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Something is amiss in the Land of Pundits when a journalism stylebook and a popular tv series seem wiser than syndicated columnists and professors. Consider the lowly word fundamentalist, about which The Associated Press Stylebook offers this counsel: "The word gained usage in an early 20th-century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. In recent years, however, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians. In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself."

Similarly, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin dealt a fair hand to Christians when his hit program, The West Wing, explored the September 11 terror attacks. The White House drama's deputy chief of staff explained to visiting students that Osama bin Laden is to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. Even Sorkin—whose screenplays for A Few Good Men and The American President painted Christians with grotesque strokes—recognizes the difference between a peaceful believer and an Al Qaeda killer.

Such discernment has thus far eluded editors at The New York Times and London's Guardian. Both papers have devoted a bewildering amount of space to shrill essays that equate many fundamentalists (be they Christians, Jews, or Muslims) with bin Laden's homicidal minions. No serious thinker has proposed that the United States wage war on the whole of Islam. For all his appeals to Islamic purity, bin Laden is a pariah even to the brutal Muslim regimes of Pakistan and Iran. Instead, pundits have shifted their attention to a new scapegoat: fundamentalism.

Consider a few of the more egregious examples to spew forth since September 11:

• "To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used." —Richard Dawkins, The Guardian, September 15.

• "The murders of abortion providers show what such zeal can lead to. And indeed, if people truly believe that abortion is the same as mass murder, then you can see the awful logic of the terrorism it has spawned. This is the same logic as bin Laden's . …In retrospect, we should be amazed not that violence has occurred—but that it hasn't occurred more often. If you take your beliefs from books written more than a thousand years ago, and you believe in these texts literally, then the appearance of the modern world must truly terrify." —Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times Magazine, October 7.

• "Will Protestant and Catholic abortion clinic bombers soon be comrades-in-arms of Greenpeace activists who destroy genetically modified crops?" —Michael Lind, The Guardian, November 11.

• "World War II and the cold war were fought to defeat secular totalitarianism—Nazism and Communism—and World War III is a battle against religious totalitarianism, a view of the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if all others are negated. That's bin Ladenism." —Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, November 27.

There is, to be sure, variety among these fundamentalist-bashers. Dawkins is a secularist scoring cheap shots against all religion, as defined in the ham-fisted style of the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair. In Lind's curious understanding of the world, Al Gore could unite conservative evangelicals and hard-left environmentalists. (How Lind divined the churchgoing habits, if any, of "abortion clinic bombers" remains a mystery.) Sullivan is a practicing Catholic who has often shown better sense when writing about political conservatives. He even expressed a strange new respect for Pat Robertson only two years ago. And Friedman argues that mainline believers are important allies against religious totalitarianism.

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January 7 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1