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Enclave Religiosity and Ecumenical Dialogue
Appleby, Scott R.

*1. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once noted an important distinction between religious people and communities who are “held by the faith,” and those who “must hold the faith.” The first type lives in an era of orthodoxy, a time and a place where the believing community takes for granted certain principles and assumptions buttressing a worldview. In such a social environment the “plausibility structures” of the religious imagination are firmly in place, reinforced in a cultural matrix of home, school, neighborhood and workplace. Would-be dissenters are rare, stigmatized and marginalized.

A central element of the parlance and practice of Roman Catholics in the United States of the 1950s, for example, was the notion of “purgatory,” universally believed by Catholics of the day to be an actual “place” where God shipped dearly departed souls, that they might continue their atonement for sins they had committed while on earth. Children facing a trip to the dentist, a scraped knee, or other routine calamities (as well as real tragedies, such as the death of a parent) were told to “offer up” their suffering for the souls in purgatory, and they did so, remarkably, without experiencing the cognitive dissonance, or sense of embarrassment, that one might expect to accompany such an affirmation in mid-twentieth century America. Indeed, the religious imagination of Catholics was shaped so profoundly by redemptive suffering and by similar doctrines, symbols and socially embedded practices comprising an energetic supernaturalism, that few if any practicing Catholics paused to reflect critically upon the merits of such a notion as purgatory. It simply did not occur to them to do so.

And then, Geertz observes, the community encounters the “acids of modernity.” Modern techno-scientific culture reduces the communal whole into separate, self-contained compartments of knowledge (called disciplines or professions), each with its own technical expertise, specialized discourse, insular practices – and, eventually, its own sociocultural values and lifestyle. Differentiation on this order – between “church and state,” the religious and the secular, public and private modes of action and speech – has the cumulative effect of an irresistible centrifugal force, prying apart what was once a tightly knit, centered community of shared faith and practice.

In the Catholic case, the transformative encounter with secular modernity was embodied in the event of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which gave official endorsement to pluralism in Catholic theology, opened the scriptures to the ordinary layperson, and emphasized the individual’s moral autonomy at the expense of hierarchical, community-based authority and uniformity of practice and belief. The reforms were introduced by the Council, moreover, just as a generation of university-educated American Catholics was entering the professional class, moving to the suburbs, and affiliating with other American cohorts on the basis of occupational rather than religious or ethnic identity. Thus, under the pressure of liberalization within the orthodox community of believers, magnified in its impact by the rapid secularization of the larger American social environment, supernaturalist (and hence, in modern America, countercultural) beliefs such as purgatory quickly passed from the religious imagination, symbol structure and daily vocabulary of American Catholics. Most mothers stopped telling their children to offer their sufferings for the souls in purgatory; confessors ceased invoking the image of souls in labor, working their way up Dante’s seven-storied Mt. Purgatory to Paradise; deceased loved ones were assumed simply to “be with God,” a rather bland formula with no hope (or intent) of stirring people’s souls to penitence.

By the mid-1970s, Catholics who wanted to persist in the traditional devotional mode were forced “to hold onto the faith,” as Geertz puts it. What had been routine and uncontested – the affirmation of a supernatural worldview “with teeth” – now became strained and contentious. Catholics who insisted on a literal reading of doctrines like purgatory, the Virgin Birth, or the infallibility of the pope, found that it was necessary for them to insist. Orthodoxy could no longer be assumed.

In this climate, orthodoxy became a litmus test separating the fervent from the lukewarm, the true believer from the impostor. Rather than a gently but firmly held set of convictions shaping a community’s shared sensibilities and way of life, the faith became a weapon against infidels, an instrument of discrimination. Assertions of what was once uncontested piety now seemed unnatural and forced. Now, in an ironic turn of events, those likely to be marginalized were not the dissenters but the guardians of orthodoxy – the shrinking number of believers who demanded that knowledge, practices and norms drawn from the secular, pluralist milieu be subordinated to the traditional verities. Some within their rank began to call themselves Orthodox Roman Catholics (the modifier having been unnecessary before the liberalization). Increasingly perceived by their fellow Catholics as fanatics, they were labeled “traditionalists” or, borrowing a term from the American Protestant world, Catholic “fundamentalists.”

Indeed, the Protestants who originally coined the term “fundamentalist” reacted to assaults on the Bible in the same way Catholics reacted to the erosion of belief in purgatory and other traditional teachings of the Catholic Church. As early as 1920, Curtis Lee Laws, an editorialist writing for the Baptist Watchman-Examiner, pledged to do “battle royal” for the fundamentals of the Christian religion by vying against its enemies – the professors of biblical criticism infiltrating the seminaries and the evolutionists infiltrating the denomination-based universities, colleges and high schools. Laws and thousands of other self-styled “Protestant fundamentalists” made “the strict inerrancy of the Bible” – the doctrine that the Bible was free of scientific and historical, as well as spiritual and theological error – the bedrock of an innovative reaction to the encroachments of liberalism and modernism in the mainline denominations.

In the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the 1970s and 1980s, “strict inerrancy” was the hot-button issue in internecine battles among evangelical Christians in the United States. Today, as a result of the fundamentalist victory within the nation’s second largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, the presidents, administrators, and faculty of Southern Baptist seminaries and mission agencies are required to testify to their adherence to the doctrine of strict inerrancy. The faith has indeed become a litmus test.

The Catholic traditionalists and Protestant fundamentalists have putative counterparts in the Jewish and Islamic worlds. Scholars, as well as their own co-religionists, have identified two quite different clusters of Jewish groups as “fundamentalist” – the religious nationalists of the settler movement known as Gush Emunim (the “Bloc of the Faithful”), and the anti-Zionist “ultra-Orthodox” or haredim (“the anxious ones”). Western journalists who covered the 1978-79 Shi’ite-led revolution in Iran tended to associate Khomeini’s brand of political Islam with fanatical “medievalism.” Searching for a familiar idiom for angry and intolerant religious conservatives, they applied “fundamentalism” to Islamic militants, whatever the latter’s sectarian pedigree or country of origin. The label stuck.

An Egyptian schoolteacher, Sayyid Qutb, introduced the most influential fundamentalist-style innovation in Sunni Islam. Qutb, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote a revolutionary treatise in the mid-sixties while imprisoned by the Nasser regime. Signposts Along the Road (also translated under the title Milestones) lamented the rise of “jahiliyya” society, characterized by a new barbarism, ignorance and apostasy known previously only in the era before the advent of Islam. Because Arab nations and peoples had fallen prey to the enticements and immoralities of Western cultures, Qutb argued, true Muslims could no longer accept at face value the traditional marks of Islamic identity – the profession of faith, the pilgrimage to Mecca, zakat or alms-giving, daily prayer, and observance of Ramadan. In the age of jahiliyya, so-called Muslims might uphold these pillars of Islam, but still pose a threat to Allah’s sovereignty. The immediate threat thus comes from traitors found within the abode of Islam – “false Muslims” who make an external show of orthopraxis and orthodoxy, but who have inwardly capitulated to the secular, atheistic forces of the West.

Qutb’s disciples have destabilized parts of the Middle East and other regions throughout the Sunni world. The Jihad group of Egypt assassinated the so-called “believing president,” Anwar Sadat, whose peace treaty with Israel, they claimed, revealed him to be a jahiliyya ruler. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind shaykh convicted of conspiring to destroy the World Trade Center and other public sites in New York City, railed against Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, on similar grounds. Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi businessman accused of masterminding terrorist attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, also drinks from Qutb’s ideological wells, as do Sunni extremists in Pakistan and India.


2. In an article entitled “Migration, Acculturation, and the New World of Texts,” Haym Soloveitchik, professor of Jewish history and literature at Yeshiva University, provides remarkable insight into the mental world of haredi Judaism by exploring the historical trends and social dynamics that led to a hardening and splintering of segments of the Orthodox community and to the emergence of a vanguard of “fundamentalist-style” true believers. His essay is instructive for our exploration of enclave religiosity.

While traditional Jewish society has always been regulated by the normative written word (e.g., the Talmud and its halakhic codes), Soloveitchik notes, the transmission of the traditional Jewish way of life had been mimetic – absorbed from parents and domestic rituals, patterned on conduct observed in neighborhood, synagogue and school. It was, indeed, a way of life, lived at a time when people were “held by the faith” and experienced it not only in prayer and divine service, but also in food and drink, dress, sexual relations between husband and wife, the rhythms of work and patterns of rest. Often these mimetic norms conformed to the sacred law, but occasionally they strayed from its letter while nonetheless remaining true to its spirit. Soloveitchik provides an example: the rigid separation of milk and meat in kosher kitchen – separate dishes for milk and for meat, separate sinks, dishracks, towels, tablecloths, and so on. Apparently, these measures have little basis in Jewish law. “The simple fact is that the traditional Jewish kitchen, transmitted from mother to daughter over generations, has been immeasurably and unrecognizably amplified beyond all halakhic requirements,” he writes. “Its classic contours are the product not of legal exegesis, but of the housewife’s religious intuition imparted in kitchen apprenticeship.”1

Indeed, the Ashkenazic community saw the Law as being manifested in both the canonized written corpus (the Talmud and codes) and the social practices of the people. Custom was “a correlative datum of the halakhic system”; frequently, the written word was reread in light of traditional behavior.2

Then, as Geertz (along with Max Weber and other theorists of religious modernization) might have predicted, the fragmentation of the orthodox community began, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, with the successive ideological assaults of modernity. In the Jewish case, these were the socialist, communist and Zionist movements, each of which carried the seeds of secularity within it. In urban areas, traditional life was severely shaken as thousands left the fold. The “surviving remnant,” the relatives and neighbors of those that perished in the Holocaust, relocated in Israel and the United States, where their habitual patterns of life were not possible. Some chose to adapt, as much as possible, to their new environment; the haredi chose, instead, to shelter themselves apart, in enclaves such as Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim.

This dispersion led to the de-coupling of the dual tradition of the intellectual and the mimetic, law as taught and law as practiced. Authors of legal commentaries and codes began to privilege the legal literature over the practice, perhaps reflecting an anxiety that orthopraxis was weakening as Jews were assimilated into the surrounding (gentile) society. Eventually, Soloveitchik explains, received practice had no longer an inherent validity of its own. One of the most striking phenomena of the contemporary haredi community, he notes, is the explosion of halakhic works on practical observance:

I refer...to the publications on tallit, tefillin (prayer shawls and phylacteries), works on the daily round of prayers and blessings in synagogue and home, tomes on High Holiday and Passover observance, books and pamphlets on every imaginable topic under the sun. The vast halakhic corpus is being scoured, new doctrines discovered and elicited, old ones given new prominence, and the results collated and published. Abruptly and within a generation, a rich literature of religious observance has been created, and it is one about articles used by Jews and performances they have been engaged in for thousands of years. These books, moreover, are avidly purchased and on a mass scale – sales in the thousands, occasionally in the tens of thousands. It would be surprising if such popularity were not some indicia of adoption....Much of the traditional religious practice has been undergoing massive reevaluation, and by popular demand, or, at the very least, by unsolicited popular consent. In Jerusalem and Stamford Hill, London, in Borough Park, New York, and Bnei-Brak, Israel, religious observance is being both amplified and raised to new, rigorous heights.

This transformation has, furthermore, taken place in the inner sanctum of the haredi world and has left nothing untouched.3

An outsider to this world quickly forms the impression that haredi Judaism has become overwhelmed by anxiety – by fear that the traditional way of life is slipping away, that memory and hence mimesis are failing the remnant, post-Holocaust community. The proliferation of “how-to” manuals and the rise of text-based, “litmus test” religiosity reflects the alienation of the faithful from their own domestic traditions. This, in turn, makes the fortification of artificial barriers – ideological walls to replace the unmistakable boundaries of the shtetl – the order of the day. Walking though the streets of Mea Shearim, one observes dozens of haredi sects, each competing with the next for ideological and behavioral purity. Nonetheless, Soloveitchik explains, “traditional conduct no matter how venerable, how elementary or how closely remembered, yields to the demands of theoretical knowledge. Established practice can no longer hold its own against the demands of the written word.”4

Here we approach the precincts of “fundamentalism.” One must hold tightly to the faith. Intentional, self-conscious religious conduct replaces social custom; adherence to texts and the letter of the law displaces mimesis; religious performance becomes highly ritualized. In short, “a way of life has become a regula, and behavior, once governed by habit, is now governed by rule.”
Assimilation, understood as the loss of identity that accompanies absorption into a larger, homogeneous, secular milieu, is the prepossessing fear of the haredim. Accordingly, they feel an urgent need to differentiate themselves from outsiders. Stringency in religious observance, dress, and lifestyle is the preferred means toward this end. “A tireless quest for absolute accuracy, for ‘perfect fit’ – faultless congruence between conception and performance – is the hallmark of contemporary haredi religiosity,” Soloveitchik writes.

As the inner differences erode, the outer ones must be increased and intensified, for, progressively, they provide more and more of the crucial otherness. In addition, the more rigorous and comprehensive the code of conduct, the less threatening the subtler inroads of the environment. The narrowing of the cultural divide has thrust a double burden on religious observance, as ritual must now do on its own what ritual joined with ethnicity had done before. Religious practice...had always served to separate Jews from their neighbors; however, it had not borne alone that burden. It was now being called upon to do so, for little else distinguished Jew from Gentile, or haredi from non-haredi, for that matter....

Both haredi and observer, however, would agree that it was the mooring of religion in sacred texts that enabled the reassertion of haredi difference.5


3. The patterns Rabbi Soloveitchik describes apply, mutatis mutandis, to Christian fundamentalists. When they first emerged from the Protestant churches, conservative evangelicals were anxious and angry, worried that evolutionism and the higher criticism of the Bible were threatening to discredit traditional Christian beliefs. Like fundamentalists in other settings, these evangelical Christians reacted by selecting certain traditional beliefs (Christ’s birth to a virgin, his blood atonement for human sins by death on the cross, bodily resurrection, and anticipated second coming in glory) and fortifying them with newly developed “fundamentals” – in this case, the strict inerrancy of the Bible. Strict adherence to both old and new fundamentals served to distinguish the true believer from the moderate or merely conservative evangelical. This separation of the sheep from the goats was in keeping with the dualist worldview of the fundamentalists, who earned the name “come-outers” when they fled the mainline denominations and established their own independent churches, in order to be separated from their corrupted brethren.

The fundamentalists were also innovative in their interpretations of the Bible’s teaching about the end days. The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) presented their own unique form of apocalypticism. Called dispensational premillennialism, the widely adopted theory held that Christ would soon return, in the final dispensation, or era, of sacred history, to punish the unbelievers (beginning with the liberal Protestants who accepted evolution and the higher criticism), and lift the true believers directly into heaven (rapture). After vanquishing the anti-Christ in a terrible battle called Armageddon, the triumphant Christ would establish a thousand-year reign.

Millennialism served as a way of differentiating fundamentalists, not only from liberals (who were merely posing as Christians, according to the fundamentalists), but also from their fellow evangelicals who resisted the darker implications of the dispensationalist worldview, including the notion that true believers ought not to form fellowships or associations with fellow Christians. In the 1940s the evangelical community in the United States split over this question, with the National Association of Evangelicals, the moderate group, willing to engage in ecumenical relations with fellow Protestants, and the hardline fundamentalists of the American Council of Christian Churches refusing to do so. The enclave mentality we have associated with haredi Judaism, became a constant feature of fundamentalist Christianity.

During their period of cultural separatism fundamentalists were not inactive; they concentrated their energies in the thirties, forties and fifties on building a subculture of fundamentalist radio stations, periodicals, publishing houses, Bible colleges, missionary bands, creationist science institutes, and Christian day schools and academies. Their operative worldview, a premillennialist expectation of Christ’s imminent return, encouraged missionary outreach and soul-winning, however, rather than ecumenical dialogue or political activism.


4.This portrait of enclave religiosity provides the context for assessing patterns of ecumenical and interreligious interaction that have characterized Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms in recent years.

In August 1995 I interviewed Rabbi Menachem Frumann in his home in a settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Frumann had been associated with the Gush Emunim, the settler movement whose hard-core members believed themselves to be pioneers of a messianic age that would culminate in the recovery of “the whole Land of Israel” from its Arab occupants. But the “true believers,” including fellow rabbis, had begun to question Frumann’s sanity, if not his sincerity. For he had initiated a personal dialogue with certain religious leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement dedicated to expunging the Jewish/Israeli presence from Palestine.

Hamas’ media depicted the Israelis as “dogs, rats, strangling octopi, pigs, monkeys, dragons, ghouls, Evil Eyes, and bug-eyed creatures to be crushed underfoot.” Yet Frumann envisioned a day when Muslim and Jewish scholars of the Holy Land would study scripture and ethics together and explore the underlying harmony between the religious worldviews of their respective monotheistic faiths.

Rabbi Frumann’s concept of interreligious dialogue conforms neither to mainstream religious models of interfaith collaboration, nor to the expectations of his fellow religious militants. As I understood his views, the rabbi does not envision peaceful relations between Palestinians and Israelis as the primary goal of the proposed dialogue with Hamas. Mainstream ecumenists seek to reconcile peoples without discrimination as to their level of “orthodoxy.” But Frumann was drawn not to all Muslims, or to all Palestinians, but to Hamas. He admired the movement’s “seriousness” about obeying divine law, he said, and its dedication to building a society governed by the Shari’a. Jews could deepen their own dedication to – and understanding of – their sacred texts and traditions by studying and entering into dialogue with other “true believers” in the Abrahamic tradition. In this view the political fruits of this dialogue, such as inter-religious peacebuilding and conflict resolution, would be restricted to the “true believers” in each society. Their common enemy would be the lukewarm, the secularized, the apostate in each society.

Similar reasoning informed the decision of the Shi’ite leaders of Iran to send members of the Revolutionary Guard to Sudan, where they trained Sunni Islamists in military maneuvers and terrorist tactics. The partnership between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims was unusual if not unprecedented. According to Hasan al-Turabi, the Sudanese leader of the National Islamic Front, the Muslim (fundamentalist) world judged it necessary to overcome historic and doctrinal differences in order to forge an effective alliance against jahiliyyah Muslims and the threatening forces of Western neo-colonialism.

This pattern of fundamentalist-style ecumenism has characterized the recent history of Christian fundamentalists as well. In 1960 the Reverend Jerry Falwell, pastor of a Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia, described the evangelist Billy Graham as “the most dangerous man in the world” because Graham, a born-again Christian who accepted the five fundamentals, had “gone mainstream” and was willing to collaborate with “high-church” Protestants, and to sit on boards, or appear at public assemblies, with noted rabbis, priests and other prominent American religious leaders, regardless of their denomination or tradition. Falwell, by contrast, prided himself on his purity and separatism. I am a soul-winner and a fundamentalist, and will have no dealings with non-believers, he boasted.

By the late 1970s, however, Falwell had become convinced that the tide of secularism had swelled to such proportions, that it was necessary to form political alliances with Jewish rabbis against religious discrimination, with Catholic priests against abortion, and with feminists fighting pornography in American society. After he founded the Moral Majority, a high-profile national political lobby, Falwell dropped the anti-Catholic rhetoric from his repertoire, reached out to African-American Christians, and came to the rescue of the floundering business empire of the disgraced Pentecostal preacher Jim Bakker. (Fundamentalists had historically refused to make alliances with Pentecostals, their close cousins theologically in the evangelical world, because the former considered the Bible to be the sufficient guide of faith and life, while the Pentecostals depended heavily on the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, in addition to the sacred scriptures.)

In the 1990s, with the demise of the Moral Majority and the advent of the Christian Coalition, a network of local lobbies established by the Pentecostal preacher Pat Robertson, the alliance between conservative Christians of various denominations and some Orthodox Jews had developed beyond the point of mere political pragmatism. A group of prominent American evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics signed a statement of common purpose and shared moral concern; religious roundtables brought together Christians, Jews, and occasionally Muslims to diagnose American culture and prescribe measures to restore the nation’s moral fabric; an organization called the Catholic Alliance formed as a wing of the Christian Coalition.

What is one to make of such fundamentalist-style ecumenism? It seems driven by the enduring fear underlying the enclave mentality, namely, the loss of distinctive religious identity. As globalization becomes a reality as well as a catchword, borne by technology and markets that do not respect natural borders – cultural, religious or territorial – the fear of a homogenizing (and bland, secular) universalism, exacerbated by the growing improbability of sustaining societies grounded in religious law or precept, does not seem unreasonable. But the new ecumenism entails an ironic cost for fundamentalists. Erected hastily in service of political expediency, the newly configured enclaves, temporarily uniting Sunni and Shi’ite, Pentecostal and Fundamentalist, Orthodox Christian and Orthodox Jew, have required each group to moderate its claim to absolute truth – or, at least, to tolerate such claims made by their new allies, people they once perceived and treated solely as infidels. A de facto pluralism now characterizes “the religious right.” The classic fundamentalist, holding tightly to the old-time religion and hence opposing any form of inter- or intra-religious amity, would find this behavior scandalous – and unspeakably bizarre.




* R. Scott Appleby is professor of History and director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. With Martin E. Marty he edited the multi-volume series: “The Fundamentalism Project” and “Religion, Ethnicity and Self-identity: Nations in Turmoil” (1997). His other publications on modern religion include “The Ambivalence of the Sacred: From Religious Militance to Peacebuilding” (1997).
1 Haym Soloveitchik, “Migration, Acculturation, and the New World of Texts,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 198.
2 Haym Soloveitchik, “Religious Law and Change: The Medieval Ashkenazic Example,” AJS Review 12 (1987) 205-13.
3 Soloveitchik, “Migration, Acculturation, and the New World of Texts,” op. cit., 199.
4 Ibid., 200.
5 Ibid., 203, 206.