Germans. A “sense of imminent annihilation” reigned in Germany; in Russia, before Bolshevik fundamentalism erupted in full force, “one could already begin to sense the smell of burning, blood, and iron,” affirmed renowned lyricist Aleksandr Blok.

This volume does not mention the apocalyptic class struggle and overlooks messianic world revolution; perhaps for the editors, the perpetrators were “freedom fighters,” not fundamentalists. In truth, along with two Communist super-

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powers, Russia and China, societies across the globe succumbed to this largest millennial experience in history. It was also the bloodiest—claiming many more victims than the Nazis, yet, unlike them, not held universally as unmitigated evil.

Group paranoia and rage are key attributes of the fundamentalist mindset, as per this volume’s definition (p. 11). Never was this more pronounced than under Stalin. The Communist secular theology obsessed with time-and death-management—equally essential to fundamentalist behavior. Beneath orthodox Marxism, the Russian revolutionaries’ deeper goal lay in the realm of the existential: to find the ultimate answer to a pivotal quandary of being, its transience and finality, to overcome the inevitability of demise. It was to be overpowered via a brilliant paradox—the elimination of the individual, carrier of death, by integrating him into a collective in the imminent social paradise. Communism was a religion of worldwide salvation, to be imposed upon “human material of the capitalist epoch.”

While not limiting fundamentalism to a religious creed, the volume barely differentiates between the two. One of its claims is that as many as 30 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical Christians, and the boundaries of a hundred million people often blur “with what . . . might be called fundamentalists.” The book focuses on “the violent potentials in all forms of fundamentalism,” which at times actualize (pp. 3-4). Cited specifically are the ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews in Israel who, in fact, shun hostilities, refraining even from the non-combat service in the military—ironically, for religious reasons. Nonetheless, as a red thread in this volume, religions are denounced for creating “a culture of violence out of which terrorism and genocide can easily emerge” (p. 97). The charge accompanies a familiar Marxist rant against religion as a coercive gadget in the hands of the “ruling class” (p. 119).

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Beyond trivial religion-bashing, the assault aims at the essence of faith. God is analyzed while sitting “on his mighty throne with a smirk of paranoid certitude…” (p. 114). The Book of Revelation is designated as “dangerous and ugly” (p. 119).

Analogous declarations justified public burning of masterpieces that did not fit the totalitarian worldview of the Nazis. The Communists declared it a crime to read books that undermined their secular fundamentalism. In an ironic twist, the reader may consider patently offensive negation of faith an attribute of a fundamentalist mindset. Belief then gets indicted on charges graver than the good-old “opium for the people”—as the cause for global extremism. One extenuating circumstance is that Gott Mit Uns on the Wehrmacht belt buckles is not God’s endorsement of Treblinka.

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