THE reasons religious fundamentalism has a bad name are not hard to find. Some Christian fundamentalists in the US have preached that hurricane Katrina’s battering of New Orleans was God’s revenge on a modern-day Gomorrah. And last weekend’s bomb attacks in Bali, which killed at least 22 people, were almost certainly the work of Islamic extremists.
But distressing and horrific as such acts are, fundamentalism’s most profound effects may be arriving more stealthily – through the slow march of religious intolerance which threatens to undermine, and even reverse, two centuries of progress towards pluralist, enlightened democracies.
Nowhere is this more apparent…
