Yet, as we’ve seen, the same ahistoricism is shared by critics of fundamentalism who equate a religious identity with some fixed set of beliefs or some reading of its scripture. They succumb to what might be called the source-code fallacy: the idea that the true nature of a religion lies with its deepest, most foundational texts, abstracted away from the real-world range of its actual adherents; that access to these codes can reveal that religion’s essence.
