The dirty little secret of fundamentalism

Fundamentalism, whether Christian, Islamic, or even Hindu, has several driving energies. It seems as much a cultural and political phenomenon as it is religious; as much a reaction to liberal values and consumer culture as it is to secularism. But I believe it’s driven both in the West and the East, primarily by sexism and a fear of self determination and female sexual freedom.

In many traditional societies without access to the birth control pill there are important cultural tabus against female promiscuity. A woman who gets a such a reputation may be find it difficult to marry or may be outcast to low status work such as serving, acting, or prostitution. If she is already married she may be divorced and her husband shamed (“cuckold” was a major insult until recently in the west, in the form of a hand-sign of two horns) by the possibility that he is not the father of her children. So her family and her husband conspire to prevent any outward signs of her sexual nature to preserve her (their) “reputation”. In extreme cases, more common perhaps in the fundamentalist backlash than in the traditions on which this is modelled, she must cover herself completely and not leave the house without an escort. If her husband cheats she is powerless – where divorce is possible it is difficult for women and she then becomes an unproductive burden on her family.

Allowing women a voice; a vote; an education; positions of responsibility and power, leads inevitably to allowing the expression of their sexual desire. A free society cannot be founded on the labour of slaves, and women are as much as men built with an urge to talk and flirt and experiment and understand their sexual nature. The pill makes this possible without consequences which are borne unfairly, but that genie once out of the bottle cannot be wished away. A woman who controls her reproduction is a force on equal terms. She can now not just work but pursue a career. Where her husband could have sex outside the relationship, and often did, his wife now has the same freedom without having to explain resulting pregnancy. Marriage must now be equal and based on honesty where it was unequal and based on power.

Few traditional societies recognised rape or other violence within a marriage. The woman had little choice but to bear children on her husband’s terms. This all changes with access to birth control and a (theoretically) equal place for women in the workplace.

There are codes for men’s desire for a return to ownership. “Family values” have been forgotten in our modern world. Without such values we have high crime rates, high divorce rates, and we don’t look after our children properly because the mother works rather than staying at home where she’s needed. Then of course in this secular and shallow age our promiscuous children don’t grow up with the proper values of decency and hard work. The same ideas are present in the middle east and other countries, but usually conflated with perhaps valid fears of cultural and economic imperialism.

If chastity is a personal choice, a purity of mind and heart aiding communion with one’s god, then that has no relation to this discussion. But when the idea of chastity is made a moral issue, and imposed upon others, then it becomes political. If a person is dismayed by the modern world’s obsession with sex and wands to enforce, by means of religiously based laws, a space for others where that same purity and communion might be found, then however well intentioned this is a serious mistake. It forces underground the same things made explicit in the liberal society, but without the protections of birth control and tolerance. The result is that men visit prostitutes and have affairs but women are subjugated by men’s need to be sure they are the fathers of the children they raise. This is the dirty little secret of fundamentalism – that it makes women property, kept slave to male fear of female sexual energy.

It raises medieval cultural practices like the veil to the centre of religious observance. It rules that AIDS funding from the US in Africa must teach abstinence in places where most transmission is by rape. It makes Human Papilloma Virus immunisation a religious issue. Fundamentalism is at its heart a misuse of religion by the old men, the priests, and the fearful young men, to excuse their efforts to rule women’s bodies and minds. It distorts the human spirit.

Protest against the veil has been used recently as a politically correct way of attacking Islam, and I’m wary of that possibility. In fact I think Western neo-colonialist imperialism in both it’s political and cultural manifestations has been one of the primary reasons for the rise of fundamentalism in Islam. The first step to robbing it of its force is therefore to remove this cause, rather than attempting some sort of long distance cross-cultural reform, however well-meaning. Similarly the West, I believe, really is in the throes of an addiction to materialism, but I don’t think a return to the worst aspects of the seventeenth century is any solution. Politicians and religious leaders in the West have been able to portray fundamentalism as a religious movement, but it is not. It’s the political attempt to reclaim the slavery of women.