Charles Taylor in Public Culture 18.2

Charles Taylor, insightful as ever, but not really understanding any but the most extreme of protestant hermeneutics I feel:

There is not one thing, called “religion,” which previously receded and is now coming back, like some raging tsunami. What we call secularization is a process that deeply destabilized and marginalized earlier forms of religion; but, partly as a consequence of this, new forms have arisen. The forms that are now “returning” in strength are thoroughly modern, and we cannot understand either them or modernity if we ignore this.

Ironically, the most obvious site of novelty lies in what are called, in the rough and rather confused language of media commentary, “fundamentalisms.” These are usually so called because they see themselves as harking back to earlier, purer forms of religion, beyond the recent compromises of modernism. So Protestant fundamentalism sees itself as returning to the purity of the Reformation sola scriptura (by scripture alone), which in turn saw itself as a return to primitive Christianity. Influential Islamicist Sayyid Qutb proposes to return to the principles alive in the first polity established by the Prophet and his companions. The irony and pathos here lie in the fact that precisely these attempts to return to purer forms are the sites of the most startling innovations; what is more, they feed on those innovations that are usually seen as quintessentially modern.

Thus the notion of literal Biblical inerrancy, with its clear distinction from and hostility to the figurative, is plainly part of the culture that has developed around modern positivistic science. Evolutionary theory has to be opposed by “creation science.” Augustine, one of the great reference figures for Western Protestantism, would be bewildered by this discourse, recognizing as he did many levels of meaning in the Biblical text. Protestant fundamentalists deviate from age-old Christian orthodoxy precisely in their wholesale acceptance of this modern positivist literalism, all the while loudly proclaiming their fidelity to the original pure form of Christianity.

What notion of 'literal Bibilical inerrancy', we may well ask, is this of which he speaks? But still, it is interesting to note the sheer modernity/postmodernity of fundamentalisms...