It is against the background of the constitutional developments discussed in Chapter 1 that we can understand the nature and sources of the forms of religious (and later constitutional) fundamentalism that are the subject of this book. I focus here on forms of religious fundamentalism because I believe that it is through an understanding of their underlying culture and psychology that we can arrive at an understanding of the basis of the appeal today of fundamentalism generally, including fundamentalism in law.

How is it that religions, marked by such differences in theology and perspective, manage to agree and ally themselves politically around fundamentalism? Why, as in recent increasingly uncivil wars in a religion like the Anglican Church, do American conservatives find themselves more united by homophobia with African conservatives than with their own American church? We should be more puzzled than we are by how the deep differences among Christian religions and even within such religions ally themselves today on fundamentalist grounds in increasingly aggressive political ways. It is not theology and certainly not any close reading of the Gospels that leads to such alliances. What is it? The argument of Part II addresses this question.

My general thesis is that all these religious fundamentalisms are, whatever their other differences of theology or perspective, marked by, first, a common set of normative convictions held with certainty, and, second, a common underlying patriarchal psychology.