A reader comments:
There is one thing that complicates your argument that should be noted. Your argument turns on the distinction between a mere worldview and a religion. What complicates this is that certain secular worldviews have, over the years, taken on the characteristics of religion (minus the Deity), especially the notion that the worldview is self-evidently inerrant and righteous. Communism (and socialism more generally) is the classic example of such a secular-worldview-cum-secular-religion – hence, perhaps, the Christianist tendency to conflate the two.
TCS Daily recently posted an article describing how, and why, socialism was transformed from a reason-based worldview, as it was conceived by Karl Marx, into a de facto secular religion by followers such as Georges Sorel. The short version is that Sorel recognized religion’s power to transform its believers into a dedicated and united "band of brothers," and wanted to harness this power for the cause of socialism. In other words, the blurring of the distinction between a worldview and a religion, now practiced by Christianists (and made into a veritable art form by Islamic supremacists), is ironically a page taken from the playbook of a radical secular socialist!
My point is that fundamentalism is firstly a state of mind and secondly a form of spirituality that can brook no error and demands submission to ultimate authority. The most successful fundamentalisms have been and still are ostensibly religious ones. But secular ones have thrived as well – Communism, Fascism, multiculturalism. I see conservatism, in contrast, as the antidote to all such ideology. The Christianists see it as a new doctrine, welded to an ancient faith. Hence the danger they pose – to politics, to faith, and to conservatism as a political tradition of limited government and human freedom.
(All this and much more in my forthcoming book, "The Conservative Soul.")
The Dish 