The Great War damaged Europe at its core. After, no one could be serenely optimistic about civilization and progress. The most cultivated nations had devastated each other. The people looked directly into the void. Economies faltered and the world fell into the Great Depression. The world seemed without pity, headed for catastrophe. Yet creativity in the arts and science abounded at this time. A new unexpected perspectives developed. Picasso. Atomic Physics. Anthropology. This was not “ad fontes”, it was a breaking and remaking of something new. Secular spirituality developed. Psychology had no place for religion. Art had no place for God. Freud revealed the cauldron of the unconscious, primitive psyche. Society was finding a new vision of what were the fundamentals of knowing.

Religious people too were having a new vision of the fundamentals. Many in the west had had a totally rational education and mystical traditions made little sense. They needed to ground their religion. Just as 2000 years earlier the world had transitioned in the First Axial Age from pagan to confessional religions, the present time was becoming a Second Axial Age. This difficult time is still in progress, and many attempts are being made.

In America the denominations were polarized. The social problems of unregulated industrial society had the conservatives and liberals working together for the social agenda. Despite their differences Protestants worked together for education, missions, prohibition and other areas. They felt America was christian and it only remained for business to become christian. They developed what became known as the social gospel to address issues like child labour, inner city strife, labour problems, immigration issues and the injustices to the poor. Conservatives were later to reject this social gospel and focus on salvation of souls. In 1909 Charles Eliot of Harvard proposed a new fundamental religion which believed only in love of God and neighbour. No churches. No theology. No worship. No unique claim of truth. He believed in the practice not the preaching of compassion. This appalled the conservatives who were willing to work for these same things, but were completely unwilling to leave church and scripture. In 1910 the Princeton Presbyterians formulated the famous 5 dogmas and called them “The Fundamentals” in a series of booklets they delivered to every pastor, professor and theology student in the USA (3 million). These 5 fundamentals were:

1. the inerrency of Scripture.

2. the Virgin Birth of Christ

3. Christ's atonement for our sins on the cross,

4. his bodily resurrection, and

5. the objective reality of his miracles.This item would later be replaced by premilleniumism.

Although the pamphlets were not radical or militant, this project became seen as the “germ of the movement”.

Armstrong says what transformed many American Protestant Conservatives into Fundamentalists was the Great War. Premilleniumism seemed not only vindicated as a read on scripture, but to be coming true at this very time. It was with increasing awe that they mapped the events of their time to their read of biblical prophesy. The horror of the war seemed to confirm apocalyptic descriptions in Revelation. 3 big prophesy conferences were held 1914-18 where these “signs of the times” were searched out and correlated with the help of the Scofield Reference Bible. The British Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish homeland amazed them, because they read the bible to declare this as preceeding the Endtime. Scofield identified Russia as a player in Armageddon and the atheist Bolshevik Revolution fit this well. The League of Nations was seen as the revived Roman empire led by Antichrist. Increasingly they felt they alone had the keys to understanding of the world. They saw this as a struggle for the future of civilization. When the same country that issued higher criticism also carried out the horror of Holocaust, they felt even more convinced of their belief.

One consequence of this perspective was that they increasingly saw the world as dangerous and the foreign as demonic. The modern trends to centralization were seen as trending to the oneworld government of the end. It was a retreat into tribalism. When people feel they are fighting for their lives, they are not kindly, they are aggressive. Their Jesus also transformed from the peaceful person of the gospel to the avenger of Revelation.

The liberals had their own difficulties with the Great War, for it challenged their belief in a world progressing to a higher plane. And the violence of the premillenial vision of the conservatives and critique of the League of Nations upset them greatly. It seemed un-American and un-Christian. They did not show love and compassion. In 1917 the University of Chicago Divinity School initiated a nasty attack on the Moody Bible Institute accusing them of bad theology and being traitors. Things got worse and worse in this most un-Christian exchange. It increased the polar positions of each side and pretty much prevented reconciliation between them.

In 1919 the WCFA (World's Christian Fundamentals Association) was formed to promote the “literal interpretation of scripture and the scientific doctrines of premillenialism” and carried out tours to 18 cities. This was most enthusiastically accepted across the country. It was carried out as a battle with militant language. For example at the Northern Baptist Convention the “fundamentalist” was defined “one who was ready to regain territory which had been lost to Antichrist and to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith. ... a war from which there is no discharge.” Most of the fundamentalists were Baptists and Presbyterians. The next objective became to expel the liberals from the denominations. With the Baptists and Presbyterians this became civil war. The liberals were considered to be un-Christian, even pagan. There was much acrimony. By 1923 the fundamentalists had largely achieved their goal.

But then the Scopes trial took place in Tennessee in 1925. A crusade had been mounted to remove the teaching of evolution from the schools. The American south were much more conservative than the north and there was no need for the fundamentalism that had developed in the north. Southern christians were much in agreement with the northern fundamentalists, and very anti-evolution. The trial became a battle of much more than the case agains John Scopes for teaching evolution in the classroom. It became a trial between God and science, with giant protagonists in the persons of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Scopes was actually found guilty, but Darrow had thoroughly discredited Bryan's religious perspectives with the press in full attendence. Fundamentalists were seen as anachronisms in modern America. They were quiet after the trial and the liberals regained control of the denominations.

Things seemed at détente. But there was much disappointment in fundamentalist ranks and they seized upon their perspectives and beliefs with even more zeal. Biblical literalism became very central to them. Before Scopes, both left and right worked together for social reform. After, the “social gospel” became tainted by liberalism and the fundamentalists moved to the political right.

Armstrong says this is a theme in her story, that “fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism, or secularism, and, under attack, invariably becomes more extreme, bitter, and excessive.”

In 1906 the Pentecostal church started in Los Angeles. It was remarkable in two ways. They experienced what the early church had experienced on Pentacost when the Holy Spirit gave people the gift of speaking in other languages – the gift of tonges. They became what we now call charismatics. The other special characteristic was that they were class free and colour blind in a time when society was neither. At first they thought the gift of tongues was a sign that the end times were near and Jesus would return very soon. With time, and the passage of the Great War, they rather understood this as a new spiritual expression – a new way to speak to God.

The Pentecostal movement according to theologian Harvey Cox “was an attempt to recover many of the experiences that the modern West had rejected.” a grassroots rebellion against modern reason. While fundamentalists were trying to join reason to religion, Pentecostals were bypassing reason, and searching out primal spirituality. Both were reactions to modern changes, yet the Pentacostals were seen by the fundamentalists as superstitious and fanatic. But as time passed, the Pentacostals were drawn into the fundamentalist camp and lost some of their sense of charity.

All faith traditions have considered the divine inexpressible. While much of the world was discounting religion, the Pentecostals showed that people still yearned for ecstasy and transcendence. Susan Sontag noted people presented with too much complexity share the mystic's impatience with the capacity of human speech. This seems then a byproduct of modernism and its blithering complexity.

In the Jewish world, there were also signs that people were beginning to retreat from the overly rational forms of faith that had developed during the 19^th century. Some German philosophers such as Herman Cohn and Franz Rosenzweig tried to make it possible for modern people to appreciate old ideas of myth and ritual. Torah could be seen as symbols pointing to the divine, with rites creating an interior attitude of listening to and waiting for the sacred. The biblical stories were not facts but expressions of spiritual realities in our lives.

Others revealed new value and understandings in the traditional. Martin Buber showed the richness of the Hasid tradition, and Gershom Scholem that of the Kabbalah.

And Zionists were planning a secular rather than religious solution, but like other modern fundamentalisms, Zionism was single minded and declaring a new fundamental value – a return to the essense of Judaism. The land of Zion would heal the Jew where God had failed. Their direction was scientific and modern, but they used orthodox Jewish terminology. In 1904, Aharon David Gordon settled in Galilee and experienced the Shekhinah (God in the world) and felt that only in Zion could the Jews find their soul. “For the Zionist, holiness and wholeness were no longer to be found in conventional relgious practices, but in their hard labour in the hlls and farms of Galilee.”

Rabbi Abraham Yitzak Kook immigrated to Palestine in 1904 to become the rabbi of the new settler communities. There was unexpected importance here. He was horrified that the Zionists rejected religion. This was a poison, an abomination, a death sentence. He was (before the Great War) one of the first to recognize the demonic power of nationalism that was missing a sense of the sacred. He used the French revolution as an example. But unlike the Orthodox community that hated Zionism, Kook saw the Zionist movement as directed by God even if they were unawares of it. These secular settlers he found were a hard working honest people. He saw their rebellion and insolence as evidence of the coming of the Messiah. The secularists were pushing history forward. The religious and the secular Jew needed each other. Each was at battle with the other, but each had a part of truth. It was the division of labour that logos and mythos had always been. Like other moderns he saw the end of the old agrarian society and a world of constant change. Unless this was connected to the mythos of Judaism, it would fail. The Great War could be seen as a Lurianic “breaking of the vessels”, a part of the creative process of history. “It was a messianic dream.” In his own lifetime we was regarded something of a crank and had few followers. He died in 1935 13 years before the State of Israel was formed. It would be his son much later that would make this new mythos a program for political action and turn it into a form of fundamentalism.

In 1912, a new political part Agudat Israel (The Union of Israel) was formed and attracted the Mizrachi, religious Zionists and had no place for secular Zionists. Most were neo-Orthodox and so modern in outlook. They were not shocked by the world but wanted to change it. Agudat gathered much strength over the Jewish world. And in this it shows the development of fundamentalism within a religious community. At first traditionalists try to find ways to adapt their faith to the new challenge – as did the Eastern European members. They try to show modern ideas are not alien to their tradition. But as society grows more secular and rational they begin to find a limit to their accomodations. They begin to see secular modernity as opposed to conservative premodern religion, and worse they see it as threatening core values of that religion. A return to the fundamentals comes forward and a counteroffensive is planned.

The Muslim societies Armstrong considers had not reached this stage yet. Modernism in Egypt had a long way to go yet, and had not yet begun in Iran. Fundamentalism would not appear in the Muslim world until this pattern of conflict with modernism had established itself. This was beginning to show itself in Turkey at this time. After the Great War, Turkey was recast as a secular state. The Ottoman Empire had fought with Germany and so was dismembered by the victors into protectorates. Mustafa Kemel Ataturk repelled Greek invasion and established a modern state. By 1947 Turkey had an effective bureaucracy, a capitalist economy and a multiparty democracy. One notes that like many other modern states, it began with the ethnic cleansing of over a million Greek and Armenian people.

Attaturk was aggressive also with his westernizing of Turkey. Religion was made subordinate. Sufi orders were abolished. The madrasahs were closed. Western dress was required by law. This destruction of Islamic tradition by Attaturk would be remembered by all Muslims in their own countries later, as something that was part and parcel of modernism.

Egypt tried to gain independence but these attempts were suppresse d by Britain. A disciple of Abdu, Lufti al-Sayyid saw nationalism as the key and Islam only as the instrument to this end – it was merely the state religion. Ali Abd al-Raziq wrote that Egypt should even sever its connection to Islam. An outcry ensued over this. Journalist Rashid Rida was the first Muslim to propose a modern Islamic state based on the Shariah. Rida was the biographer of Abdu but less enthralled by the Europeans. He was a reformer in the tradition of Abd al-Wahhab, wanting to counter foreign domination by a return “ad fontes”. While honouring the Islam of the first generation, he wanted the learning and values of the west to be introduced in an Islamic context. He envisaged a seminary where all learning, modern and traditinal, was found. Such would he make leaders suited to modern times. Rida was no fundamentalist, but his work would much affect later fundamentalist development. He was appalled by Attaturks violence and felt that the violence of both Christian and Muslim was due to the decline of religion.

In Iran, the “secret” of the west was seen as constitutional government. They saw Japan move from feudal society to a constitutional government and defeat Russia, and were impressed. Since unlike Egypt where the ulema had retreated from engagement, the Iranian ulema were in the vanguard of change. In 1906 there was a general action by the ulema against the high sugar tariffs which led to a promise (broken) by the shah for reform. The mullahs of Tehran made exodus to Qum and some 14000 merchants took refuge in the British legation bringing business to a halt. Thus began the constitutional revolution. They had much success and a constitution was made. But secular law contested with Shariah law, and much disagreement ensued between the factions of reform. Token reference to the Shariah was put in law, but the great power of the mullahs had gone. Then in 1908 this difficult beginning came apart. A coup led to the execution of the ulema. A countercoup was cut to size by the European powers and Russian troops occupied Tehran. It was years before the Majlis (parliamentarians) were given effective power again.

The Great War was disruptive for Iran. The British were occupiers. They rigged the elections. The Majlis had no power. Oil had been discovered in 1909 and Iran was a rich prize. In 1921, Reza Khan made a coup and became shah. He began to aggressively modernize the country and the worn out people did not object this time. He had no concern for the poor or social reform, but only for the economy of the country. He courted the Americans and Russians to eject the British. Standard Oil of California replaced the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Iran as the major oil concession. Reza was a ruthless leader.

Religion had lost power to secularism in Iran, and as limitations of modernism became apparent, the cut-down radical movements would rise again.