Finally, someone says it: Fundamentalism is not “religion gone too far”, but the betrayal of religion.

Until now, I’ve been arguing against characterizing Fundamentalism as “extremist” forms of various religions (for instance, Christianity taken to extremes of strictness and intensity becomes Fundamentalist), but in fact a single religion with denominations defined by which host religion the fundamentalism has infested and perverted (so Islamic Fundamentalism is the same religion as Christian Fundamentalism, but outfitted with different forms) — but perhaps even affording Fundamentalism the status of a religion might be giving it too much credit.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to characterize Fundamentalism as a pathologically inadequate and blasphemous modernist philosophy assembled from words stolen from religion.

Fundamentalism is what results when a thoroughgoing modernist willfully assigns truth to  religious texts and traditions that are entirely incomprehensible from the modernist perspective. Instead of allowing the truth(s) of a text to be revealed to the reader as transfiguring insights, the text (a mass of words) itself is taken as the revealed thing, and faithfulness to this revelation is understood to mean adhering to the first interpretation (the “self-evident” meaning) arrived at by a mind trapped inside modernism. Of course, the consequent absurdities resulting from this ludicrous method makes sincere belief — that which we cannot help but take for true — impossible. This is where “faith” enters the stage: all opinions on what is to be regarded as true or false is labored out by the mechanics of explicit ideology, and the output (the Belief) is prioritized over the spontaneous beliefs that arise from reflective lived experience.

Anyway, here’s Latour’s take:

…This phenomenon [of religion] is not defined by an original type of subsistence, of risk, but, on the contrary, by an often desperate quest for substance, guarantees, some substratum. For those who use the term “religion” are really appealing to another world! And this is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to identify. There is no other world — but there are worlds differently altered by each mode. The fact that people speak tremulously of “respecting transcendence” hardly encourages the ethnologist to take this phenomenon seriously, since she sees quite clearly here the wrong TRANSCENDENCE, the one that has IMMANENCE as its opposite rather than its synonym. What is so disagreeable in the appeal to the “supernatural” is that the “natural” is accepted in the same breath. And if someone speaks, in hushed tones, of “spirituality,” we are warned that a peculiar idea of “materiality” has just been swallowed whole. Why should our investigator be concerned with those who raise their eyes toward Heaven to speak ill of the things of the Earth, of “rampant materialism,” of “humanism”: what do they know about matter, reason, the human?
What passes for religion today can offer only a particularly discouraging avatar of the quest for immobility, for the incontrovertible, the supreme, the ideal. Some have gone so far as to take religion as a quest for the absolute, and even as a nostalgic portal to the beyond! Religion turned into a “rampart against relativism” and a “supplement of soul” against the “secularization” and the “materialism” of “the world here below”! No targeting mistake is more spectacular than this one. Really?! All those treasures of intelligence and piety only to end up with this? Thousands of years of uninterrupted translations, continual variations, prodigious innovations, to end in a quest for foundations? How can anyone be so mistaken as to worship these false gods?

Even if she steps completely out of her role, the indignant investigator no longer even dares to call such a perversion a category mistake. “Heresy” would be a euphemism; should she speak of category horror? How puerile they seem to her, the ancient confusions between Yahweh and Baal or Moloch! The idolators would never have dared confuse their God with an undistorted transport, an immobile motor, an uncreated substance, a foundation: at least they knew that one could not institute Him without a path of alterations, interpretations, mediations. Fetishism is only a peccadillo alongside the idolatry in question here: the replacement of the religious by its exact opposite, the confusion of the relatively holy with the impious absolute. And this blasphemy is uttered in the temples themselves, at the heart of the churches, before the tabernacle, from the pulpit, under the wings of the Holy Spirit! Where are the prophets who could have spewed forth their anathemas against these pollutions, these ignominies, these abominations? Where are Jeremiah’s tears, Isaiah’s lamentations?

No, if the investigator wants to hold onto her sanity, she has to look for the religious outside the domain of religion. She has to hypothesize that what is called “the return of the religious” manifests only the return of FUNDAMENTALISM. And we can understand why. Incapable of situating multiform values in institutions made for them, reactionaries of various stripes fall back on an ersatz solution that seems superficially to “defend the values” — by placing them out of reach!