Fundamentalisms
By Gilbert Martinez

My Holy War
by Jonathan Raban
NYRB Collections, 193 pp., $21.95

THE TOWN OF AVE MARIA IS NOT A PLACE most people have heard of. For one thing, it is a town that has yet to be constructed. Ave Maria will be centered around Ave Maria University, a Catholic University that is the brainchild of Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan. As Newsweek recently noted,

Ave Maria is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to spreading his own strict interpretation of Catholicism. Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values…and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives.

To those who have been following the surge in activism by the Christian Right, the construction of such a town is not so surprising. The influence of the Christian Right permeates our entire nation, from political elections and Supreme Court nominations to the first ever five second tape delay of the Supreme Court—including several hours during the uneventful pregame show.

While the Founding Fathers were skeptical of mixing religion with matters of state, the Christian Right has thrived on blurring the boundaries that have traditionally separated church and state.

Jonathan Raban, an Englishman living in Seattle, is no stranger to religion and this shows in My Holy War, a collection of essays written since the September 11th terrorist attacks. Though Raban is an atheist, Raban’s father was an active clergyman who later became ordained. A journey through several Arab countries, which he recounts in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth, provides him with insight into the modern Islamist movement—insight absent from most television pundits.

Written from the perspective of a European, Raban’s narratives provide a detachment from the passions present in the writings of most American writers struggling to balance frustration with current policy while not alienating fellow citizens. The ability to separate himself from American prejudices allows Raban the freedom to pursue insights that are often missing. Rather than repeating the line that terrorists hate “our freedoms,” or trying to respond to such thoughts, Raban shows how it’s resentment toward Western decadence that provides much of the motivation of Islamist terrorists.

Beginning with the influential writings of Sayyid Qutb, Raban details the rise of Western resentment in the Islamist movement, which he sometimes refers to as Qutbism. It is the “rubbish heap of the West” that fuels the disgust of Qutb and his successors. It is this disgust that led Mohammed Atta and other September 11 terrorists to pursue martyrdom in retaliation against an extravagant West stuck in jahiliyyah—the state of godlessness in the world before the arrival of the Prophet Mohammed. In the world of Qutb and his likeminded jihadist, “either Islam will remain or Jayilliyah; Islam cannot agree to a situation which is half-Islam or half-Jahilliya.” And so they battle to purge the world, or at minimum Arabia, of decadence and the moral decay brought by the West.

When one looks at the motivations of some on the Christian Right, one eerily notices a similar cynical view of the United States and the West. The evidence of this can be seen in the demonstrations by Reverand Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas. Phelps and members of his church have been protesting at the funerals of military personnel who have died in the Iraq war. The reason for the protests, they say, is because the deceased troops died because they were protecting a nation that supports gay rights and abortion rights. According to the protesters, people protecting a nation that supports these rights deserve no special treatment.

Phelps and his congregation, clearly, are in the extreme. Yet the basic premise for their actions is shared by many on the Christian Right: an intense dislike for the indulgences of the United States. Resentment toward American excesses has manifested itself in the increasing activism of the Christian Right. Whether it’s teaching creationism or its progeny, Intelligent Design, in classes, putting Ten Commandments monuments in courthouses, refusing to sell contraceptives at pharmacies or creating a new city, Christian fundamentalists are pursuing a fight against what they perceive as the moral decay of the United States.

The desire to purge ideas that are different is not monopolized by religion or the Right. One only has to browse liberal blogs—which contain a large number of self-described atheists—to see a similar sentiment. For many on the Left, the movement they pursue cannot tolerate dissent. Politicians who disagree with them on as little as an issue are ridiculed, reviled and plotted against. The inclination to hold strict fundamentalist views not motivated by religion is not missed by Raban. In his title essay, he describes how his “father had the Gospels” while he “had the bomb”—his strong belief in anti-nuclear proliferation. He “used it daily…to gain converts to [his] brand of millennialism.”

While not necessarily resorting to violence, most people demonstrate a dangerous fundamentalist mentality, whether it’s based on religion or not. The world is becoming more connected, and an increasing number of different views and beliefs are being brought into contact. It is importazznt that we not forget that we’re all susceptible to intolerant fundamentalism.◊

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