Tides ebb and flow in religion as well as hydrology. We used to think otherwise: That modern science would wash away fundamentalist mythologies once and for all. Not so. Certain faith-based belief systems – literalist, reactionary, and hostile to non-believers – are now proving the most dangerous force of our time, inundating the political landscape with a resurgent flood of fear.

What a tidal turnaround! Less than two centuries ago poet Mathew Arnold prophesied – and lamented – religion’s imminent demise. “The sea is calm to-night,” began Arnold, deceptively, in 1867. “The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits….” His spatial perspective was also the poem’s title: “Dover Beach” on the English Channel looking towards France. The mood: apparent serenity in a world still encompassed, for most people, by religious certitude. Religion provided ground rules, held things together, endowed human affairs with ultimate meaning. The Faithful (most of us back then) felt a consequent peace of spirit: “The cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.”

But the poet knew different, realized that religion’s explanatory power was on the ebb. Eight years earlier Darwin’s “Origin of Species” had enraged True Believers by challenging their truth and eroding their belief. Thus Arnold at the start of stanza three: “The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full … but now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar to the breath of the night wind. …”

The tide dropped fast. Darwin showed us that change, not stasis, was the order of things and that Nature, not (necessarily) God, was its active agent. Then came Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Then Freud who substituted an individual-specific superego for the divinely derived Voice of Conscience. Then Nietszche who appeared to nail religion’s coffin: “God is dead.” By the start of our last century – say 1902, a hundred years ago – most folks in the West still attended church or synagogue, but religion was no longer our primary organizing principle.

Arnold had feared the consequences, predicted them in the sonorous, ominous, final passage of “Dover Beach”: Without spiritual faith “we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.” Those ignorant armies turned into the 20th century’s three awful isms: nationalism (leading to World War I), fascism (leading to World War II), and communism (leading to half the Cold War). Whether the triumphant other half – our side’s free market capitalism – will seem any better a century hence is best left to prophets and poets.

Cold War victoriously concluded, Bush One spoke of a “New World Order,” free of competing isms. He reckoned without the return of fundamentalist religions. Vengeful at being sidelined so long, they have surged back – each insistent on its own mutually exclusive Order. Fundamentalism, the very opposite of rational science and philosophy, is giving rise to the 21st century’s most destructive “ignorant armies.” Arnold’s vision has been turned on its head. His “Sea of Faith,” once on the wane, now swells with faith-based fanaticism.

Some of its lagoons are familiar and easy to recognize: Afghanistan, for instance, or nearby Kashmir. Others are newly filling (Turkey) or disguised by lobbies (Israel). And then there’s the United States of America – with its crucial separation of church and state more threatened than ever, I predict, by the outcome of last week’s mid-term elections.

First Afghanistan and the Taliban. Whatever their current status (destroyed? re-assimilated? secretly regrouping with al-Qaida?) the Taliban first swept to power in response to post-Cold War chaos. Mullah Omar offered order with two price tags. One was a radical Islamist curtailment of civil liberties … complete with hideous penalties. The other was the prospect of indefinite Onward Muslim Soldiers, going off the war in non-Taliban northern Afghanistan and Kashmir and the formerly Soviet “Stans” across the Oxus. Like sharks, extremist militants can’t stay still. To survive, they need to move … and find new enemies.

And now that the Taliban are (supposedly) routed? Some things go well in Afghanistan – including the lifting of Kabul’s night curfew last week for the first time in nearly 25 years – but Taliban-style Islamist restrictions are creeping back. Last August the government, under conservative pressure, felt compelled to ban Indian films. The issue of female news announcers is once again contentious. And pity poor Marzeya Basil, a 44-year-old mother and Afghan judge, who was photographed bare headed with the First Couple in Washington last month. Back in Kabul, she’s been sacked for indecent exposure by (male) justices of the Supreme Court.

Reaction mounts outside the capital city. Several girls’ schools have been burned in the provinces since September. The arson is typically prefaced by pamphlets warning families to keep girls at home and women in burqas. And musicians, while able to perform in some towns, are warned off rural gigs.

Hamid Karzai remains committed to liberal reform but can barely proceed even in Kabul for lack of physical security. Only we can deliver it – in the form of an extended role for the International Security and Assistance Force. While Washington dithers on ISAF, let’s recall when women had it best in Afghanistan, indeed when many liberal reforms were most advanced: During the same communist era that the Islamists and we (including myself in small ways) cut short. Our victory cuts both ways.

The last few years have witnessed a global floodtide of religious fundamentalism. In India, locked for decades in dispute with Muslim Pakistan over Kashmir, the government has turned “Hindu nationalist” and ferociously faith-based. Across Kashmir’s “Line of Control” Parvez Musharraf (until post-9-11 amends) and his predecessors have routinely escalated Islamist rhetoric. No other ideological glue holds Pakistan together.

(Time for a semantic aside: “Fundamentalist” does not truly distinguish today’s militant Islamists from other Muslims. In a logical and non-disparaging sense, all Islam – even its moderates forms – is “fundamentalist.” It goes with the Qoranic territory. How so? Stay tuned for “Fundamentalist Footnotes” in the Bangor Daily News.)

Political religion means danger for democracy. Two Muslim quasi-democracies – Algeria and Turkey – voted for Islamist governments in the 1990s … despite the clear risk that a religious authority would effectively suspend voting. In both cases the army intervened and prevented Islamist control. Ten years later, Algeria is still at war with itself. Turkey banned first one faith-based party, then another. A third won big this past Nov. 3. Initial reassurances from the Justice and Development Party speak of continuity in Turkey’s movement towards the West. Let’s hope so, but who knows? Turkey’s constitution guarantees a secular state. Will the army, guardian of secularism, have to stifle Islam again? And then what?

Likewise Israel, of which I maintain fond kibbutz and moshav memories. The mind shudders back to early November 1995 and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by – remember? – a Jewish fundamentalist who feared that this Nobel laureate would “give the country back to the Arabs.” Said zealous killer Yigal Amir, “I acted … on God’s orders.”

Beginning with that tragedy, things in the Holy Land have gone from promising to horrific. Fear and anger drive moderates into the arms of religious extremists. God-inspired militants now call the tune on both sides, especially since last week’s collapse of an Israeli coalition government.

What of early November 2002 in the USA? Time will tell what comes of the Bush sweep. This much is clear: The president’s most dependable, get-out-the-vote, core group are Christian fundamentalists. Many are decent, law-abiding citizens, even if they seek to alter our law in basic ways. Some, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rejoice in anti-Islam bigotry. But decent or demagogic, it was they – more than any other single constituency – who put Bush in office and now have bolstered him with both Houses of Congress. What will they demand of him? What will he provide?

And how would Matthew Arnold feel, 16 decades later, with his “Sea of Faith” once again rising on Dover Beach? Would today’s hyper-charged, hard right religiosity – flooding right around the globe – please or appall him?

Finally the beach itself. How long before it’s drowned, like beaches elsewhere, by rising waters from polar ice caps melted by warmer weather caused by greenhouse gasses? Ask our fundamentalist-dependent (and environmentally indifferent) president.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.