Democracy vs. God
According to news reports, Al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s latest audiotape threatening Iraq’s election this weekend noted a variety of specific complaints, but the most important point is this: “We have declared a bitter war against the evil principles of democracy.” And he added this: “God was the highest authority, not elected officials.”
Westerners often dismiss this kind of God-First talk as bizarrely foreign and even inexplicable. The secular among us often assume that democracy trumps religion, and even many who are religiously motivated embrace Western-style pluralism and believe, at the same time, that religion and democracy are complementary rather than contradictory. We’re often baffled by those who support a more literal commitment to God’s primacy that makes democracy irrelevant. Yet such commitment is common, and not just in the Islamic world.
Religious fundamentalism is a complicated, multifaceted phenomenon, with a variety of meanings and implications. Generalizing about it, though, I take it to mean a belief in religion’s fundamental truths supposedly as revealed in the past and a commitment to following those truths today regardless of alternative values such as democracy and regardless of consequences for other people, especially those who don’t share the same views. Given my general anti-religious perspective, my negative assessment of fundamentalism in particular is no surprise.
Al-Zarqawi’s explicit preference for God over democracy is matched by fundamentalists of other religions, though often more diplomatically. As I’ve suggested before here, it increasingly seems to me that the three Abrahamic religions have a particularly lethal take on God’s word. Maybe I just don’t know enough about other religions.
Christianity expanded through conquest as much as by persuasion, inflicting atrocity and genocide on those resistant to Jesus. Its fundamentalists, and even many who aren’t fundamentalists, often agree with al-Zarqawi that “God is the highest authority,” a stance that increasingly sets American politics apart from other Western societies.
Islam came out of Arabia with the sword, insistent that Allah is Great and allegiance to him inevitable. Islamic fundamentalists get the most attention today, but their logic is not unique.
Judaism took another route, the Chosen People rejecting forcible conversion and keeping for itself its special relationship to the Almighty. Yet with the rise of Jewish power in a Jewish state, the clash between fundamentalist Judaism and modern democracy becomes more stark. My now-completed month-long visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories was punctuated by growing threats by Jewish settlers to stay in Gaza and the West Bank — as God wants them to, they tell us — even if that means resisting government orders to evacuate.
Religious fundamentalism isn’t the only danger. Nationalism often elicits the same single-mindedness, as in both Israel and Palestine as well as just about anyplace else. But religion raises complications by an order of magnitude. Nationalists can compromise under mutually agreeable terms. Religious fundamentalism makes compromise impossible.
December 28th, 2005 at 11:31 am
“Generalizing about it, though, I take it to mean a belief in religion’s fundamental truths supposedly as revealed in the past and a commitment to following those truths today regardless of alternative values such as democracy and regardless of consequences for other people, especially those who don’t share the same views. Given my general anti-religious perspective, my negative assessment of fundamentalism in particular is no surprise.”
With respect to the above comment (of yours); Democracy is not a value. Democracy has its place even in the Torah but it cannot be used in matters of truth if that “truth” is not to be at the mercy of the media. We have the ridiculous situation where the truth of the theory of evolution is based on the number of people who are supposed to believe it and on the law in the USA apparently forbidding any contrary arguments.
There is no reason why fundamentalists, even those you mistakenly call fundamentalists, should not follow their own opinions any less than others, athiests and yourself included. You will find people who try to force their will on others just as much if not more among the democratic public. Lots of people oppose and even break the law. They just have to take the consequences like anyone else. You should not take the actions of a small group of people with whome you disagree as the basis for an onslaught on an idea, any idea. Ideas are independent of people and can only be argued with on an ideas level and not on a people level. Fundamental Judaism, as I understand it, merely believes that the word of God is the truth by definition. If the people who claim to be following it only took into account the whole of the law, written and oral and understood it correctly there would be no problem. Quite the reverse.