I’ve been trying to figure out why there has been such an upsurge in religious extremism over the last several years. While there have been many horrific world events occurring that might stimulate extremism, world events don’t look much worse today than they did any time in the 20th century, just different content.
So what is behind religion-driven extremism?
The fall of communism changed the world in many ways, but there are two aspects that directly affected religious fundamentalists; the devil incarnate disappeared, and the end of the world wasn’t going to occur in their lifetimes.
Since WW II the ‘free world’ knew that it was in a struggle with the devil himself as represented by communism. It was a battle of good-vs-evil. A war against the ‘godless commies’. Oh, there were plenty of other evils in the world, but we knew that the focus had to be fighting communism.
Anyone born after 1950 grew up knowing that the world was going to be turned into a blackened clinker by nuclear holocaust, and it was just a matter of time till armegeddon was upon us. The fulfillment of prophesy, in our lifetime!
With the fall of the Berlin wall, fundamentalism lost its’ best ally, communism. They now had the problem of coming up with a new Satan and the timing of the ‘second coming’ was in doubt.
If anything I’ve said is vaguely accurate, is the current wave of strident fundamentalism the actions of those trying to re-build a comfortable ‘knowing’ of who is the devil? Who or what best personifies all that is evil in today’s world? Is the heightened interest in the prophesies of Revelations the search for proof that ‘the end is near’?
Is any of this plausible or am I just suffering indigestion?
It could be either or both. Remember, there were all sorts of lesser devils for both christian and muslim religions. They were fighting each other and secularism just as they are today, but in general, communism was the big devil. Bin Laden liked us well enough till Russia was removed from Afghanistan and the Taliban was installed.
The programmes contention was that certain right-wing Americans and radical Islamists used Soviet Russia as a means of focussing the public’s attention against an ‘invasive evil’. Once this threat disappeared (with both sides taking the credit), to stop society degenerating into non-idealistic consumerists, they needed to find a new focus. So they turned on each other.
I wonder if the popularity of the ‘left behind’ series of books was in part due to the disappointment that the world wasn’t going to end anytime soon? Christian fundamentalists no longer have to read Revelations, it is imaginatively laid out in detail in this collection of fiction.
