On Genetic Fundamentalism

‘The believer will not let his belief be torn from him, either by arguments or prohibitions’

Modern Christian fundamentalism began in the USA in the Deep South in the early 1900s. A reaction to modernism, the Fundamentals of the Bible were widely circulated in a response to the increasing impoverishment of the American agricultural South relative to the industrial North. Central to the Christian fundamentalism of the USA was its famous opposition to the modern materialist story of creation - Darwin's descent of the species through natural selection operating on the genes.

The conventional representations of modernism include only its successes wrapped in the myth of progress. But modernism includes unspeakable cruelties in its history, from slavery, child labour, and genocide in the nineteenth century to industrialized murder in the twentieth, to Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Iraq in the twenty-first. Modernism can be as profoundly threatening as it can be profoundly liberating.

Fundamentalism has arisen in response to modernism in its cruel and malign incarnation. Fundamentalists fear annihilation. Annihilation anxiety is perhaps the most terrifying of all affects known to the human psyche. With their backs to the wall, fundamentalists reject modernism, including its science, replacing its undoubted efficacy with their own. This is why creation science has arisen in the USA, with its bid for equal time in American school science curricula in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

But modernism as a global phenomenon has generated similar feelings of hope and fear in every section of every society. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, is one response. Ironically, there is another response to modernism, one that utilizes science itself as a myth to give meaning and solace in the face of the present limitations and inequities of modernism. Genetic fundamentalism is a myth created within the culture of science orig