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.Hullabaloo: Evolutionary Theology:
Those of you who follow the religious beat more closely than I do have probably seen this article called The Fundamentalist Agenda, by Davidson Loehr. I may not have religious experiences, but I do have epiphanies and reading this was one.
From 1988 to 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored an interdisciplinary study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. More than 100 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.
The five characteristics are
1) Men rule the roost and make the rules. Women are support staff and for reasons easy to imagine, homosexuality is intolerable.
2) all rules must apply to all people, no pluralism.
3) the rules must be precisely communicated to the next generation
4) "they spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed[...]
5) Fundamentalists deny history in a "radical and idiosyncratic way."
All of this is interesting and it's interesting because it crosses all religions, cultural and regional boundries.
The essay then goes on to relate the above to evolutionary psychology, and to make the case that the above shows that some elements of fundamentalism resonate with everyone because they link to behaviors that were programmed into us in the early days of humans, and that we need to include in our messages those conservative elements while reframing them as the basis for liberal programs. Interesting argument, fascinating study.
