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The irony is that no sooner had a thoroughly atheistic culture arrived on the scene, one which was no longer anxiously in search of this or that placeholder for God, than the deity himself was suddenly back on the agenda with a vengeance. Not, however, this time on the side of civilization, not a suitably blue-blazered, short-haired, white-collar, golf-playing God, but a God who had shifted over to the side of so-called barbarism, a wrathful, alien, brown-skinned deity. The Almighty, it appears, was not safely nailed down in his coffin after all. He had simply changed address, migrating to the hills of Montana and the souks of the Arab world. And, despite his premature obituary notice, his fan club is steadily growing, not least in the evangelising of Latin America.

Fundamentalism has its source in anxiety rather than hatred. It is the pathological mind-set of those who feel washed up and humiliated by the brave new world of advanced capitalism and who might conclude that the only way to draw attention to their undervalued existence is to blow the heads off small children in the name of Allah or blow up playschools in Oklahoma City. What had happened was that smaller, weaker nations that had suffered under the West’s new post-Cold War triumphalism finally unleashed a backlash in the form of radical Islam.

Terry Eagleton | Read the full extract here.

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Image from Newsweek