Fundamentalism and "mythological literalism"

There's an interesting discussion over at Crooked Timber about Christian fundamentalism in America, in response to the results of a recent poll being promulgated which asserts that no less than sixty percent of Americans believe that the stories of the Bible (Creation, the Flood and Noah's Ark, et cetera) are in fact literally true, a jump from the conventional figure of about forty percent. Somewhere along the line a poster mentioned a recent archaeological survey that suggested that the Black Sea region underwent a tremendous flood circa 8000 B.C., thus giving events of the Book of Genesis a possible kernel of historical truth around which the myth was later embellished.

The problem with anchoring mythological events to specific disasters like this is that you are left with having to explain why, if the Mesopotamian flood myth found in the Bible was caused by an actual event, then the same basic disaster story appears elsewhere in Western and non-Western mythologies alike over the aeons. Unfortunately, such attempts at rationalizing myth have become quite fashionable, even among people who should know better. For example, I have a friend who never tires of linking the Mediterranean flood myth to the explosion of Santorini, which he furthermore identifies as having been the seed of the Atlantis myth (a disaster two-fer, if you will). Leaving alone the simple fact that Plato clearly made up that doomed island to suit one of his allegories - it appears nowhere in Greek literature before his dialogue Critias - the same difficulty occurs with making mythology a kind of imperfect historical record as with the Biblical flood.

A similar thing is happening right now with the hooplah surrounding Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy. Just because Schliemann found a Troy and a Mycenae doesn’t mean the events depicted by Homer must necessarily correspond to an actual "Trojan War". This assumption that all mythology must be grounded in some historical fact (however slight or distorted) is a form of academic literalism that runs dangerously close to the kind of thinking that drives Biblical archaeologists to look for pieces of Noah’s Ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat. The prevalence of such thinking even outside Judaeo-Christian mythology, however, calls into question what if anything can be inferred from the above-mentioned poll data about the veracity of Biblical stories. If the same American polled who said he believed Moses parted the Red Sea were also to answer that he believed in the story of the Trojan Horse - and I'd bet dollars to donuts that he would - does that mean then he's not only a fundamentalist Christian, but a closet Greek pagan as well?