The important thing is not fundamentalism, which is not inherently violent. It can be as peaceful as a Hindu hermit or the Pennsylvania Dutch. The important variable in making it violent is its interplay with politics, states and aggrieved nationalism. And that was just as true for the Reformation as it is today.
Michael
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I am picking up this thread off the archives, since I wasn't following it over the week (no interest in Hitchens). I think Michael Pollak is probably right that it is a mistake to consider a parallel with the Reformation in quite the way that Brad DeLong presented it:
``...The parallels are striking: a dominant clergy and aristocracy that seem to have lost their way and succumbed to materialism; a rising literate middle class; the mass distribution of personal copies of the Holy Book so that people can read it and think for themselves; and then terror, as those who have convinced themselves that they bear the will of God take action, and people fight and die...''(BD)
And Mike proposes:
``...Besides the fact that history never repeats itself exactly, Islam seems to me to be missing several preconditions to a reformation exactly where it shares similarities with Judaism. In both cases, despite their greater rhetorical fixation on being peoples of the `book,' in fact they are peoples of the commentaries, which are endless and bottomless, and impress that fact upon their adherents. Secondly, studying the commentaries has always been a duty of all religious laymen. Holy men are generally revered as sages rather than as saints by others who all consider themselves students. It is almost the opposite of the absolute divide that marked pre-reformation Catholicism. For both these reasons, there is no instant explosive secret waiting to be discovered through the once-forbidden key of literacy. On the contrary, both religions have always been built around teaching as many members as possible to read the holy language -- that's what the religious schools that everyone's afraid of do. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in both religions there is no pope and no unified Church bureaucracy. What you have instead is a hopelessly tangled web of rabbis and imams....''(MP)
And yet I think both Mike and Brad miss something which is shared by the Reformation, and current events. Simply put that is the creation of national states. Because Brad cast the Reformation as a revolt against the Pope and clergy's hegemony over the `word', and Mike followed suit, you both missed the power struggles between monarchical states, popular political/religious sentiments, and the Catholic Church. Right from the beginning Luther was seen as a threat to secular power because his activities coincidented with a local peasant revolt against the landed aristocracy. The big fear was that the two revolts would link together and become an overwhelming force against the tentative alliance of german principalities that were under the provisional governance of the German Holy Roman Emperor (The particulars here might be wrong--this is from memory.)
So the religious wars of the Reformation that followed were intimately tied to secular power maneuvers to keep the bulk of the population under control (and fighting in various armies), in order to establish various geo-political positions relative to the other european monarchies in their ever changing temporary alliances and hostilities.
What makes the Reformation period an interesting parallel is its intermixing of secular geo-political power games with the religious sectarian sentiments of various populations--which were combined in the rise of the european national states. The ultimate outcome of the Reformation was the French Revolution. One of its goals evolved quickly into a secular terrorism against the clergy. This was a twist or reversal of events, since the Catholic clergy were participants in the original revolt in anticipation of establishing a Catholic state.
Where all these religious branches (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) find their center is the Old Testament---which if read as I am reading now, is about founding of society and the trials and tribulations of building a religious state (Pentateuch). All the various commentary traditions make up the regulation of society and foundation of state.
So, ultimately, I think I disagree that fundamentalisms are not inherently violent. I would say, the various ages of Fundamentalisms have always among the most violent, bloody, and chaotic.
Their violence stems from the conflict between secular and religious laws, which as a textual arena, represents differing conceptual frames for ordering society that are in turn used by political parties in their endless struggles for domination of state power.
Chuck Grimes