Fundamentalism has its appeals, and I’ve also found fundamentalist religion attractive, just like I, on some level, have found traditional femininity and domesticity attractive. The authors are right on, the world has gotten enormous, and complicated, with advances in technology and communication it all seems overwhelming coupled with the age old mysteries of human nature and where we go when we die and what compels people to do the horrible/wonderful things that they do. It’s complex, and I have been tempted to take the easy way out and look to old time religion to tell me where my place is and how to act. If I devote all of my beliefs to religious teachings, I no longer have to fight for equality as a woman, I already know I’m not equal, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t have to wonder what my ultimate fate will be upon my death, I already have those answers spelled out for me. I don’t have to wonder why people do the things they do, I can write it off as being compelled by God or Satan, and I don’t have to do anything strenuous or inconvenient to change the world around me, I can offer up a prayer and assure myself that whatever it is that’s going on in the world is the will of God, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. It’s reassuring, and it’s cowardly, and it’s lazy. Things would all be so much simpler for women if they didn’t bother trying to manifest their full potential and achieve their own self actualization, just as it would all be so much easier to deny evolution and insist that God created the world in seven days. I’m not saying this is why all people have turned to fundamentalism in these precarious and changing times, but these were the things that I’ve found seductive about the religion, and the reports in ‘Fundamentalism and the Control of Women’ seem to back me up on that. Religion is a beautiful thing, but all to often, people turn to it for the wrong reason.
Amanda Wright
