But not all religious people are fundamentalists and not all secularists are arch modernisers. The countervailing movement of the 21st century are those who see self-discovery and compassion as the driving forces of both self-fulfilment and global concern and this movement embraces those of both a humanist and a religious background. Those who hold this view have no dogmatic creed that they wish to thrust onto others, are not interested in control or adherence to a mass movement. They are more concerned with finding the humanity that lies within us all and applying that to our global environment.
The new alliance of those interested in self knowledge and compassion include a growing spectrum of people from humanists committed to a rational approach to the world, Eastern religions with their quest for the inner self, many Christian traditions that are open and questioning including a new interest in Gnosticism and some of the more mystical as well as progressive approaches to Islam. There is a growing alliance of people who know that tolerance and understanding must be at the root of self discovery and social action. And this growing culture will have a profound impact on both religion and politics in the 21st century.
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It's true of course that the links between religion and fundamentalism (or indeed moral and social conservativism more generally), and between secularism and modernism, are not iron bound.
Nevertheless, there is a trend. Otherwise you wouldn't even have needed to point this out. There is a trend which links religious belief to a kind of moral intertia, whereas secular worldviews tend to be quicker to accept progressive moral norms. Organ transplants, blood donation and embryo research, for example, are "progressive" in that they rely on medical advances for their delivery, and they rely on our capacity to overcome our yuck-factor intuitions in order to gain our assent. Civic equality and for some reason gay rights in particular have always been quick to gain merit amongst the secular. Abortion is, of course, another keen example.
Given that this is the case, if you're seeking to avoid dogmatism and open up the ethical sphere to human-centred, progressive, knowledge-based conception of morality and politics, then don't these trends tell us something? If there is a strong trend linking religion to the intertia of moral conservativism on the one hand, and linking secular worldviews to progressive and more open morality on the other, perhaps this indicates that rationalism is a proper part of humanism, and that fideism of any flavour represents an obstacle?
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