In my post on “Religulous,” I made the point that Bill Maher exudes a shockingly self-righteous certitude in his own position–and at the movie’s end, literally preaches a gospel of Maherism and warns doom for all who don’t see his light. (The comments about this in the thread below echo a similar exchange at Steven Waldman’s blog.) I understand that the movie’s denouement is over the top, and I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I called Maher a fundamentalist. But still, Maher’s position on religion, religious people, and the only solution to the problem of religious belief sounds and smells like fundamentalism: it’s a belief on a raft, a triumphalist resistance to an apocalyptic problem.
Scott Appleby, following Kathleen Boone, has said that fundamentalism is a tendency. It’s a tendency that exists inside believers of all kinds–we can all be militant, hardened, closed-off separatists about something. We can all pass over into a place where we’re unwilling to be reflective about our position, where we’ve assigned those who don’t see things in our way to a place of (relative) weeping and gnashing of teeth.
This is where Bill Maher–and Richard Dawkins and other usual suspects–have arrived in their secularlism. They aren’t reflective about it anymore. They might be plenty smart about it, just as, say, B.B. Warfield was plenty smart about his biblical hermeneutics. But on the subject of religious faith, they probably lack the ability to really hear and consider, to deem reasonably persuasive, a point of view that is not their own. That, to my thinking, is part of what is at the heart of fundamentalism.
I realize that I’m close here to saying that if you do not doubt what you believe, you might be a fundamentalist. That’s not quite what I mean. But I think a strong tonic for fundamentalism is epistemological modesty (hat tip: Peter Berger, by way of Alan Seligman): the ability to admit you don’t have absolute proof, and that it’s reasonable and acceptable for someone to disagree with you. Fundamentalists don’t have that ability. If “Religulous” is any indication, Bill Maher doesn’t, either.
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