Abstract
Drawing on sources from across the sociology of religion, this article argues that processes associated with modernisation have facilitated the emergence of fundamentalist movements by transforming the religious field. First, an increase in certain forms of reflexivity has disrupted the close fit between the field and the disposition of individuals, causing them to look for new narratives that can give authenticity to their lives. Second, in every religion there exists to some extent a plurality of sites of authority, but the intensification of this plurality has resulted in the emergence of new strategies in the religious field and the formation of new social organisations. Third, the failure of national institutions to provide economic and social certainties and security has made these new organisations attractive to individuals seeking a source of social and symbolic order.
Introduction
Perhaps of all objects of contemporary social science, religious fundamentalism has the greatest need for reflexivity among those attempting unprejudiced scholarship; any sentence containing the word ‘fundamentalism’ functions strongly as what the philosopher JL Austin (1962) termed a performative speech act – utterances that enact certain effects in the social realm. Fundamentalism denotes – but is also a powerful social strategy by which the speaker can enact – categorisation, exclusion and denunciation. Even social scientists have been complicit in this process, treating ‘fundamentalism’ as a curse word. I will begin this essay, therefore, with an attempt to coin a definition of fundamentalism more analytically sound than simply ‘a protest against modernity’. The relation between fundamentalism and modernity will yield sociological insight rather than a re-iteration of the assumptions of the popular view only to the extent that we can avoid tautology.
Inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and drawing on a wide range of studies from across the sociology of religion, I will contend that three factors associated with modernisation have permitted the emergence of fundamentalist organisations: the necessity of the re-invention of tradition within the religious field, the intensification of the plurality of authority in modern public religions, and the inability of key national institutions to provide economic and social certainties and security. A fundamentalist rhetoric of protesting against modernisation becomes possible – along with many others, including a pick-and-mix religious identity or secularisation – as a strategy for religious agents as a result of these changes, which fracture the established hegemonic orthodoxies of the religious and national fields and permit new ways of acting and thinking. It is chosen as a strategy above competitors such as Marxism or nationalism, I will argue, due to the effective way it controls feelings of chaos through its intensive regulation of the body and focus on authoritative texts.
Sociology should not simply accept the rhetoric adopted by the fundamentalist or the politician of a protest against modernity by traditionalist religion. Fundamentalism can be better understood as itself a response to certain modern processes that destabilise the relation between the elite and the dominated in the national and religious fields.
Analysing fundamentalism
I wish to define fundamentalism as a social organisation structured such that its members are provided with a totalising system of regulative beliefs and practices replete with thick social and symbolic boundaries between different forms of subjectivity. These boundaries are legitimated solely through reference to a set of sacred texts and a religious tradition; the interpretation of both texts and tradition are conducted by individuals believed to be empowered with religious authority. This definition draws attention to the institutional and cultural aspects of fundamentalism, rather than their political opposition. The advantage of such an approach is that one can then consider why the re-working of cultural boundaries, as enacted by fundamentalists, becomes a national problematic worthy of social debate, academic study and legislation – even when the fundamentalist groups themselves favour the nation-state (see Lehmann and Siebzehner, 2006: 137; Ramet, 2005).
It is certainly not my intention to imply that all fundamentalisms are the same. Each fundamentalism is decisively marked by peculiarities of its religious tradition and its current position in the modern world. To offer some examples: the particular significance of the relation between religion and state in Islam means that Islamic fundamentalist organisations are inflected by the nature of the accommodation made by their state of origin (Gerges, 2005). The Catholic tradition of cosmopolitanism and avoidance of sectarianism have inhibited the development of fundamentalism to a certain degree and resulted in the production of less cultural dissonance where it does arise, whereas Protestant fundamentalism has been bequeathed a tradition of popular asceticism and sectarianism by its Reforming ancestors (Lehmann, 2003). Jewish fundamentalisms have a tendency towards an ‘exquisitely passive yeshiva attitude’ due to the monastic discipline inculcated by the yeshiva system (Heilman, 1994: 181); because of the saliency of the messianic theme in Judaism, each Jewish fundamentalism seems to require a theology of historical time. Nonetheless, an examination of the literature on fundamentalist groups in these three religions yields a number of points of commonality, permitting a sociological description of some of the key modern factors that permit their emergence. Furthermore, in examining the emergence of a fundamentalist area across different religions through a cross-cultural perspective, this essay can work against the tendency, noted above, of treating fundamentalism as synonymous with global Islam.
Theoretical tools
The sociology of religion is an academic field in which theoretical eclecticism is widespread, and this is definitely to our benefit. My aim in this piece is to consider fundamentalism through a theoretical approach inspired by Bourdieu, though this is not intended to exclude any other approach to the same material. Though Max Weber’s sociology of religion was foundational to his thinking, religion is not a major theme in Bourdieu’s mature thought. Nonetheless, his ideas provide a powerful heuristic for thinking about modernisation and changing religious practice, as Engler (2003) has also noted.
Bourdieu (1990) describes a ‘field’ as a space of play within which actors compete according to a set of tacit rules for the symbolic, social and material resources valued by that social environment. These resources are termed ‘capital’. In learning how to compete actors are oriented by a subjective feel for the objective material and institutional structure of the field, as instilled by their early socialisation – the word ‘habitus’ is adopted to refer to these embodied dispositions that work to creatively generate present behaviour. Bourdieu argues that those actors who dominate in a field through their possession of large quantities of the capital will attempt to maintain the existing rules. Their means of achieving this is ‘doxa’, a hegemonic set of cultural categories which structure perception and experience. Doxa establishes and naturalises distinctions between individuals, thus legitimating the present distribution of capital. Those who are dominated in a field may – if they can free themselves from doxa – try to subvert the rules, changing the valuation of forms of capital or instituting new forms of capital.
Thinking with Bourdieu, we can theorise that modernisation is resulting in the fragmentation of the contemporary religious field. Whereas an established priesthood had previously held a monopoly on the legitimate means of salvation, the doxa of the religious field is becoming weak resulting in, inter alia, the formation of sects led by charismatic prophets (cf. Bourdieu, 1991). The religious field, however, is embedded in the wider social environment of the nation-state, a field with ‘a power over all games and over the rules that regulate them’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 99–100), which too is undergoing certain institutional and cultural changes. The result of these disruptions is an alteration in the structure of the national field and also in the relations between fields. I shall argue for, in particular, three major global processes as key forces at work in changing the nature of the religious field and producing an environment that permits the emergence of the form of social organisation I have identified as fundamentalism in Christianity, Islam and Judaism. These three, of course, are an academic abstraction – in practice they form a re-enforcing and refracting lattice. Yet by picking out specific processes, historically attested by academic scholarship, I hope to avoid creating a ‘fetish of modernity’ by theorising a monolithic process (Yack, 1997: 7). Thus, rather than relying on universalising forms of social scientific explanation, this analysis will hopefully contribute to the comprehension of the pattern behind the emergence of fundamentalisms: their extent, their relative popularity, their appearance in a particular place and at a particular time.
Objectification
The first process which has made possible the emergence of fundamentalism as a position within the social field of different religions is the fragmentation of the doxa that maintains the position of different status groups. Since habitus is no longer well adapted to its social environment, actors are brought to a new, self-conscious awareness of their identity. Both the cultural meaning of and emotional attitudes towards religious practices change as new forms of subjectivity become available, resulting in the hybridisation and creation of new forms of practice. One such new form is the intensive attempt to regain an ‘authentic’ form of religious life through involvement with institutions with totalising systems of regulative beliefs and practice, and with thick social and symbolic boundaries. I shall look at Islam, Judaism and Christianity in turn to show that, whilst this de-naturalisation of identity is the foundation for a secularisation process, it is at the same time foundational to a fundamentalist response to the state of the religious and national fields. Both are responses to the same structural conditions, depending on whether actors are brought to depart from, become less invested in, or transform the religious field. These decisions, we can theorise following Bourdieu, are shaped to a large degree by the distribution of various forms of capital owned by particular actors in the context of the structure of the relevant fields.
The process which Eickelman and Piscatori (2004: 43–44) believe to have caused the fragmentation of the ‘mutually beneficial accommodation’ between state and religious elite in Islam is the globalisation of Western-style education. This education breaks the fit between subjective dispositions and objective institutional and material culture to produce in individuals a reflexive sense of their form of subjectivity as but one of a myriad of possible identities, a process they term ‘objectification’ (see Zeghal, 1999 for a detailed study in the case of Egypt). Inserted into their habitus are expectations of future accumulation of economic and political capital – expectations which nation-states frequently do not or are unable to meet, resulting in a lack of national identification (cf. Gellner, 1983: 36–38). Furthermore, the religious practice of their fathers and mothers now seems alien and inauthentic – it is seen through modernised eyes. A large number of individuals, faced with the de-naturalisation of the identity of their predecessors, depart from the religious field to varying degrees in their beliefs, practices and institutional affiliations. Among those whose distribution of capital encourages them to remain in the religious field, there are actors who wish to turn away from the profane world towards an authentic religious life established in the private sphere. Yet for those who see an authentic religious life as achievable only through work for change in the national or supra-national field, an Islamist identity becomes available (Metcalf, 1993; Kepel, 1993: 33–39; Devji, 2005).
In Judaism, Soloveitchik (1994) describes a similar process of objectification. Jewish life in the Shtetl (Yiddish: ‘small town’) communities in Eastern Europe and Russia was governed by tacit dispositions learnt in early childhood and well adapted to the day-to-day social and political environment. With the experiences of migration and acculturation into Western society, Judaism as an ethnicity formed by the strong symbolic boundaries of pariah status was undermined, with the result that religious ritual was alone left as the marker of cultural difference. Once again this was a key moment for secularisation and the creation of ‘modernised’ forms of Jewish religious identity, such as Reform Judaism. For those whose social trajectory encouraged them to attempt to preserve and remain within the religious field, however, sacred texts, seen as remaining ‘unblighted by the contagion of their surroundings’, became the moorings of religious identity (209). These texts were reclaimed by a generation, frequently with a Western education or lifestyle, who felt that their parents had brought them up to be too assimilated to secular culture. Life in yeshiva, monastic institutions requiring the full-time learning of Talmudic commentaries on the bible, became dominant as the ideal to which religious Jews aspired – both for the Hasidic quiescent fundamentalists and for the religious nationalist movements inspired by Rav Kook (Don-Yehiya, 1994). Soloveitchik argues that these changes have meant that ‘a traditional society has been transformed into an orthodox one, and religious conduct is less the product of social custom than of conscious, reflective behaviour’ based on a plethora of new legal texts detailing correct religious practice (1994: 201). With objectification has come a spiral of ever-increasing stringency in observance and the capture by ultra-orthodox Jews of a hegemonic position in the religious field due to the huge stockpiles of textual capital they have gained in yeshiva (Selengut, 1994: 259).
Christian fundamentalism, too, appears to be in part a result of the breakdown of doxa and the assumption of a more self-conscious identity by actors in the religious field. Coreno (2002) provides substantial evidence from a large-scale quantitative survey to support the hypothesis that the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States is a concerted answer to the questions posed to social classes during periods of cultural renegotiation. Similarly, based on fieldwork experience, Ammerman (1994), Withnow and Lawson (1994) and Riesebrodt (1999) have proposed that both the original emergence of a call to return to the fundamentals of the Christian faith in the late 19th century and the contemporary rise of the religious right since the 1960s are responses to the breakdown of social and symbolic boundaries associated with migration, economic upheaval, bureaucratisation and the rapid increase in the level of education between generations. Whereas for some this social turmoil undermines their ties and place in the religious field, resulting in a secularisation process, for others it necessitates the reinvention of their religious identity to enact an effective response. The family and the church are utilised as spaces of purity in an otherwise corrupt world: ‘the rhetoric of patriarchy and submission serves primarily as a normative counterweight to the individualistic and hedonistic ways of the larger society’ (Ammerman, 1994: 157; see also Ammerman, 2010). Objectification also emerges as an important factor, among others, in the description by Birman (2006) and Meyer (2006) of the growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America and Africa, particularly among those members of the working class a degree up from the lumpenproletariat, who find a response to the ambiguities and uncertainties of modernity in an organisation run by modern management techniques and marketing itself as ‘global’ using sophisticated new media.
Intensification of the plurality of religious authority
When religious authority fragments, Bourdieu’s theory predicts that new groups will attempt to capture spiritual capital and achieve domination of the social field (cf. Verter, 2003). It is important to recognise that fundamentalism is not only produced by relations between the religious field and the national field within which it is embedded, but also formed by developments inside the religious field itself. As the rules of the game alter and the number of consecrated authorities increases, new legitimate strategies become available to social actors. The relativism threatened by these multiple authorities can lead to a de-centralisation of religious power and move some actors towards pick-and-mix relations with religious authorities and the less institutional areas of the religious field, as Wood (2007) has demonstrated in his study of the life-course of New Age practitioners. However another response to the multiplication of religious authorities is that of intense loyalty to one of the many sects led by a charismatic leader. Thus this process, which can shift some areas of the religious field towards secularisation, can also lead to the structuring of new institutions and networks of religious leadership and power, including some with a rhetoric of anti-modernism.
Like Soloveitchik, who traces Judaism’s beginnings back to its emergence from the culturally bounded confines of the Shtetl, Stolow (2004, 2006) has proposed a historical model of the rise of Jewish fundamentalism. Yet whereas Soloveitchik places emphasis on the ordinary believer’s need to re-invent the past when confronted by the questions posed by objectification, Stolow focuses on the intensification of the plurality of religious authority. Agudat Israel, an ultra-orthodox group which defines itself through a rhetoric of opposition to any compromise with modernity, has attained a high level of influence due to its presence as a regulatory and consecratory body in this chaotic religious environment of change and possible secularisation. Through its discourse of she’erit yisrael (‘the remnants of Israel’), Agudat Israel establishes new rules for the religious field in which the ultra-orthodox are the keepers of an authentic tradition as handed down to Moses at Sinai. Other Jews, including even some who do not accept the ultra-orthodox way of life, have become subject to Agudat Israel as a broker of authentic religious capital – though, in the face of the increasing plurality of authority, they use these resources as part of their own, more liberal, religious projects (cf. Bourdieu, 1998).
Using the metaphor of a deregulated economic marketplace, Chesnut (2003) describes how competition for members with the rising Protestant Pentecostal groups led the Latin American Catholic Church reluctantly to support grassroots movements of Charismatic Catholicism as part of its supply strategy. These movements were so popular that there are now 70 million members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal worldwide. On the open marketplace of faith, Chesnut believes that fundamentalist strategies attract adherents by their promise of a strong supportive community, personal transformation through conversion followed by an ascetic code of conduct, and the solution to concrete, day-to-day problems. Above all, their focus on the family offers individuals, in particular women, an arena of agency and a measure of security. Lampe (1998), studying the Caribbean, and Chesnut (1997) have both noted that, for social groups who are experiencing psychological anxiety associated with problems of cultural or economic disruption, these rewards are more attractive than the offers made by more mainstream religious affiliations. Whether among the poor or the middle-class, the Pentecostal and Catholic Charismatic promise of healing in mind, body and spirit is strongly appealing to those suffering personal turmoil.
Mandaville (2001, 2007) attributes the rise of both fundamentalist groups and secular/modernist groups in Islam to an increase in centrifugal forces in the Islamic religious field in both Muslim-majority and minority states. In late modernity, he proposes, an Islamic global public sphere emerges due to translocal flows of people, practices, beliefs and cultural artefacts. An example of such flows is ‘imported Imams’, who travel back and forth between Muslim-majority countries and the diaspora (2001: 145). The result of the creation of this global public sphere is the increased permeability of national religious fields; both the boundaries between Islamic and non-Islamic cultural representations and the boundaries between ideas and practices within different Islamic communities become fluid. This produces hybrid cultural forms such as an Islamic discourse on human rights and other types of modern religious practice and belief. The major effect of the intensification of the plurality of authority is that the rules governing access to religious capital undergo renegotiation: for example, CD-Rom collections and internet resources offer individuals the textual resources to make their own decisions rather than following established legal experts, oversupplying the market and thus devaluing traditional forms of textual religious capital (Turner, 2007).
Failure of key national institutions
The final modern process I believe to be essential to an understanding of the rise of fundamentalist movements is the failure of key national institutions to deliver economic and social certainties and stability. The result is the resentment of the status quo which Bourdieu (1990: 111) sees as a prerequisite for the emergence of new social groupings and norms. For there to be transformation of social structure Bourdieu specifies the need both for the breakdown of doxa and for the effervescence of emotive social forces propelling individuals onto new trajectories. Whilst for some the failure of national institutions to deliver on their promises necessitates secular projects for protecting individual or group interest, or for changing the national field, in other cases it makes more readily accepted the exceptionally strong institutional ties of religious institutions, which come with sources of cultural and social capital (Lehmann, 2008).
Meyer (1998) and Maxwell (2006) draw the conclusion that believers are attracted to Pentecostalism because of the agency it gives them: in a personal environment thrown into turmoil by the economic mobility, urbanisation and state failure associated with neo-liberalism and post-colonialism, Pentecostalism offers the embodied self (in prayer or rituals of deliverance), the family and the church community as arenas under personal control. Many of the same factors are identified by Ammerman (1994) and Withnow and Lawson (1994) as contributing to the rise of grassroots Christian organisations among blue-collar workers in the USA. As Martin (2002) notes, the clean living and self-control insisted on by these religious groups produces believers who are ideally adapted to the economic conditions of late modernity by their self-discipline, self-reliance and high aspirations. Furthermore, as traditional cultural relationships tying individuals to the land are disturbed, churches provide ‘reception centres as they arrive in impersonal megacities’ offering a ‘depot’ of social capital which the displaced urbanised newcomer can use to find a place in this new environment (23–24). An example of this is that, even when Pentecostals leave countries with high levels of uncertainty and instability, as is the case with Nigerian middle-class immigrants to Britain, they still seem to require religion to help them retroactively order their lives. This diasporic group focuses on religious purity in a reaction to what is felt to be the corrupt, squalid, crime-ridden, undisciplined society that they have left behind, and on self-reliance and entrepreneurship in a reaction to the ‘“squandering” ethos that has become almost synonymous with Nigerian life’ (Hunt and Lightly, 2001: 119).
For Islamic fundamentalism, there appears to be a similar link with the failure of the nation-state and its institutions to meet the expectations engendered in the habitus of individuals. Tibi (1998) has proposed that the globalisation of the nation-state was not fully successful when it was exported to Muslim-majority countries. Islamic states did not offer the political representation which since Locke has been the source of the authority of the nation-state and did not receive cultural acceptance among Muslims. It was seen as a hulul mustawrada, an imported solution. Furthermore, in recent times, state-sponsored attempts at economic modernisation in Muslim-majority states have sometimes been highly unsuccessful and alienated those associated with the incumbent economic system (Beyer, 1994; Riesebrodt, 1999). Some Muslims in the West have been politically enfranchised and economically successful. For those European Muslims who find themselves excluded economically and culturally, however, transnational identification with the worldwide community of Muslims, the Umma, becomes attractive either in quiescent retreat into the Muslim community or in global politico-religious struggle (Tibi, 2007).
The evolution of the Israeli political party and social movement Shas illustrates clearly how objectification can combine with the failure of the nation-state to ensure economic and social inclusion for all its citizens, resulting in the rise of religious fundamentalism. For the Sephardim (Spanish and North African Jews), ‘the shock of modernity, the shock of migration to Israel – and also, at least in Israel, the shock of powerlessness’ coalesced with entry into universal state education to result in a powerful process of objectification (Lehmann and Siebzehner 2006: 56). The symbolic boundaries comprising Sephardi ethnicity became re-worked as political markers adapted to a religious and national field dominated by Ashkenazim (Jews with a Russian and European heritage) (Lehmann and Siebzehner, 2006: 56). The consequence was the rise of Shas, a highly successful political party and movement for religious renewal that can be part of a self-reflexive project of identity for many kinds of people.
The failure of national institutions to provide economic and social certainties and stability can also affect members of the middle classes. Davidman (1991) describes new female adherents to two Jewish institutions, the Lincoln Square Modern Orthodox congregation and the Bais Chana Chabad seminary, and notes that though economic upheaval was an important factor for neither group, many of them had suffered some kind of social disruption. The Modern Orthodox women were mostly in their thirties, primarily atheists, highly successful in the world of work, and unhappily unmarried. Nearly all had recently suffered some kind of shock or personal tragedy, such as the death of a parent. By contrast, most of the Bais Chana women had recently left secondary education. Many had suffered a dislocated family life in childhood and had a personal history of damaging sexual and social relationships. They had ‘an ongoing sense of being lost’, causing a search for a total self-transformation (99). These individuals, devoid of institutional certainties and stability, look to religious institutions as a source of symbolic boundaries, social ties and personal meaning.
Breaking boundaries
Whereas macro-economic and social processes are subtle and insidious in their slow cracking and reshaping of the social rules of the national field and the cultural doxa through which the elite had previously dominated, both quiescent and active fundamentalists, as unashamed advocates and perpetrators of cultural change, are frequently highly visible. In order to forge the totalising system of regulative beliefs and practices replete with thick social and symbolic boundaries between different forms of subjectivity that constitute fundamentalism, the cultural norms that sustain the status quo must be transgressed. Though itself caused by alterations in the religious and national social fields, fundamentalism thus contributes to the breaking of symbolic conventions and boundaries – in fact it frequently shocks us by its disdain for our established norms. To explore this boundary-breaking feature of contemporary fundamentalism I shall re-visit two of our previous case studies.
Birman (2006) depicts Pentecostalism in Brazil as transgressing the country’s national symbolic conventions in four ways. First, it breaks national religious norms by declaring as demonic Brazil’s idiosyncratic religious culture, which in its combination of Afro-Brazilian cults and Catholicism is an important part of the country’s imagery. Second, it breaks national political conventions by claiming to offer an alternative political programme. Moral panic over endemic crime and drug use is exploited in Pentecostal iconography to argue that the strength of the nuclear family can fight social chaos. Third, it breaks national economic conventions and contests the authority of the social and economic elite by claiming poverty as eradicable through the doctrine of faith as the path to material well-being. Finally, it breaks national territorial conventions through its proud transnationalism, displayed through events such as the ‘Fire of Israel’, in which members of the church gave their bishops envelopes containing a cash donation and written requests for miracles to take with them on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where they were burned in a ceremony screened worldwide. In response to the threat to their cultural hegemony perceived in these activities, the national elite use the legal mechanisms of the state and the forum provided by the media to assail the Pentecostal movement.
Another fundamentalist group that has been documented as contravening national symbolic boundaries is the Israeli political party Shas (Lehmann and Siebzehner, 2006). One instance of this contravention is the dissemination of the party’s ideas via pirate radio stations, which preach the need for Jewish religious renewal in a distinctly Sephardi and low-culture style. Broadcasting from pirate radio stations breaks national legal conventions, and the Israeli political elite has tried in vain to use the state to close down this illegal network, though this has been hampered in particular in recent years by the dependence of the Kadima party on the 12 Shas MKs for the preservation of its coalition. In the broadcasts from the pirate radio stations, national linguistic conventions are also transgressed as, in order to appeal to those ‘mired in the frivolities – or worse – of consumer culture’, the broadcasters have adopted the use of army slang (205). By associating themselves with low culture, the radio-stations alter the symbolic boundaries between popular and erudite, thus setting up an opposition between themselves as streetwise religious Sephardim on the one hand and both the religious and secular establishments as dull Ashkenazim on the other.
Conclusion
Drawing on studies from across the sociology of religion, we have seen how certain processes associated with modernisation have resulted in a transformation in the codes of perception and practice that structure the religious and national fields. Objectification disrupts the close fit between the field and the disposition of individuals, causing them to understand their own identity as a self-reflexive project and to look for new narratives that can give authenticity to their lives. In every religion there exists to some extent a plurality of sites of authority, but the intensification of this plurality has resulted in the emergence of new strategies in the religious field and the formation of new social organisations. The failure of national institutions to provide economic and social certainties and security has made these new organisations attractive to individuals seeking a source of social and symbolic order.
Comprehending the meaning of the fundamentalist rhetoric of protest against modernity, therefore, requires an understanding of the changes that are restructuring the relation between the dominant and the dominated in the national and religious fields. In response to these changes, fundamentalist organisations reconfigure national symbolic boundaries to produce an enclave culture sustained by a cultural opposition between themselves and their particular moral and social environment.