183 - Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age

Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age
By Bruce B. Lawrence
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1989. 306 pp. $24.95.

Since the Iranian revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the term "fundamentalist," a term fashioned by American Protestantism, has been used to characterize a host of religious movements, Christian and non-Christian alike. We have been told by television commentators, editorial pundits, and, more recently, scholarly commentators, that civil

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peace and international understanding were being undermined, not only by Christian fundamentalist, but by Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, and Hindu fundamentalists, as well. Little serious attention has been given to the anomaly of applying a Protestant Christian term to the perplexing varieties of modern religious revivals. How illuminating can a term coming out of American conservatism be for analyzing religious traditions so vastly different from one another? It seems as if a kind of journalistic ploy has gotten fastened upon us as a serious analytical tool without virtue of significant redefinition. Bruce Lawrence has taken this perplexing anomaly and subjected it to profound and illuminating analysis. He has rendered the term "fundamentalism" a significant interpretive category by giving it careful definition and then applying it to the phenomenon of new religious movements in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

This book falls into two parts. Part I is a careful delineation of modernity and fundamentalism as a revolt against the modern age. Lawrence defines fundamentalism, not simply in terms of its literalistic understandings of the defining scriptures and traditions of a religious community, but also as the revolt of marginalized groups against the hegemony of high-tech civilization. Fundamentalist movements do not emerge, Lawrence argues, among the legally established authorities or power bases of a civilization. The leaders of the power base of a community affirm religious traditions but are open to modernizing interpretations and the resolution of conflict. It is the dispossessed who find in their authoritarian traditions and scriptures a base of action for rejecting the destructive assault of modernity on their religious tradition and community life. This first part of the book is conceptually the most difficult. Lawrence gives a brilliant and detailed analysis of social theory, historiography, literary criticism, and philosophy in defining modernity and fundamentalism. This first section on the context of modernity is of immense value, not only to historians of religion, but to biblical scholars, theologians, and pastors seeking to understand the context in which they minister.

Part II of the book is called "Countertext." It is the investigation of the way in which fundamentalist movements in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are reacting to the impact of high-tech modernity to affirm their own identity and their empowerment. The second part of the book goes far beyond the usual journalistic chit-chat and finger-wagging about the evils of fundamentalist movements. It is a detailed and well-informed analysis of how parts of three major religious communities are struggling to keep their identity and empower their people in face of the destructive rush of modernity. The book provides ways of understanding the continuing modification of these fundamentalist movements as they interact in the arena of modern technical societies. Fundamentalism is not a resuscitation of "the old time religion," despite its efforts to picture itself that way. The fundamentalist revolt is a

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religious movement articulated by its relationship to modernity. Modernity and fundamentalism are not polar opposites; instead they exist in Lawrence's analysis as context and countertext in the unfolding of the human religious story.

Donald G. Dawe
Union Theological Seminary in Virginia
Richmond, Virginia