In dealing with the United States Supreme Court’s decision in 1961 that ‘secular humanists’ (i.e. non-believers) should have the same legal protections given to religious people, Ruthven continues “ironically, this is the decision religious fundamentalists now use to argue that ‘secular humanism’ qualifies as a religion, for example when values associated with it appear on school curricula. It should therefore be curbed by the State whose responsibility it is to maintain the ‘wall of separation’”. Well, some might call it ironic. Others might call it playing the devil’s advocate, which last time I checked, was still regarded as a perfectly legitimate tactic. Whatever about the legal semantics of the case, Ruthven still implicitly makes the problematic assumption that the values of liberalism are somehow universal.

Let’s expand the argument a little further: let’s compare France with The Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranians have a state-religion. It’s there in black and white. It is precisely because of this fact that there is such a lively debate going on in Iran today about the role Islam should play in Iranian public life. Most Iranians think critically about the values which hold sway within their public sphere much more than most Europeans or Americans do. Next to the French, who unknown to themselves, have two clandestine state-religions, scientific post-industrialism and bourgeois liberalism (i.e. secularized Judeo-Christianity). But the fact that neither of these ideological forces are explicitly referred to in any article of French law means that a proper debate on their power is hardly even possible. So, which country’s political process is less democratic?

Then there are places where Ruthven’s analysis just goes off the rails – in discussing homophobia within many religious traditions, he maintains that “Catholicism masks this contradiction (between homophobia and homoeroticism) through the institution of celibacy in its clergy, a symbolic ‘third sex’ that dresses in female garb and seems disproportionately liable to indulge in male paedophilia”. No argument here, this analysis is intuitively appealing, but his previous explanation of Christian homophobia is hilarious – “The origins of homophobia in the Judeo-Christian tradition may lie in the ‘contradictory religious ethos’ experienced by devout Christian males. On the one hand they are expected to love a solitary deity imagined in terms both of father imagery, and perhaps more potently, through the erotically charged figure of a young almost naked male impaled on an instrument of torment”. He later refers to the “homoerotic love of Jesus”. Oh, please! I thought that most reasonable people were by now agreed that psychoanalyzing one’s ideological opponents was just a cheap trick. As an irreligious person, this analysis doesn’t offend me in the least. It just strikes me as far-fetched.

It also strikes me as a little convenient that, while all the secular ideologies nice middle-class intellectuals would rather steer clear of can be understood as quasi-religions, to describe any social movement of the new left (e.g. radical feminism or environmentalism) as ‘fundamentalist’ is “not analytically useful”. The problem with this position is that it deprives us of a popular terminology we could use to describe liberals or members of the new (well, actually not so new) cultural left whom we might regard as intellectually lazy, narrow-minded or bigoted. If fundamentalism has a defining characteristic, then perhaps it is that all fundamentalist ideologies incorporate a sense of their own moral superiority. What many liberals and new lefties overlook is that moral superiority is like detergent, basically a generic product. It doesn’t matter who’s selling it or what slogans they’re using. It’s all the same deal.

Let me finish with a story about a new-age hippie I met on the street several years ago in Cork City. I was mulling about town on a day off, and I got talking to this guy, a busker – English, forty-something, said he was waiting for a payout from his divorce, then he’d go and buy a patch of land in West Cork, grow some food and get in touch with various pantheons of gods.
“Oh, you’re going to farm”, I said.
“No”, he corrected me, “I’m going to homestead”. I stood duly corrected. I was carrying a book with me – something I’d picked up second-hand. I can’t remember what precisely – maybe it was Nietzsche or Heidegger, of whom I was reading a lot at the time. “What are you doing around town?”, asked the busker. “Shopping”, I said, “book-browsing” . I displayed the book. “Oh”, he said, “I don’t need to read books. I’ve got God on my side”. My mouth fell open. If this guy was a practicing Christian or Muslim, we’d all form certain conclusions about him. We’d all say he was a batshit ‘fundamentalist’. In spite of the preferred nomenclatures of people like Malise Ruthven, I walked away from the busker thinking just that.