Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God - A History of Fundamentalism

The Battle for God

Karen Armstrong

Excerpt and notes

July, 2005

[#] indicates page number

Fundamentalism was a term first used by Protestant Christians in the mid-19^th Century [xii]

- stemmed from fear of annihilation

- fight with "selective retrieval" of old texts.

"They may reject … rationalism but they cannot escape it. Western civilization has changed the world." [xiv]

A theme Armstrong makes repeatedly is the tension between mythos - the figurative or extra-rational element of any religion, most purely expressed through its mystical branches - and logos - the rational, logical, A leads to B leads to C type of approach that she argues is an artifact of the modern world and is misapplied to religion (if done at the expense of mythos). In this way, she argues, fundamentalism is a modern movement. A literal study of the Scripture is a modern preoccupation.

	Mythos	Logos
Practical?	No	Yes
Time orientation:	Time-less	New, future-oriented
Function:	Meaning	Action

Pope Urban II -> 1^st Crusades in 1095

1492 Edict of Expulsion -> Jews being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula

- conversos were also known as Marsanos (pigs) = new converts to Christianity;

Torquemada was a converso [15]; "they feign great science by contradicting what they do not understand." [18]

13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during 1^st 12 years of the Inquisition

Baruch Spinoza [22] became first person in modern Europe to live successfully without church or temple

Islam

Prophet Muhammed ->

cousin Ali ->

Husain => killed at Kerbala, the scene of a great massacre that split the Sunnis and Shiites

By the end of the 15^th C most Shiis were Arab

- Shiah was especially strong in Iraq

- especially in 2 shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala [52]

Iran was fully converted to Shiism in the 18^th century

- started with Shah Ismail in 1501 who declared Shii official religion of Iran [54]

alam al-mithal world of pure images and subconscious [55]

until 17^th Century, Islamdom had been more advanced intellectually but Europe surpassed them in the 18^th Century

1798: Napoleon captured Alexandria, Egypt => represented invasion of European ideas to the Middle East [60]

Christianity

Martin Luther had severe bouts of "tristitia" (extreme melancholia); ? major depression [65]

Newton: "the hot and superstitious part of mankind [leads them to] like best what they understand least."

Horrible wars with a religious theme convulsed Europe:

- 30 Years War 1618-48 => devastated Europe

- Civil War in France 1562-3 was between Protestants and Catholics

- English Civil War in 1642 -> execution of Charles I in 1649

Friends founded by George Fox in 1600s (he died in 1691)

John Wesley (1703-1791) [77]

- believed that faith and reason should be separate

- believed religion was not a doctrine in the head but a light in the heart

THE GREAT AWAKENING [80]

1734 Northampton, CT was where it all began;

anti-Catholic [81], exuberant movement of ecstatic sense of collective salvation followed by despair and in some cases clusters of suicides.

Most Americans at the time of the Revolution were Calvinists (only 1% were Catholic) and deeply mistrusted the secular deist elite who formed their government, wrote their Constitution, etc.

- about 60k Torys fought with England; 80-100k left to Canada after the War [82]

End of Times:

Ebenezer Baldwin in 1775 in Connecticut preached that the calamities of the world would only hasten God's plan for the new world [83]

In 1774, King George III became associated with the anti-Christ in the eyes of Americans when he granted religious freedom to French Catholics in newly conquered Quebec [84]

In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt -> beginning of Western invasion and domination of the Middle East [112-3]

RAPTURE

- was an idea begun by John Nelson Darby, an Englishman who found few followers in England but had large audiences in the United States

- he believed that Christians would be raptured to Heaven and thereby avoid much of the suffering the "pre-millenialists" believed would occur before the end of times [138]

Dwight Moody is regarded as the father of American Christian fundamentalism, after he founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which insisted on a literal reading of the Bible and harshly condemned those who tried to read more into the text or take it figuratively or question its authorship.

Egypt

Muhammed Ali

United Egypt and overthrew the Mamlutes;

Those who followed him embraced Western values, helped finance and build the Suez canal, but then found themselves bankrupt and lacking even a single share in the enterprise -> embittered disillusionment

Modernity in the Middle East was associated not with progress and autonomy but profound dislocation and dominance by an outside, alien force.