Fundamentalism
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coalition that placed as much emphasis on moral issues as it did on traditional ones such as the economy and foreign policy. Since the end of the Reagan era, the influence of the new Christian right has fluctuated significantly. Reagan’s successor, George Bush Sr, was not ‘one of them’ (until 1980, for instance, he supported abortion) and broke his campaign promise not to put up taxes. This prompted the Christian right to put up its own candidate for the presidency, leading to Pat Robertson’s unsuccessful 1992 bid for the Republican nomination. However, the Christian right received a major boost from the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Not only were a number of members of Bush’s cabinet, including Bush himself and his vice- president, Dick Cheney, ‘born again’ Christians, but a leading evangelical, John Ashcroft, was appointed attorney general. Fundamentalist influence on the Bush administration was clearest in relation to foreign policy, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. This was evident in, among other things, stronger US support for Israel. The importance of Israel for the US evangelical right stems from the belief, sometimes called Christian Zionism, that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 fulfilled the Bible prophecy that the return of Jews to the Holy Land prepared the way for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The peak of support for Christian Zionism nevertheless came after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and was reflected in support for the idea of ‘Greater Israel’ (and the effective abandonment of the two-state solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli problem), an end to condemning Israel for allowing settlements to be built on Palestinian land, and the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Other fundamentalisms Instead of advancing comprehensive programmes of political renewal, other forms of fundamentalism have typically been concerned more narrowly with helping to clarify or redefine national or ethnic identity. In this sense, many fundamentalist movements can be seen as sub-varieties of ethnic nationalism. This has usually occurred in response to the emergence of rival ethnic or religious groups, or to actual or threatened territorial change. In this context, religion can exert a powerful appeal, since it provides a basis for group identity that is supposedly primordial and seemingly unchangeable. The fundamentalism of Ulster Protestants – whose religion gives their national identity, their ‘Britishness’, an ethnic substance – is thus very different from the fundamentalism of US evangelicals, which has little bearing on their ethnicity. Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Buddhist fundamentalism also resemble forms of ethnic mobilization. Hindu fundamentalism Hinduism, theprincipal religionof India, appearsonthesurface toberelatively inhospitable to fundamentalism. It is the clearest example of an ethnic religion, in which an emphasis is placed on custom and social practice rather than formal texts or doctrines. Nevertheless, a fundamentalist movement emerged out of the struggle for Indian independence, achieved in 1947, although this was modest by comparison with the support for the secular Congress Party. However, it has flourished in India since the decline of Congress and the collapse of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in the mid-1980s, a key point in this process coming with the demolition of the Babri Masjid (Mosque) in Ayodhya in 1992. The core goal of fundamentalist Hinduism is to challenge the multicultural, multi-ethnic
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