It is getting hard to see what fundamentalism has to do with religion.

Take the Beslan carnage. What was it really about except a brutalized nationalism? The attackers’ sole demand was for Russia to leave Chechnya. They said they were ready to die because they had lost their families and had nothing to lose.

These are not religious motives even if the people holding them are Muslim extremists. It’s stunning how many fundamentalist groups are based on creating a strong, transformed state: in Israel, or the Taliban, the (Buddhist) Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka — and don’t forget U.S. right-wing evangelicals, who carry great weight in the Republican Party and White House. Even bin Ladenism is obsessed with the humiliation of Muslim and especially Arab nations. In a way, it is Arab nationalism for this century, though it cloaks itself in fanatical religious garb.

Let me carry this thoughtline further. After the 1967 Mideast war, many U.S. evangelicals began backing hard-line Israeli positions. They opposed internationalizing Jerusalem, trading land for peace and a state for Palestinians. Why? In their so-called literal reading of the Bible, the creation of Israel would lead to the return of Christ, the final battle with the Antichrist etc. Goals like peace or justice for Palestinians might get in the way, postponing the whole scenario. Jerry Falwell warned, “There’s not going to be any real peace in the Middle East until the Lord Jesus sits down upon the throne of David in Jerusalem.” Presidents who sought a settlement were betraying their sacred mission. Only the current president has met the test.

There is a Hebrew phrase, dohek ha-kaytz, which means “forcing the end,” by trying to make the messiah appear through human effort. It’s about impatience. Some people find the waiting unbearable. Their death approaches, their pain is too great, they want answers to their questions (Why pain? Why evil? Why death?) — so they demand and insist that the end is about to burst forth. The signs are everywhere, they say. Look, Israel. Look, global warming. Look, the first Gulf war. Or the second.

Why is this unreligious? Malise Ruthven, in his book Fundamentalism, suggests the mindset trivializes and “mundanizes” the “transcendental” sources of religious experience. The point of most religion is not to shift all meaning to a heavenly realm, but to sanctify aspects of life on our level while remaining connected to a “higher” realm. That is what most ritual, prayer and acts of goodness intend. They happen here but have meaning on that other level. Fundamentalism dissolves the tension between levels by wanting it all right here, right now, in terms of entities (the state of Israel, the axis of evil) that we can see and either embrace or destroy.

It’s so palpable. Here are the signs, here comes the Antichrist, there go the elect to hover above, now comes the cosmic battle and Bob’s your uncle. It makes religion an oddly unmysterious, unawe-inspiring thing, which moves you more as a horror film does than as the mysterium tremendum written about by historian Rudolf Otto: causing you to shudder and wonder. This only makes you feel icky and fretful.

The point about such fundamentalists is not just that they are being un-Christian or un-Muslim with their haughtiness, suicide etc. The point is they have actually secularized religion by — literally — bringing it down to earth.

Has anyone noticed, by the way, the new heft of weather on the news shows? Every hurricane is treated as portentously as a terror attack. Is that because it’s reassuring — a disaster, but at least no one is mad at us, and there’s nothing we could have done to stop it? Unless you’re a fundamentalist, that is, in which case it’s retribution — or a portent.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.