Christian Fundamentalists, Jewish Messianists, and Muslim Supersessionists

Malise Ruthven

A Response to Open Society, Closed Religion. by Guy Stroumsa (Sources, Spring 2021)

On the issue of fundamentalism, I concur with Guy Stroumsa’s view in this excellent, elegant essay: it is a modern phenomenon that tends to emerge when hermeneutical systems fail or are too slow to adapt to social changes. And Stroumsa is surely correct in distinguishing between scripturalist literalism and fundamentalism.

I would however suggest that the issues of interpretation are both epistemological and social. Christian fundamentalists, for example, may resist social changes such as gay or transgender rights. But they also challenge the paradigm shift driven by the mainstreaming of evolutionary theory. Epistemological as well as social concerns appear to be creating alliances that transcend religious boundaries. Today, both Muslim “creationists” in Turkey and American Evangelical parents on high school boards deploy the same arguments challenging the Darwinian consensus. A comparable leapfrogging over religious boundaries is evident in what Stroumsa calls the “fanatical Jewish settlers launching pogroms on their Palestinian neighbors,” part of whose funding, not to say motivation, is helped by Evangelical Protestants who believe that such activity hastens the “return” of Christ. In this context I would suggest that Christian Zionists should be added to the menace to liberal society posed by Jewish “messianic fundamentalists.”

The interesting idea of “cognitive consonance” has ramifications that go far beyond Stroumsa’s essay. He refers to the turnround in Christianity after the conversion of Constantine. Another (arguably more far-reaching) example is the way the early Islamic conquests were (and are still) seen to vindicate the truth of Islam. In this supersessionist theology, Islam supersedes and corrects the putative departure made by Jews and Christians to the correct path of the earlier revelations given to Moses and Jesus. I’ve referred to this perspective—often advanced by Muslim apologists—as the “argument from manifest success.” In essence, this argument states that the “truth of Islam” was proven by virtue of one of the most extensive territorial empires the world has known. The problem, of course, is that during the colonial era the vast majority of Muslim peoples found themselves living under European or Christian rule, directly contradicting the theory. It may be argued that the primary intellectual challenge facing today’s generation of Muslims is to grapple with the realities of a pluralist, post-colonial world order where modern ideas and systems of governance fit uneasily with a supersessionist theology.

One small query: Is it correct to say, as Stroumsa does, that approaches to religion since the Enlightenment tended to view polytheistic or non-theistic religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism as being “free of the lethal connection between religion and violence”? I was instantly reminded of the British suppression of sati (widow-burning) and thuggee (robbing and strangling travelers) during the Raj. Buddhism was seen as peaceful, but were other strands of the Indic religious tradition also seen as such?

Malise Ruthven is the author of Islam in the World, The Divine Supermarket, Fundamentalism the Search for Meaning, and several other books. A former scriptwriter with the BBC World Service, he has taught at universities in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.