The Christianist madrassah
It is recognised by everyone too intelligent to watch Fox News that Muslim fundamentalism is a response to poverty, unemployment and general social misery. If that is so, what then is the cause of Christian fundamentalism in the USA?
The Bush Administration used to complain about the madrassahs or Koran schools, where the next generation of Muslims are having their heads filled with a primitive scriptural literalism, fanatical piety and a hatred of liberal secular values. The West’s calls to suppress such institutions would be much more convincing if accompanied by a similar suppression of American religious schools and colleges, where the next generation of Christians are having their heads filled with a primitive scriptural literalism, fanatical piety and a hatred of liberal secular values.
The same applies to right-wing broadcasting. If we demand that the Pakistanis reform the madrassahs so as to stop them teaching children to hate the West, do the Pakistanis get to demand that the US reform its hate radio so as to prevent it teaching impressionable youngsters to hate – well, almost everybody? And the same goes for Christianist home-schooling.
Now, the growth in popularity of the madrassahs is related to the growth in popularity of the mosque; and that in turn is largely a result of the death of Arab socialism and the dismantling of the welfare states under IMF pressure. It is the mosques that have stepped in to fill the breach. Muslims must give 2.5% of their income in alms – which go to the poor and so are not at all the same thing as Christians passing the plate to finance the running of their own church; and the oil states bankroll charitable foundations in the poor Muslim countries to do good works that somehow never get covered in Western media. As Andrew Undershaft says in Shaw’s ‘Major Barbara’, it is easy to preach to the starving with the scriptures in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. If the mosque leadership is Salafist, then yes, these welfare recipients will indeed be exposed to jihadi teaching. Perhaps this is why the Republicans are so keen on their own ‘faith-based initiatives’; that is, outsourcing American welfare provision to the fundamentalist churches to create a religious patronage machine.
The expansion of the Christian right is driven, not by religiosity but by economic despair: by the flight of manufacturing, by government neglect, by soulless exurbs, by isolation. What people want is a sense of purpose, an assurance of love and protection, a world of magic in which God has a plan for their lives and intervenes every day, and an excuse to exult in catastrophe and apocalyptic violence. Their rage against Evolution, it has been said, is due to their fear of being dumped back into a depressing reality. This economic and social alienation is almost exactly how intelligent observers explain the rise of jihadism. It is early days yet, but the dynamics will be the same, the recruitment of the poor and the alienated to be Christianist terrorists. Watch this space.
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