Since the Islamic revolution in Iran (1979), religious fundamentalism has increasingly become known for its violent outbursts. The term refers to a pattern of militancy where self-styled true believers attempt to arrest the erosion of religious identity by outsiders, fortify the borders of their community, and create alternatives to secular institutions, processes and behaviors.”
Its surge has caught many secularists by surprise. They had assumed that religion was a relic of the past, destined to disappear as Enlightenment thinking had overtaken the world.
These movements rose from condi- tions of the late 20th century that resulted in social and cultural change. They emerge in every religion as a reaction to major cultural and socioeconomic challenges and fears.
The key issue is less about what fundamentalists believe, than about the means they use. Some resort to violence against real or imaginary foes of their traditional beliefs and practices. However, not all use violence to advance their causes. Every religiously Orthodox, literate, and committed believer must not pejoratively called “fundamentalist.”
There is an enormous difference between ordinary, pious Muslims and bomb-throwing Islamic terrorists. Many pious Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Jews strenuously object to the claim their extremist co-religionists are the only one’s upholding or defending their faiths’ basic tenets.
Characteristics of religious fundamentalism
Specific modern social, political and cultural conditions have contributed to its resurgence.
Modernity has altered how people view themselves and others, and their relationships with one another. Profound changes have affected people’s world-views, altered their relationship with the divine and contributed to dislocation from traditional personal and communal life.
People cope with modernity and its implications in various ways. Some react positively, enthusiastically endorsing modernity, leaving their beliefs and becoming secularists. Others relate to their tradition and faith with the positive aspects of modernity.
And still others dismiss modernism as a threat to everything they believe that leads to the devil and destruction. The only antidote to the consequences of modernity is adherence to a militant way through the basics of their religion and traditional culture.
They are critical of scientific rationalistic worldviews, but their opposition is not total. When they oppose television and the internet as technologies, their primary concern is mainly about the content trans- mitted through them, which promotes practices opposed to their religious values. Most, though, do not categorically reject technology and its achievements.
Their objection often occurs when the “decoupling” of religion and science has removed restraints from modern technology. For them, technology and science must be subordinated to religious principles.
There are only right and wrong, good and evil, insiders and outsiders with no room for shades of gray. They imagine the world divided into realms of light and darkness, the pure and impure, the orthodox and the infidel.
Many dramatize this worldview within an apocalyptic framework: the world is in spiritual crisis, human history will come to a miraculous end with the ultimate triumph of good over evil, usually in the not-too-distant future, through divine intervention.
They have an absolutist moral out- look, seeing sacred truths as the foundation of genuine knowledge, and religious values as the base and summit of morality– a trait they share with other believers. They emphasize the importance of literally interpreting texts, considered to be of divine origin, inerrant and beyond question; invulnerable to critical analysis by secular science, history, cultural studies and literary theory. Yet, fundamentalists cannot retrieve their traditional beliefs without some theological revisions relat- ing to modernity.
They selectively retrieve from the sacred past stories or lines and passages from their venerable texts to justify ac- tion designed to protect and bolster the besieged basic tenets of the religion and to fend off or conquer outsiders.
They interpret their tradition’s central texts to prove their faith can meet modern life’s challenges.
Fundamentalists focus on a utopian golden age of religion, a glorious past, whether historically accurate or mythical, they project into the future and believed to be within their reach through a trans- formative action.
This is compelling narrative to those disillusioned with modernity. It offers a comprehensive view of life grounded in an imaginary glorious past with a promise of an exalted future for those who think, act, and believe within the their particular ideology.
They attribute the present decline in religious purity and perfection to the purposeful and treacherous dilution of religion by their co-religionists and set as their goal to overturn this catastrophic trend. This results in a deep sense of commitment.
Public morality is a central concern to most of these groups. They strongly believe that religion should have a central role in their societies’ public life. They approach the political arena with an anti-democratic outlook, rejecting the essentials of a democratic polity, including the notions of freedom of expression and inquiry, bargaining and compromise in reaching political agreements in a free society.
There is only one correct answer for them to all questions whether moral or political.
Those who believe differently are not simply mistaken but have allowed themselves to become instruments of the devil since they have failed to uphold the truth, which for them is simple.
They claim to be favored by God because they uphold the fundamentals of faith. They set clear boundaries between the threatening and dangerous outside world and their protected and sheltered world. The rigidity of their views is protected by erecting boundaries between members and non-members and develops particular modes of dress behavior, and speech, which distinguish them from others.
These groups are organized along authoritarian lines and attribute special powers of knowing and understanding to a charismatic leader who assumes responsibility and claims the totality of people’s lives - political, economic and personal.
Followers seek his opinion for all major life decisions. For example, among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, this authority is considerable. Rabbis are consulted regularly on issues of daily life, including where to live, where to send children to school, whom to marry, what names to give one’s children, and where to work.
Authority guides all aspects of life and behavior, including private and intimate zones such as sex and the family. This is not an absolute list of traits, however. While they tend to conform to most of these traits, few such movements strictly conform to all of them. When comparing different movements across religions, it is arguable that they have more in common with each other than they do with non-fundamentalist co-religionists.
Fr. Clapsis is Archbishop Professor of Theology at Holy Cross School of Theology.
