The collapse of liberalism and the growth of fundamentalism

The so-called 'global growth of fundamentalism' is in fact a global - albeit gradual - collapse of liberalism. This is an abridged version of the lecture given last November at the University of Minnesota by Vishal Mangalwadi.

The militancy of the terrorists, the discrimination and persecution of the religious or ethnic minorities, the corruption and oppression of the state, are together demolishing liberalism's assumption that a human being is good enough to govern himself decently without God.
A phrase such as 'Hindu fundamentalism' is meaningless because in Hinduism there are no theological or ethical 'fundamentals' to which anyone has to adhere. A devout Hindu can be passionately committed to the non-violence of vegetarianism. But a 'left-hand' tantric, practising human sacrifice and drinking the blood of his victim, is just as devout a Hindu as the vegetarian is. Many Hindus would indeed condemn the tantric as a 'bad' Hindu. But what they may not realise is that unwittingly they are judging their faith by 'Western' standards. They assume that whatever does not conform to the Western values is not good Hinduism.

Political theory

The label 'liberalism' has been attached to various movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. As a political theory, liberalism denied the doctrine of the depravity of man and affirmed the natural goodness of human beings. It stood for the autonomy of the individual, favoured civil and political liberties; government by law with the consent of the governed; and protection from arbitrary authority. Within the Roman Catholic church, it was a theologically orthodox movement that advocated democracy and ecclesiastical reforms.
The liberal-fundamentalist controversy was a Protestant phenomenon in the 1920s in the United States. The 'liberals' were those who pitched human rationality against divine revelation. Liberal rationalistic theology began to deny some of the fundamental tenets of the Bible. It questioned God's ability to reveal himself, to heal the sick and to act miraculously. In denying the resurrection of Christ, liberalism made death, instead of God, the author of life, to be the ultimate reality.
From questioning creeds, theological liberalism moved on to question ethical norms. One of its latest fads is campaigning for homosexuals to be ordained as clergy. Having unanchored itself from the Bible, liberalism had no option but to float at the mercy of the winds of the world - even when they became whirlwinds. It did not merely favour Marxism over capitalism, in Germany the liberal church went as far as defending and championing Nazism.

Spirituality?

Those Protestants who felt that liberalism did not leave enough room for God to act in his own creation reacted against it. In contrast to liberalism's materialism, they continued to affirm spirituality. These Protestants were called 'fundamentalists'. Inadequacy of human reason had been well established by the European thinkers such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. Therefore, liberalism could not win the debate for the sufficiency reason and an impossibility of revelation. Yet, supported by the secular media, liberals did win the day. Fundamentalism became a dirty word. Now, however, Protestant liberalism is a dying phenomenon. Its churches are empty, if not being sold as clubs. Its seminaries and publishing houses are being wound up.
No one is lamenting the death of Protestant liberalism. The gradual collapse of secular liberalism, however, is raising some 'fundamental' questions. Do individuals have 'fundamental' rights? Are religious tolerance, political freedom, rule-of-law, social justice and equal worth of all human beings merely Western values? Or do these values transcend human cultures and are, therefore, binding on all societies? Are all cultures equally valid or should those cultures be reformed that chronically violate these values? Are all belief-systems equally true or should worldviews be discarded that teach that human beings are created unequal; we have no 'inalienable' rights; moral law is only a figment of human imagination? Is the law 'Thou shalt not kill' a real law, binding over the monarchs and the majorities - ethnic or religious?

Biblical revelation

Is it a coincidence that liberalism was birthed and nurtured in a Judeo-Christian milieu, and not in Islamic Iraq, Confucianist China, Buddhist Japan or Hindu India? The historical fact is that liberalism simply hijacked the values of its religious matrix and called them 'natural laws' instead of recognising them as peculiar products of biblical revelation. Liberalism spread globally because it was also able to hijack the press, and educational and other institutions that the Christian missions and other Western agencies had built in non-Western parts of the globe. The leaders of the ruling Hindu Nationalist Party (BJP) themselves claim that 80% of the independent India's constitution was written by the British in 1935 - that is, 12 years before independence.
Liberalism is collapsing globally be-cause it deliberately destroyed the philosophical source that gave birth to the values it cherishes. In rejecting the authority of the sovereign God, it has condemned us to be ruled over exclusively by sinful men. In denying the depravity of the human heart, liberalism also ruled out the need for our spiritual regeneration.

Real freedom

Replacing our monarch with a majority rule does not equal freedom. The ethnic and religious majorities can be as oppressive and brutal as a dictatorship. It was a democratic majority in Greece that killed Socrates. Hitler had the democratic support of the Aryan majority in Germany. Freedom involves re-straining the power of the rulers, whether they are monarchs or majorities. Which cultures have been able to restrain political power effectively? Those that have submitted to the rule of the transcendent law of sovereign God. When a prominent Hindu leader justifies the gang rape of nuns, he simply acknowledges that his belief system does not have a transcendent law that could restrain the power of the majority. Liberalism could not sustain the idea of the unique dignity and fundamental rights of every individual because:

- its biology dismissed man as nothing more than an animal;

- its chemistry considered him nothing more than a complex compound;

- its psychology denied that he had an independent psyche - soul; and

- its post-modernism deconstructed his self as a myth - no-thing more than an
expression of one's culture.

Dignity of human beings is not a notion decreed by human rulers. It depends on the value the Creator puts on his creation. Of course, cultures other than the Judeo-Christian one have known God to be compassionate towards man because of his special value. A decisive issue that gave birth to the idea of the inalienable rights of man is: how valuable is man? Or how compassionate is God towards human beings?
I have two daughters. Suppose one of them rebels against me, rejects everything my wife and I have taught her and decides to disobey. She gets into drugs, crime and violence; gets caught in a whirlpool of her own making and begins to sink. What would I do if her life were in danger? Would I send her merely faxes, e-mails, more commandments and prophets, or would I at some stage go myself to do whatever I can to try and save her - even if it costs me my own life? The experiment with democratic freedom succeeded in the Western culture only because in the West, the value of a human being was defined by the cross on Calvary. Liberalism undermined freedom - its cherished value - because it dismissed the Creator's definition of who man is.

Mr. Vishal Mangalwadi is an author, international lecturer and winner of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar Distinguished National Service Award.

The collapse of liberalism and the growth of fundamentalism

An international perspective on the role of religion in public affairs

Political theory

Spirituality?

Biblical revelation

Real freedom

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