There are a whole host of adjectives used to describe fundamentalist religion: backwards, anti-modern, reactionary, unscientific, ante-Diluvian.* The idea behind all of those descriptions is that fundamentalist religions have fallen off the train of progress. It’s a whiggish notion that religion, like society and politics, is advancing to greater freedom, rationality, and liberality thanks to science; consequently, fundamentalist religions that don’t share those goals are backwards, and will fade away in time.

It’s also a notion that is wrong.

As George Marsden points out in his influential book Fundamentalism and American Culture (reviewed here), the prediction that fundamentalist Christianity will die out in America is as old as fundamentalism itself, which has managed to outlive its predicted demise. So far from being anti-modern, fundamentalism is a modern form of religion.

Marsden argues for fundamentalism’s debt to modern, scientific ways of thinking in several ways, but the argument most relevant to recent events concerns hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the set of principles by which one interprets Scripture. In the recent furor over Harold Camping and his predictions of a date for the rapture, the question that has not been much asked is how he went about pulling a precise date out of obscure scriptures.

My point, borrowing from Marsden, is that the hermeneutics of Camping and his ilk are compatible with, even indebted to, modern ways of thinking. To be sure, calculating a date for the end of the world is a practice old enough to be condemned in the Talmud. But the methods of Camping et al. are a peculiarly modern take on an ancient tradition.

Witness the Rapture Index, a website that tracks the signs of the times indicating the end of the world. The website lists a series of categories, such as inflation and ecumenism, then tracks whether they are getting better or worse. The aggregate of those numbers serves as index, like the Dow Jones or S&P500, indicating whether the end is drawing nigh. You’ll notice that the Rapture Index, unlike the stock market, is just off the all-time high.

The categories for the Rapture Index have been derived from the inductive, scientific study of the Bible (cf Marsden, p. 60). The index’s creator has read the Bible as a set of proof texts that speak about the end of the world. Then, its creator has examined and quantified the natural world, like a scientist or technocrat. The findings are being distributed on the Internet. And the findings bear the form and authority of a stock market index, a quasi-scientific way of conceiving of the economy. In an age of stock market collapses and government bailouts, what could be more modern?

* Well, maybe not “ante-Diluvian” and certainly not “anti-Diluvian.”