Reaching for certainty
Richard Swift on the true believer's remedy for modern confusion and doubt.

Letter of the Law
Fundamentalist Christianity is in something of a resurgence worldwide. But, argues George Fisher, it's lost something along the way.

Market mullahs
The faithful of free enterprise say it's just common sense. Tom Walkom on the fundamentalist game-plan in economics.

Eco-apocalyptics
The environmental movement has not escaped the obsessive posturing of the faithful. Brian Tokar reports.

Battle for Buddha
Mark Timm on Thailand's unlikely fundamentalism.

FUNDAMENTALISM - THE FACTS

The sword of God
Tom Barry weighs up the political impact of the new Protestant reformation that is sweeping Central America.

Facing the fire on high
Chris Brazier argues for a spiritual opposition to the fundamentalists.

Mesmerized by faith
The impulse to absolute belief is a powerful one. Jeremiah Creedon explores its dangers and attractions.

Simply... the fundamentals

Fundamentally female?
Women are attempting to recover the female essence in a male-dominated world. Celia Kitzinger thinks this is a blind alley for feminist politics.

I've never really been certain. Oh I've got my convictions all right. But the kind of burning certainty you need if you are to tell others what's best for them has always escaped me. I tend towards seeing the complexity of the problem and wind up balancing the one side with the other.

I also find it difficult to carry on a conversation with someone who is always certain. Everything they say seems to have the weight of Luther's 95 theses nailed to the Wittenberg church door. Disagreement becomes heresy. I often get the sense from such people that if they let their certainty slip even slightly they would be buried by an avalanche of doubt. Fundamentalism is certainty writ large, certainty transformed from personal conviction into an entire system of belief.

This issue on fundamentalism tries to go beyond simply 'rounding up the usual suspects'. The holy roller and the ayatollah are after all pretty easy targets. It is more challenging to shine a light into some of the dark corners of our own house to ferret out our own absolute beliefs.

Tackling a topic like fundamentalism in such an idiosyncratic way leaves one open to having the charge turned on oneself. So I pondered the ways in which I am a fundamentalist myself and NI is tinged with this kind of belief and argument.

Those who know me will undoubtedly concur that my adherence to professional baseball and particularly the fate of the Montreal Expos is tinged with fanaticism. But I am attracted to a more serious form of absolute belief as well, which I think of as 'the politics of absolute refusal'. Here the idea is that we should just overthrow the whole oppressive mess - abandon our jobs, the restrictions of family life, the false gods of state and nation, the millions of oppressive little obligations and deceits that stand in the way of true freedom.

Won't he ever grow up? I can hear you say. Ultimately of course it is impossible to live in this way. Still I think such a sweeping approach has the advantage of allowing one to stand back and honestly examine what matters and what doesn't. Fundamentalisms can be useful as long as you don't surrender to them.

But is the NI with all its naive earnestness fundamentalist? Again yes and no. We certainly tend towards the prescriptive, usually because we are keen to give people some hope and something useful to do rather than just drowning them in negative stories about what's wrong with the world. Sometimes it seems a bit pretentious - ten ways to stop global warming, or to feed the world. We do have a tendency to be a bit 'preachy'.

We don't have a consistent political position that we push, thanks in part to a system of rotating editors who often disagree vigorously. We have our sacred cows - grassroots Third World development (or grassroots almost anything else for that matter), feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism, etc. But it's okay to have firm ground on which to stand provided you are not blind to your own hypocrisies.

I think this is one of the reasons for doing an issue like this. It is not just an exposé of something you don't approve of but also encourages self-criticism. There might just be enough (I wouldn't want to be certain about it) to persuade those who share the NI's perspective that fundamentalism is something that touches all of us - and not just people from rural Alabama or downtown Tehran.

COVER PHOTO: Steve McCurry / Magnum
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