The fundamentalists.

• Author: Bulliet, Richard W.
• Position: Essay

Many people believe the world is--or should be--reaching a consensus on the universal and inevitable superiority of the rationalistic, humane and rights-based values of Western civilization.

In stark contrast, the "end-time is nigh, secular humanism seduces people from their faith, and personal behavior with respect to God is (or should be) our primary concern" school of thought is attracting an increasing number of adherents.

The secularists' vision of the world's future fits the uplifting story of the past few centuries contained in most American history books. The venerable Great Books curriculum of Columbia University, for example, exposes undergraduates to the key thoughts of the greatest Western thinkers. Plato and Aristotle rub shoulders with Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, and we continue reading both secular and religious texts up to the time of Luther and Calvin. Then we turn a page. No more readings about religion. Instead we follow the path of reason from Hobbes to Locke to Kant to Marx to Nietzsche to Freud.

Did debates about faith come to an end three hundred years ago? No. But the readings are not intended to chronicle the history of Western thought; they are intended to teach the lesson of admiration for rationality and the liberal values suitable to our times. This is the Western-civilization-trumps-all narrative.

Our schools teach that "modernity" (whatever that is) took shape at a certain point in European history. Secularism, democracy, human rights, gender parity and opposition to racism constitute the bright side of modernity. Consumerism, imperialist domination, genocide and the decay of social institutions constitute the dark side. Historical studies have illuminated both the rough and the smooth.

But as this historical narrative meets the present, it expresses a less and less positive view of people with strong religious beliefs. If religious adherents hold their peace and don't make a fuss about their faith, it treats them as the dwindling remnant of a once-important, and indeed honorable, tradition which reminds us that Judeo-Christian civilization at one time involved religion. If, on the other hand, they carry on about things the march-of-rationality believers do not like, they are branded with the mark of Cain: irrational religious zealots, enemies of freedom, violators of human rights or, at the furthest extreme, terrorist fanatics.

Yet, doesn't all of that put good Christian people who feel that abortion and homosexuality are abominations in the same basket with Muslim terrorists who decapitate hostages, burn American flags and blow up American embassies?

Though historians do tip their hats to those few believers, nowadays termed "moderates" or "reformers," who contrive to accommodate the noble ends of modernity to the tenets of their faith--bold voices speaking out against obscurantism and fanaticism!--more commonly people of faith who fail to embark on the modernity cruise ship are portrayed as missing the boat--or is it the juggernaut?--of history.

The phrase "teleological history" encapsulates the search for roots. In Greek, a telos is an "end," so "teleological" denotes the "study of an end." Of course, different people think of ends differently. For a follower of Hegel, the flow of history leads toward maximizing the principle of freedom; for a Marxist, it leads to a communist utopia.

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For ordinary historians, however, teleological history is more mundane. They stick their thumbs in the air, guess where their society is headed, and then ransack archives and half-forgotten tomes to cobble together the story of where and with whom this heading originated. Thus a world careening toward a telos imbued with Western liberal values and economic success--call it globalization, for short--demands a historical narrative that reveals the roots of these prized qualities.

When Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle East historians, saw how many Muslims were choosing not to follow the Christians and Jews of Europe down the garden path of modernity, he famously asked: "What went wrong?" Teleological history makes this an acceptable question--if not a very useful one. It takes for granted that history is headed in a certain direction. So if some people have strayed from the path, something must have gone wrong.

The political scientist Samuel Huntington, Lewis's ideological soul mate, put forward an alternative approach in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. For him, modernity is not for everyone. If you belong to the wrong civilization, which in his view Muslims certainly do, you can never grasp the key values that underlie Western modernity. He doesn't ask how the Muslims went wrong. Being Muslims, they just couldn't help it.

But does this mean that everyone in Western civilization is on the right track? Huntington confronted this awkward assumption in 2004 in a book entitled Who Are We? Secularized Protestants, he opined, have been more adept than anyone else at following the trail of liberal and rational thought blazed by our Founding Fathers. Americans from other backgrounds must learn to try harder.

Thinkers who are captivated by the dream of world-embracing modernity cannot account for faith-based conviction. At least not in civil language. Those who believe they answer to God do not fit into the history in which the modernist teleologists believe. Being out of step with the times, it is a group that should have disappeared long ago. Their beliefs have caused them to lose track of where the...