The Search for Certainty 
￹FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=George W. Bush with Pastor Dr. Louis Leon after Sunday Services at St. John's Episcopal Church "
How much should faith guide policy?	
BBC Radio 4's Analysis: The Search for Certainty, will be broadcast on Thursday, 23 December, 2004 at 20:30 GMT. 
Read the programme transcript 
Religion is back. It is winning elections and is offering a slogan for the discontented. 
After its prominence in the recent US presidential election it is apparently guiding the leadership of the western world. 
But it also acts as a battle-cry for the enemies of all things western. Assumptions that the fast-globalising world of consumerism and secular habits would sweep faith aside have proved to be wrong. 
In 'the Search for Certainty' Bruce Clark asks what lies behind this surprising new trend, affecting in particular the Islamic world as well as the US. He also explores what effect it might it have on our common future. 
Even if its direct ability to shape modern societies is limited, he discovers, religion is making its voice heard in debates about values which are of increasing importance. 
The contributors are the Muslim convert Tim Winter of Cambridge University, Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, the Canadian Muslim writer Irshad Manji, Biblical scholar Margaret Barker, French specialist on Islam Olivier Roy and expert on global fundamentalism Professor Steve Bruce. 
Presenter: Bruce Clark
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Nicola Meyrick 

Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not 
be reproduced or copied for any other purpose.

                                                                              RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS     

ANALYSIS  
THE SEARCH FOR CERTAINTY

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED 
DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Bruce Clark
Producer:  Chris Bowlby
Editor:  Nicola Meyrick

BBC 
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Broadcast Date:    23.12.04
Repeat Date:         26.12.04
Tape Number: 
Duration:  

Taking part in order of appearance:

Margaret Barker
Hebrew Scholar and Methodist Preacher

Irshad Manji
Muslim Writer

Robert Royal
Director of Faith and Reason Institute, Washington

Tim Winter
Lecturer in Divinity, Cambridge University

Olivier Roy
French Scholar of Muslim World

Steve Bruce
Sociologist specializing in fundamentalist Religion

CLARK:	It’s only 15 years since Soviet communism collapsed – and with it, the whole idea of closed creeds which every member of society is supposed to believe, and which claim to explain almost everything. At least that’s how it seemed at the time. Ideologies which offered the comfort of certainty seemed to be out and a much more individual quest for truth appeared to be in. But things have turned out very 
different. All over the world, the role of traditional religions in public life is making a comeback. And the beliefs which are flourishing today are not usually of the lukewarm, apologetic variety. Margaret Barker, a Hebrew scholar and Methodist preacher, has observed this change at the grass roots.     
   
BARKER:	The churches experiencing the most rapid growth at the moment are those who do have a fundamentalist reading of scripture or, at any rate, a very Bible based approach if you see the massive growth of, for example, the Pentecostal Church.  So that certainly is where the growth is and this may be that the certainty of Bible based Christianity in its simplest and strongest form is something that a lot 
of people are opting for these days.  Now why that is happening, one can only begin to speculate.  You can either say this is the Holy Spirit at work if you are a Christian creature, or you can say – if you are trying to be objective and cynical – these are people whose worlds are collapsing around them and they’re looking for something secure.

CLARK:	The Holy Spirit or a search for a safe refuge prompted by desperation and insecurity? And if the movement we call fundamentalism is gaining ground among Christians and Muslims in particular, what does that mean for the rest of society in countries where this debate is raging? How much do new forms of belief in places as varied 
as the Islamic world and the United States really have in common?  And 
are these new forms a product of modernity, or more of a reaction against it? Whatever their source of inspiration, religious believers are not leaving unchallenged the assumptions of secularism. Irshad Manji is a Canadian Muslim writer whose book, ‘The Trouble with Islam’ radically challenges Islam to modernise. But she insists that religion has a vital role to play and she has clear ideas about where today’s resurgence of faith is coming from.       

MANJI:	I call it you know the revenge of the religious.  And what is it a revenge against?  It’s a reaction really against sort of deconstructionism; this notion that everything, everything can be 
dismantled and understood rationally.  And when that’s the case, there is no mystery; and when there’s no mystery, there is no reverence for 
something outside of ourselves.  And so many people, whatever their 
generation, feel that really what we’ve become is a narcissistic, selfish society in which we are strangers to God, strangers to nature, strangers to tradition. (see AYN RAND)

CLARK:	Religious language sounds strident these days, and that’s rather frightening for people of no particular creed, who prefer to pick and choose their values like good comparison shoppers. 
But people of faith see things the other way round; they live in a materialist age where religion must strive energetically for the right to be heard in the public arena.  Robert Royal is an American Catholic intellectual who runs the Faith and Reason Institute, a think-tank in Washington.  
    
ROYAL:	There is a place in public discourse for religious arguments, there is a place for highly sophisticated, rational arguments, and there may even be a place for aggressively atheistic arguments.  But the problem, as we perceive it, is that if the properly secular nature of public life in the United States, which offers a protection 
to various religious traditions, even those outside the Judeo Christian orbit, if that itself becomes a substantive position that seeks to eliminate religious discourse in public - we look at countries like France, less so I guess the UK - but we see certain countries that seem to us to have imposed a secularism that seems to squeeze out any religious discourse in the public square.  And to our minds that really is a violation of the kind of pluralism that should be encouraged in truly open democratic societies.
 
CLARK:	Of course, when religion is banished from the public arena, that doesn’t always imply that the political authorities are hostile to faith. Sometimes, official secularism may simply be a practical response to the existence of many different faiths. When people can’t decide whether to put a crucifix or a Muslim crescent or a star 
of David on the school wall, it may seem sensible to leave the wall 
completely empty. But people of faith can experience this exclusion as a kind of hostility.  

MANJI:	In many ways secularism is not just a way of life.  It is now an entitlement, an expectation that many Europeans have – to the point where it’s actually moved from secularism to, in many cases, atheism.  And missionary atheism, as I would call it - the kind of atheism that seems to impose itself on others.  The irony, of course, is that 
such atheism replicates the very sin of fundamentalism that it originally sought to castigate.  The end result of all of this is that many Muslims in Europe are made to feel like they’re inadequate, weak, oppressed, indoctrinated and brainwashed, and sometimes even dangerous, simply because they choose to practice organised religion.  The real tragedy here is that many Muslims as a result tell me that they feel driven into the arms of fundamentalists.

CLARK:	But what exactly do people like Irshad Manji mean when they talk about fundamentalism and distinguish it from other kinds of faith? Surely if religion is about anything at all, it’s about belief in certain fundamental ideas or writings which are supposed to 
underpin everything else that we think and say? Tim Winter is a lecturer in divinity at Cambridge University – and under his other name, Abdul Hakim Murad – a respected interpreter of his adopted Muslim faith. Both as an academic and as a scholar, he’s trained to define his terms rather carefully. What does he understand by fundamentalism?   

WINTER:	The word fundamentalism always has to be used with caution.  It originated about a hundred years ago in an American Christian context and to wheel it out and apply it to a non-Christian context sometimes begs some important questions.  If we mean by it a literalist strategy for reading scriptures that produces social results that liberal journalists find objectionable, then I think it’s probably a bad 
term to use because it’s really a value judgement.  If we mean a conservative and cautious approach to reading scriptures that take seriously the claim that God is indeed in some sense speaking through them, then I suppose it can be used, but that I suspect is not usually the way in which it’s used.

CLARK:	Fundamentalism will always be a tricky word, open to much abuse, especially in the highly charged atmosphere after September the 11th. But there is no easy substitute, so we should at least use it with an awareness that it can mean different things in different contexts. One consistent component of most definitions is an 
emphasis on the importance of text as a statement of core belief.   In the search for certainty, the way we read sacred scripture plays a central role. 
For many people, a fundamentalist is a person with an unshakeable 
attachment to every word of a particular text. But in her work as a Biblical scholar, Margaret Barker is in pursuit of something more elusive.  

BARKER:	The aim of all that we try to do is to stand where these writers stood, to look where they looked and try to see what it was that they saw. And it is their vision which we have to try and 
make available for our own generation.  Not the packaging, not the 
particular cultural mores, anything like that.  I want to look always to what it is that that text bears witness to.  It may be inaccurate, it may have been subjected to human errors, all sorts of things, but if you stand back and you read these writers sympathetically, you can glimpse what it is that they saw and that is what we must hang on to.  These are the fundamentals, there’s no question of that.

CLARK:	But even though she rejects the more simple-minded kind of literalism, she sees an even greater danger in the sort of relativism that sees no such thing as universal truth.
    
BARKER:	If I had to choose between being a fundamentalist and being a woolly liberal, I would come down on the side of fundamentalists because their instinct is right; that there are certain things that you cannot compromise on.  I think they have got the broad picture right, they’ve got some of the detail wrong.  And so to hang on to the core tradition is very, very important.  Everything is not negotiable.  If 
you have a tradition that hasn’t got any definition of what it is, then in the end of course it doesn’t exist.  You define yourself by your boundaries.  I think one of the problems with more liberal Christians of our present time is that they think that the tradition has no boundaries.  It can be all-inclusive in the worst possible sense and it ends up of course being nothing.  So the fundamentalists have got a great deal to teach us.

CLARK:	If all people were doing was teaching new ideas to their fellow believers, the rest of society would probably let them get on with it. But people wouldn’t be so concerned by this activity if it were merely a new mind-set or a new way of reading holy texts. For a small minority of its adherents, fundamentalism is also an inspiration to violence. Olivier Roy, a French scholar of the Muslim world, is struck by 
the way one extreme version of Islam has taken on the role once played by revolutionary socialism. It has become a battle-cry for the powerless, whether they were born into Muslim families or convert to militant Islam in a spirit of revolt.

ROY:	When you are a young guy in destitute neighbourhoods, in some sort of revolt against the society and looking for a cause, what do you find now?  Islam.  There are many boys of the neighbourhoods you know who convert to Islam.  This phenomenon of conversion is very important in the West now.  In any Al Quaeda networks which has been caught, discovered recently, there have always been some – and sometimes many – converts in it.  So this shows that the revolt in the name of Islam is not I would say backlash of the traditional Muslim identity against liberalisation, but on the contrary; it is seen by many uprooted young boys as the new cause to fight Society with a big ‘S’ and the US imperialism.

CLARK:	For some Muslims, then, their faith becomes a way of expressing a more generalized grievance against all things western and capitalist. That sounds rather different from the conservative Christians who voted in large numbers for President George W Bush.  But for Olivier Roy, there are big psychological similarities between the experience undergone both by born-again Christians and newly devout Muslims, what he calls their religiosity.  

ROY:	By religiosity, I mean the way a believer experiences his own religion.  So it has nothing to do with the dogmatic content of religion, it has nothing to do with theology.  It has to do with the way a Muslim acts, behaves as a Muslim, as a believer.  And I see many parallels with Protestant fundamentalism.  First you know the idea that to be a born again, you need to break with the past, to break with 
the traditions.  When you are born again, you are not interested in the 
religion and traditions of your grandfather, your family and so on and so on.
 
CLARK:	 That’s a surprising point, but it’s an important one. We sometimes associate fundamentalism with going back in time, returning to the good old days – or the bad old days, depending on your point of view. But in fact, today’s fundamentalists, whether peaceful 
or otherwise, are very much part of the me-generation, the generation that insists on making its own choices, even if that means breaking with the extended family and its way of life. Among Muslim scholars, too, there are those who regard fundamentalism as modern, in the worst sense of the word. Tim Winter sees a huge difference between traditional or orthodox readings of Islam on the one hand - and the views on the other of a militant fringe that is both unrepresentative and very recent in origin. 

WINTER:	Well I think everybody can see that twenty or thirty years ago, nobody had really heard of the kind of fundamentalist movement that we see today in the Islamic world.  The mosques were still full, but this kind of targeting of civilians, for instance, the aberrant use of terrorist violence is something that really is very new.  
It’s novel in the history of the religion and it reflects a particular decadence in Muslim religious discourse in certain places.  It hasn’t gained much inroad into the leadership of the religion, but in the masses on the streets, as it were, particularly in very tense, unnatural places like Gaza, the slums of Baghdad and other places, it does have a certain standing unfortunately.  
And this is the great challenge of the leadership of the religion – how to reassert orthodoxy in the face of a growing groundswell of fundamentalist revolt.

CLARK:	It’s a long way from unnatural places like Gaza to the prosperity of America’s Bible Belt. This difference in social context makes a huge difference to the role that religion plays. So for 
all the psychological parallels, we shouldn’t overestimate the similarity between Middle Eastern-style fundamentalism and the American variety. 
Professor Steve Bruce of Aberdeen University is a sociologist who has 
specialised in Protestant communities in Northern Ireland and the US and he now studies fundamentalists in all their global forms. 

BRUCE:	Let’s divide successful and failed states.  The kind of fundamentalisms that you get in these two conditions are very different.  In a lot of the Islamic world, there is no successful 
government or state or social support system or health system or education system.  In that world fundamentalism is very attractive not just because it explains your problems and offers a solution to those problems, which is get back to God, but it also offers viable social institutions.  They actually provide a more effective society than their governments do.  What’s going on in countries like the United States is very different.  In the United States, you have a very successful economy, a very successful government, but you have serious arguments about personal morality, about culture, and about the place that religion ought to have in shaping those things.  I don’t 
see that there’s been any great change in the United States.

SEGUE  

ROYAL:	Here in the United States at least, Evangelicals are educated at levels higher than the average, as Catholics are actually these days.  They are more prosperous than average Americans and we explain it somewhat through the fact that religion tends to be a stabilising force that enables people to get higher education, to be healthier, 
to be more regular in their work habits, etcetera.  So I certainly don’t believe in crude or Biblical fundamentalism, but I would distinguish that from strong belief in Biblical principles that even among many Evangelicals is under girded by now an attempt to use reason. 

CLARK:	Robert Royal, director of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington. It’s certainly true that beliefs play a different role among successful players in the social contest than they do 
among the angry and dispossessed. America’s conservative Christians 
usually employ peaceful means to advance their cause. There are some 
exceptions, like the people who make bomb attacks on abortion clinics. But Steve Bruce points out that they don’t on the whole try to impose a new regime on society.

BRUCE:	In the United States of America, the Government is widely accepted as successful.  It’s intensely legitimate.  
Even fundamentalists accept the autonomy of the state, so they accept the democratic method.  They fight elections, they try and fight court battles, they will try and persuade people to see the world their way.  But basically they accept that there is a separation between law and morality; that people have a right to sin if they want to and that there’s nothing you can do about that.  There are many countries in the world in which the state has never managed to establish itself in that way, where there is no creditable secular organisation, and in those settings the religious institutions have a great deal of power and influence and there isn’t the same acceptance of the idea of a government and of rights of individuals separate from pleasing God. 

CLARK:	Does that mean that Christian fundamentalists are democrats with a small d, who accept the idea of a free contest of ideas in a political arena which is essentially neutral, while the Muslim fundamentalists are theocrats whose ultimate aim is an overtly 
Islamic regime? Certainly not, says Tim Winter. From his point of view as a Muslim convert, there is plenty of democracy in the heart-land of Islam and plenty of theocracy in the historically Christian world     

WINTER:	The British state constitutionally in some dim way is theocratic: the head of state has to be the head of the established religion.  The House of Commons every day begins with speakers’ prayers.  There is a kind of institutionalised privileging of 
Anglicanism in things like the blasphemy legislation, for instance.  So 
theocracy as such is certainly not incompatible with the usual western 
ideals of democratic process.  The issue is whether Islam is more resistant to that than Christianity, and I think that this may be just a matter of perspective.  The Muslim world generally is very much in favour of democracy.

CLARK:	But isn’t it the case that any Muslim would say that the ideal form of government would be a religious form of government; that a secular government can never be ideal?

WINTER:	There is no standard model for an Islamic state; that you also had in Indonesia, for instance – the world’s largest Muslim country – the ulema, the Muslim religious leaders, were at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement there, and that’s the case in many other Muslim countries.  We tend to forget that at least forty percent 
of Muslims today live in functioning democracies.

CLARK:	Whether or not they live in democracies, Muslims - like everybody else - live in societies which are modern or at least modernizing: the sort of societies in which each 
generation (if not every individual) makes its own choices.  So even when they claim to be rejecting the contemporary world, they are doing so in a modern environment, in a modern way. In the view of Olivier Roy, this point holds good both for what he calls the neo-Christians in the United States and also the rapidly changing societies of the Islamic world. 

ROY:	The sociology of the Muslim world is changing and this sociology is turning western. For example, there are less and less children in the families.  The fertility rate now of the Muslim world is close to the western world.  All the sociological factors show that 
the Muslim societies are becoming westernised.

CLARK:	So we’re living in a world where the religious have to compromise with the secular at a tactical level because that’s simply the kind of world we live in?

ROY:	I think that the political theme is less and less relevant for the Islamists.  They gave up the idea of building an Islamic state.  They now suppress the issue of values.  And we have the same phenomena with the American neo-Christians, you know.  In fact, the American neo-Christians are not fighting to have a Christian state in America.  They are promoting values.  They are promoting social issues you know like abortion, divorce, family and things like that. 
                             
CLARK:	To be modern, then, is to live in a world of tactical battles and short-term partnerships. You can’t really hope to convert the whole of society, from top to bottom, to your way of thinking. So even if your instincts are averse to compromise, you have to pick and choose your objectives, and pick and choose your allies, in a rather pragmatic way. Focusing on values rather than beliefs can be a way of broadening your coalition. Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington.

ROYAL: 	There are certain issues where I believe that faith and reason intersect very strongly.  I don’t believe, for example, that abortion is particularly a religious issue.  I think that Catholics and other Orthodox Jews here in the United States and Evangelicals are united in their opposition to abortion, but that’s because we take seriously the obligation to look into the science of what we think a developing embryo is.  I don’t think that that’s a particular religious point 
of view.

CLARK:	It’s not just Christians and non-Christians who may find themselves campaigning together for specific causes. Very different varieties of Christian may find it expedient, for certain purposes, to put their doctrinal disputes aside. As Steve Bruce puts 
it.

BRUCE:	If you get involved in politics, if you get involved in the world, then you have to do deals, you have to compromise.  So, for example, on a Sunday night you may denounce the Catholic Church as being the anti-Christ, but if you want to win the elections on a Monday you have to work with conservative Catholic groups.  Now a lot of conservative Protestants in the United States can’t do that kind of alternation.  I mean their religion tells them that Catholicism is 
wrong.  They can’t then for the sake of politics suddenly pretend that 
Catholicism is right.  Some fundamentalists will always be attracted to the idea of a pious retreat; that you try and cut yourself off as much as possible from the world in order to go to heaven and you wait for that happy day.

CLARK:	There, if you like, is the fundamentalist dilemma: to be engaged in modern society, or even to be engaged in fighting the main trends of modern society, means accepting the give-and-take, the tactical tradeoffs, the coalition-broking which are bound to occur in a pluralist society.  That’s hard to bear if your focus in on the 
fundamentals. You can urge people to reject modern fashions, in lifestyle as well as politics.  But you probably can’t roll back the modern trend towards greater freedom of choice in almost everything. As Steve Bruce observes, the certainty of faith has to co-exist with the uncertainty of shifting political alliances, shifting personal choices – and the probability that society as a whole will move in exactly the wrong direction from your point of view. 

BRUCE:	If you go back to the new Christian rights wish list and say well what’s happened on those things over the last twenty years.  They want to ban homosexuality.  Far from banning it and putting homosexuals back in the closet, we now have homosexuals largely accepted: we have a serious push for gay marriage, we have homosexuals portrayed on television programmes as perfectly normal people.  
Fundamentalists are opposed to divorce.  Has the divorce rate gone down?  
No, it hasn’t, and it’s actually now as high for fundamentalists as it is for other people.  Fundamentalists want to return to conventional gender roles.  
Well the proportion of women working full time in the labour force has 
continued to go up, it hasn’t gone down.  There is no point on a new 
Christian rights agenda, the things that are special to it rather than just being what any conservative American wants, on which it’s succeeded.

(In other words their VALUES are at odds with freedom and what people want-LB)
   
CLARK:	Of course, the fundamentalists argue that society’s decadence is exactly why they are now obliged to raise their voices. But however hard they try, they probably can’t create a different order in which decisions are made for us by representatives of religious or political authority whose word is unquestioned. We can’t stop living in a world of choice, even if the choices we happen to make are deeply conservative ones. As Irshad Manji sees things, young Muslims like her 
living in the West are often bewildered by the range of options, the routes to happiness, laid out before them: that’s what is prompting them to look elsewhere.
                                     
MANJI:	In the west we are assaulted by alternatives – choices of career paths and fashions and gadgets and even marriage partners – and this can lead not just to empowerment but to its very opposite: to a sense of alienation and disorientation.  And here’s my theory, and it is only a theory.  Muslims may be more susceptible to that kind of disorientation than others because you know by and large we’re not 
taught to ask questions, so adapting to the notion of having alternatives can be painful and certainly disorienting

CLARK:	To cope with this confusion, Irshad Manji believes, religion needs a breath of fresh air.

MANJI:	I do a lot of speaking about diversity, both on European and on American campuses.  And even before 9/11, after many of my speeches about diversity, I noticed that it was young Muslims who were emerging from the audiences and they would gather round at the side of the stage or the side of the floor and they would start chatting excitedly amongst themselves and then walk over, sometimes hesitantly to 
be sure, but nonetheless walk over and say things to me like “Irshad, we need voices such as yours to help us open up this religion of ours because if we don’t let some oxygen in, we’re leaving it.”  These kids were telling me that they were desperate to reconcile their pluralistic realities here in the west with their Muslim identity.

CLARK:	People like that won’t be satisfied by fundamentalism of the cruder variety. Or will they? Fundamentalism presents itself as something anti-modern, but it is modern enough to be attractive and marketable to restless young consumers. Its message can certainly be delivered by modern means, like websites and satellite television. But if Tim Winter is right, the spiritual thirst which drives some people in a fundamentalist direction will not be that easily slaked.           

WINTER:	For a million years or longer, human beings seem to have believed in some kind of transcendant world, whether it be pixies and sprites in the forests or one celestial God in heaven, and it’s 
not clear whether we can really live for many generations without believing the way that our species has always believed.  Fundamentalism is one aspect of the disillusionment with the promises of secularity that we’re seeing in our end of this new century.  But there are others.  We tend to pay less attention to the increasing credibility of religion amongst scientists, and I see that in my own home town of Cambridge where it’s more respectable to be a scientist who believes in God than it was twenty or certainly fifty years ago.  So fundamentalism is one of the reactions that human beings I think very legitimately have against the sort of grey mediocrity that secularity tends to represent.  But there are other reactions as well and we can only hope and pray that it’s the more constructive reactions that eventually prevail. 

SEGUE

BARKER:	It is the vision of eternity, yes, so by definition it is beyond time, it transcends gender, culture, all these things,
because without the vision we’re in darkness, aren’t we?

CLARK:	What Margaret Barker and Tim Winter are both suggesting is that there are two different impulses driving people to rediscover faith: a search for certainty, and a search for the sublime. This quest for the sublime takes place in a modern context, but it’s looking for something that pertains to no particular century. 

It’s understandable that people will try to escape the chaos, the messiness, the need for awkward choices and compromises that appear to be features of our own time. They may then try turning the clock back, or forward, to a different era in the hope that things will be more predictable and orderly.
 (Chaos theory does not help people looking for certainty-LB)
Like all attempts at time travel - so far at least - that enterprise is doomed.  
To sceptics, it seems obvious that fundamentalism is self-contradictory and as a political project, destined to fail. But people shouldn’t fall into the secular trap of dismissing the whole thing as simply irrelevant. The hunger for some reconnection with the eternal, in the way we live and the values we espouse, is no longer in retreat.