Intolerance — whether exercised by “Islamic” fundamentalists blowing up the mosques of other sects or by “Christian” activists blowing up abortion clinics — is rapidly becoming a decisive force in domestic politics and foreign policy in nation after nation. ~Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post

Yes, that rash of abortion clinic bombings has been troubling everyone lately, I’m sure.  Never mind that there is one such clinic bombing every fourth leap year, and any number of attacks on mosques and churches alike (though obviously attacks on churches tend to be the more common) every year by Muslims in countries as various as Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan.  Here the relatively exceptional Eric Rudolph will stand in for all of Christianity, while the depressingly commonplace violence of Islamic militants against all and sundry is safely filed under the generic intolerance of everyone who takes religion seriously.  The content and merits of any one religion do not count in this assessment, but all religions will be smeared equally with the crimes of the worst creeds and most unbalanced fanatics.  Notice how this weak parallelism allows Mr. Hoagland to identify Intolerance decisively with generic Religion, of which there are various manifestations (all of them troubling), which he then uses to set up the rest of the unfortunate column (the fight against the “crisis of intolerance”!).

One of these troubling manifestations Mr. Hoagland describes as follows:

The spiraling growth of evangelical Christianity in the United States — as well as in Latin America, China and Africa — reflects the central reality that also helps drive the radicalization of Islam across the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern Caucasus. When people feel threatened by rapid and mystifying change, they turn to the most literal forms of religion for explanations and justifications.

The evangelicals are coming!  Run for your lives!  Now, I am hardly what you would call evangelical-friendly on matters theological and ecclesiological, but I recognise a ridiculous insult against evangelicals when I see it.  Evangelical Christianity presumably does serve social and cultural functions that make it very popular in both late modern and modernising societies (e.g., perhaps its capacity for greater individualistic expressions and practices of faith, perhaps a seemingly more intense emotional religiosity, etc.), but depicting it as refuge for the shell-shocked victims of rapid change hardly does it credit and certainly does not make any attempt at understanding the phenomenon.   

The claim that people turn to religion, much less the “most literal forms” of religion, to cope with rapid change is, at the very best, simplistic.  The social and cultural functions of religious belief will be as varied and complex as the societies that embrace a given belief.  Gone are the days, I hope, of the myth that people embraced mystery religions, and Christianity most of all, in the later empire in large part because their world was crumbling around them.  I suspect this religion-as-flight-response is the sort of thing some sociologists wish were the case (more than a few sociologists not being all together big fans of religious people themselves), as it would provide a fairly easy psychological explanation of why people turn to religion that will fail to account for religious attitudes in periods of rapid change as often as it succeeds. 

Mr. Hoagland has arrived late on the scene if he thinks the debunking of the modernisation-leads-to-secularisation model is news.  For the last 15 years we have seen many kinds of religious fundamentalism (which is, as many have noted, itself a product of modernity) moving arm-in-arm with technical and political modernisation–the fundamentalists are often the modernisers of the moment.  See India and the rise of the BJP as a prime example, or consider Erdogan’s Islamists in the AK Party in Turkey.  The rise of Christian democracy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is hardly an unknown phenomenon, would similarly baffle those wedded to such a self-serving progressive theory.  Perhaps before we get carried away with interfaith conferences our own secularists should acquaint themselves with even the most basic outlines of the religious mind in their own civilisation.  They might also take some time to study the rise of religious movements as something other than a sign of rising “intolerance,” which to the ears of religious people is pejorative and tendentious rhetoric.  Perhaps then they might find that their religious neighbours are at least barely tolerable.