Book Club Bullies -Jun 30, 2004
Fur has been flying in the small Gloucestershire village of Brimscombe.

Local boy done good Nick Page, who hosts the BBC2 Escape to the Country programme, was to be the star guest at the local fete. But just half an hour before the start he pulled out, objecting to Christian propaganda displayed on one of the stalls. "We've got a Christian fundamentalist prime minister sending hundreds of people to their death every week and I couldn't believe people were promoting these ideas - at a village fete of all places," he said.

Page is right to highlight the fact that Christian fundamentalism is creeping into the heart of middle England. But to describe the prime minister as a fundamentalist is flippant nonsense that seriously misplaces the meaning of the term. Using the F-word as a generalised insult for all those with religious convictions allows the real thing to slip by unchallenged.

Fundamentalism was first employed in southern California in the 1920s and rapidly gained an audience among Southern Baptists keen to reclaim what they perceived as Christian fundamentals against the onslaught of secular modernity and liberal theology. It's now a portmanteau concept applied to many religious fringe groups in all the world's faiths and spans huge differences in theological temperament.

The common denominator is a refusal to accept that a sacred text can be legitimately read in more than one way. This goes hand in hand with the belief that scripture has a straightforward meaning, often twisted by clever sophistry dancing to secular tunes of gay liberation, feminism, socialism, and so on. Fundamentalism is not about the degree of religious conviction or about having beliefs that are non-negotiable - all but the most cynically pragmatic of us have those. Terry Eagleton gets it right: "It is a textual affair."

Yet it is precisely here that fundamentalism is most vulnerable, for the written word is wholly unsuited to the transmission of a single message. A text, particularly one as fecund and multi- layered as the Bible, cannot be ring-fenced. Meaning scatters off the page in a multiplicity of directions. Ironically, for the fundamentalist, the text turns out to be the very source of the problem.

It is no coincidence that fundamentalism flourishes in places of low literacy. The US Bible belt is not a place where books are commonly read for pleasure or enlightenment: information comes from the radio and TV. For all their emphasis on the sacred text, fundamentalists are generally unfamiliar with the culture of books.

Salman Rushdie captured this fundamentalist suspicion of the text perfectly in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which the fundamentalist character Khattam-Shud seeks to close off the diversity of interpretations by blocking the source of the Streams of Story. "He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and because the stories were held in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories." This is precisely the sort of hermeneutic chaos the fundamentalist finds so insufferable and against which he can never win. Like Khattam-Shud, the fundamentalist prefers a text to be lifeless.

Of course, the reasons for resisting the idea that a text requires interpretation are social and political, not principally theological. Fundamentalism flourishes in places of instability and social vulnerability. It is the desire for solid foundations in a world in which the vulnerable are tossed about like flies to wanton boys.

Often this is associated with poverty, but not always. Students I see arriving at Oxford for the first time are pitched into a new and uncertain world. In such circumstances students commonly find refuge in a church that gives them the security of a singular message believed with absolute and unquestioning certainty. For those at the rough end of global capitalism or American imperialism, the instinct is considerably more urgent.

Once a month my wife goes to her book club. Everyone is given space to express what they made of the latest choice of novel. Others listen courteously: sometimes enlightened, sometimes puzzled. No one interpretation claims dominance.

The fundamentalist is the bully of the religious book club determined to regulate the conversation and silence disagreement. Even within the traditionally inclusive Church of England these book club bullies are increasingly using political muscle to change the rules of the conversation so that only those who subscribe to a particular interpretation of the text can participate. Elsewhere, this muscle is exercised at the point of a gun.

Perhaps I am insufferably liberal, but we need to have a greater appreciation of why bullies become bullies. Fundamentalism can only be defeated if we understand it.