Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth 2

Eric Kaufmann, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? notes that secularism's growth has come mostly at the expense of liberalized versions of traditional faith which tried to accommodate secular thought. Fundamentalism is actually a modern movement, using modern means of thinking about religious "facts," which fights secularism directly. Kaufmann offers a striking metaphor for the ecology of modern secular vs. religion fights:

“Secularism, like DDT, wiped out much of its opposition but also gave rise to new, resistant strains of religion.”

2 comments:

Nate Crimmins said...

Causes me to think about R. Collins and our time in theory camp. Fundamentalism is indeed a modern response to secularism, but I would have seen liberal religious thought as a middle way between over-belief and disbelief. I suppose that is where it began and perhaps fundamentalism, though modern is also a return to an orthodoxy that had been suppressed/abandoned after the success of the liberalized versions of faith. Interesting.

Gruntled said...

There may not be a majority market for the middle way, at least not in its current institutional format.