Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment by Paul Maltby (review)

It took me a while to get the frequent references made by one of the narrators of Mohsin Hamid’s debut novel Moth Smoke (2000) to “fundos.” Eventually, it dawned on me that a “fundo” was a fundamentalist. The novel is set in Pakistan, and the fundos are of the Islamist kind responsible for Daniel Pearl’s 2002 beheading. But this is not the only kind. Nor do fundamentalists hail solely from Muslim countries. What is more—and I will come back to this important distinction later on—in a more general sense, fundamentalism is not limited to religious dogmatism either. Recent geopolitical developments, including the post-Cold War spread of terrorist networks, may have prompted such hasty synonymies and identifications, but a critical look at U. S. culture, religious practices, and at the latter’s bleeding into politics may suggest otherwise.

Paul Maltby’s thoroughly researched and impeccably argued new book goes a long way toward expanding and nuancing the debate around fundamentalism at a time world events and the resounding play they get in the media tend to chalk up “fundo” zealotry, simplistically and oftentimes disingenuously, to Islamism alone. Bringing into focus Christian fundamentalism and its own theocratic aspirations is thus—“toutes proportions gardées,” as the French might add—a timely corrective. Arguably, the maturity and responsibility of a culture are measured by such initiatives and, no less, by how seriously we take them especially when the priorities seem to point in other directions. But even if those priorities are real, “comparative fundamentalisms”—or, with a nod at DeLillo’s White Noise—“comparative fundamentalist studies” is or should be the truer name of inquiries busying themselves with doctrinaire extremism and its attempts to proselytize and shape the life and policies of communities around the world. Any open-minded reader of Maltby’s book would be struck, I think, by thought-provoking parallels and analogies, hence by the usefulness (not to say urgency) of a comparatist approach likely to foreground symmetries and asymmetries across sacred texts, these texts’ readings, and those readings’ encroachments—violent or less so—on civil society, secular institutions, gender relations, freedom of expression, and so forth.

Precisely in this comparative context, the same reader would also have to acknowledge the impact of something that remains endemic to the very cultural space canvassed by Maltby: the “culture of disenchantment,” and, within it, the remarkably anti-fundamentalist counterweight provided by what he calls, broadly but aptly, “postmodern critical theory” (4). True, in the twenty-first century U. S., postmodernism has lost, at least in literary studies, some of its cachet. But Maltby also underscores that, on the one hand, postmodernism, understood as a post-metaphysical, anti-authoritarian, and delegitimizing epistemology and inclusive radical-democratic platform, has been instrumental to the rise of a disenchanted culture inside and outside the academy despite the comparatively small number of postmodern proponents and aficionados—“My impression,” notes Maltby, “is that [U. S.] fundamentalists [which the critic estimates at around 45 million] outnumber the postmoderns by a ratio conceivably as high as 4 or 5 to 1” (23). Largely oriented by postmodern aesthetics, immanentism, and overall irreverence toward ossified values, canons, meanings, and authority—religious and laic, textual and otherwise—this culture’s suspicious attitude, contagious irony, playfulness, experimentalism, language games, bookish allusiveness, amphibological gusto, and selfreflexiveness have supplied, directly and indirectly, a bulwark against the vectors deployed by evangelism in matters of faith, biblical interpretation, lifestyle, and religion’s place in schools, government, and public arena. This resistance has been more pervasive and more active than, say, overtly anti-theocratic undertakings such as Margaret Attwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Maltby is, I think, spot on (and detractors of postmodernism like Eagleton are dead wrong): counterintuitive as it may sound, it is probably time to credit postmodernism—whether what we have in mind is this theory of pastiche, that model of intertextuality, or a particular episode of The Simpsons...