Why hasn’t secular modernity snuffed out fundamentalism? Armstrong says it’s because fundamentalism is itself a recent, innovative mode of thought. She begins her story in 1492, the year Christian Spain crushed Europe’s last Muslims, deported or forcibly converted all its Jews and discovered a new world; it was the year, arguably, when modern Western culture was born. In the premodern world, she claims, people had two separate, complementary ways of “thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos.” Myth dealt with timeless truths and meanings–“an ancient form of psychology”–while logic or reason dealt with pragmatic realities; no one fretted over the literal truth of battles with monsters and descents into the underworld. But as scientific rationalism came to dominate, it left a void where meaning used to be. Fundamentalism, then, is a quintessentially modern experiment: a rationalist attempt to reassert myth. Its error, Armstrong says, is to confuse mythos and logos; to “prove,” say, that the Bible’s creation story is scientifically true is to caricature both religion and science.
Despite this smart thesis and 500 years’ worth of great characters–from the sickly Jewish mystic Isaac Luria to the puritanical Ayatollah Khomeini–Armstrong’s numbing boilerplate prose makes “The Battle for God” a slog. But it’s not her fault that her story’s ultimately depressing. In both the Middle East and the United States, fundamentalists are morphing into terrorists, and nowhere do secularists and believers understand each other. “What seems sacred and positive in one camp,” she writes, “seems demonic and deranged in the other.” About all she can recommend is that fundamentalists be more compassionate and secularists “address themselves more empathetically” to the fears at the heart of fundamentalism. Good luck. In this country, at least, any impulse to make nice will have to wait until after November–plenty of time for a holy war, if both sides want it.
