I've been trying to explain to my 9-year-old what fundamentalism is. He reads enough of the news to have learned that we are at war with a "fundamentalist Islamic regime" in Afghanistan. But he has classmates who identify themselves as fundamentalist Christians; and given the enormous diversity of life in New York, he knows children who belong to each of the world's major religions and not a few of their sub-orthodoxies. Why is fundamentalism such a bad thing, he wants to know.

What a loaded question, I think to myself as I search for words that would help him understand my distrust of virtually all fundamentalist ideologies--ubiquitous though they be--without also conveying disrespect for his friends. Perhaps there are wiser ways, but I begin by unlinking the question of fundamentalism from any one religion and try to think about a general political meaning--for after all it is with politics that the trouble usually begins.

I think that fundamentalism most frequently reveals itself in a basic relation to language, what linguists might call the notion of transparency. That is, there is very little play between the literal word and the thing to which the word refers. For a common example, if "God" refers literally to the supreme deity, the word itself is made holy, and the careless or playful use of that name constitutes blasphemy--what many call "taking the Lord's name in vain." In some traditions, writing or just saying God's name aloud is an act of hubris. Similarly, the proscription against iconography is a version of this literalism: There can be no human "play" with the representation of the divine.

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