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Abstract
Using violence to promote one's beliefs grabs the headlines. Nevertheless, today the main threat does not come from the violent few, who do get some attention in this paper, but from the growing numbers who wish coercively to impose their views on others. Most world cultures encompass such coercive variants, and the factors that contribute to their rise are discussed. The main focus is on coercive religion and fundamentalism, but some attention is paid to factors common to all coercive ideologies, notably the rejection of multiple identities. The threat from coercive ideologies may be reduced by multiculturalism, by distinguishing desirable from misguided appeals to ‘freedom of religion’, and by supporting open‐mindedness and religious reform movements.
Notes
See http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/ ˜jkh8x/soc257/nrms/fund.html.
Modernity and modernization originally refer to the significant changes brought about by the Enlightenment and the increasing application to social organization of scientific and technological ideas in all spheres of life. They brought about the ‘disenchantment’ (Entzaüberung) of the world, and greatly reduced the areas where traditional, non‐rational, explanations were acceptable.
Moves by the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the finances of religious agencies, the application of civil rights arguments to the rights of homosexuals, public certification requirements even for Christian schools, and finally the Supreme Court's Roe‐v‐Wade decision, which ruled that abortion was a matter of private choice (Ammerman, Citation1991).
See the BJP website: http://www.bjp.org/philo.htm.
Moreover, conflicts continue to result to a significant degree from being disgruntled about the economic situation, about exclusion, and about one's position in an increasingly unequal society.
Hirsi Ali, both as a journalist and as a politician, has tirelessly, even if rather flamboyantly, held up to shame the worst practices against women (such as female ‘circumcision’) still prevalent in some Islamic countries (Ali, Citation2004).
The Financial Times (15 June 2002), reporting on an International Christian Chamber of Commerce conference in Jerusalem, called ‘The Business of Loving Israel’.
This was a not infrequent reaction among Muslim students in the Netherlands (Barbara and Louk de la Rive Box, personal communication).
Studies in Egypt and Iran, reported by Sami Zubaida (Citation1987), have shown that there fundamentalism's main activists come above all from the young intelligentsia, the “… intellectual proletariat of students, teachers and minor functionaries”. Zubaida adds: “These are the same social groups from whom support is drawn for all oppositional politics, left and right, religious and secular” (1987, p. 49).
Entzinger's (Citation2003) research in the Netherlands points in the same direction.
Those who take their fundamentalism to extremes — suicide bombers — are predominantly middle class, too.
See El País (Madrid), Sunday 24 October.
Those associated with Bernard Lewis and his followers. My own reading of Lewis suggests a rather more nuanced conclusion.
This position of Islamic extremists is hard to understand, as for Muslims suicide is regarded as a major sin and believed to be punished by ‘eternal damnation’ in the form of endless repetition of the act by which the suicide victim killed himself (Lewis, Citation2004).
‘Christian Identity Movement’, Ontario Consultants for Religious Tolerance (www.religioustolerance.org).
See www.christiangallery.com/findabortionist.html.
Angana Chatterji, ‘Indian Diaspora funding Hindu extremism’, in Daily Times, Lahore, 21 July 2002.
His political movement had as one of its foci precisely this failure of immigrants to integrate in Dutch society and accept some of its central values. Another important issue was the growing sense of physical insecurity, experienced by many as a side‐effect of what was seen as the excessively tolerant attitude to deviance in The Netherlands.
Author's translation.
“Individuals must be free not only to criticise the religion into which they are born, but to reject it for another or to remain without one” (United Nations Development Programme, Citation2004, p. 56).