what is religious fundamentalism in simple terms

Some fundamentalist movements appeal to infallible holy scriptures (e.g. 28. Privacy Policy Contact Us A nominal definition of water would be something like: a transparent, odourless, and colourless liquid that fills our oceans, seas, rivers, and lakes and that is the basis of the fluids of living organisms. The Rt. fundamentalism definition: 1. the belief in old and traditional forms of religion, or the belief that what is written in a. This may be due to the missionary drive that many fundamentalist movements have: they aim to strengthen internal bonds, convince outsiders, and gain converts. In fact, there seems not a single field in science that it categorically rejects. A well-known example of this is, of course, creationist readings of Genesis 13. fundamentalist religion is also often highly political. Think of group dynamics regarding belief formation, such as indoctrination, or disagreement with members outside the group, like various responses by fundamentalists to the brutal killing of French teacher Samuel Patty in October 2020. The etymology of a word is historically important and can shed light of how a term came to mean what it means today, but it cannot be authoritative in determining the current meaning of a term. Fundamentalism is commonly defined as the religious militancy which individuals use to prevent their religious identities eroding. Religious fundamentalists believe in the superiority of their religious teachings, and in a strict division between righteous people and evildoers ( Altemeyer and Hunsberger, 1992, 2004 ). The most wellknown fundamentalist denominations in the United States are the Assemblies of God, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the SeventhDay Adventists. All this implies a firm rejection of modern hermeneutics, which acknowledges multiple layers of meaning only some of which are literal and which claims to identify large numbers of textual and historical mistakes in these scriptures. According to Sathianathan Clarke, for instance, religious fundamentalism is a communal mind-set steeped in a revealed Word-vision, corroborated by a definitive ethical system of world-ways for human living, and calibrated by an aggressive movement that labors towards the goal that such a global order will govern the social, political, economic, cultural, and religious lives of all human beings. For instance, the Muslim Brotherhood is just one of the numerous institutions that has brought Islamic fundamentalism back into the political sphere of a Muslim nation. One would expect that defining fundamentalism . student. Yet, he writes, looking only at rituals and institutions misses religions very center, that which the rituals are all about, namely something eerily holy.. Harvey Cox is known for saying that fundamentalism was born in America but has its roots everywhere (see Cox (Reference Cox2009), 147). There are at least three reasons for that: 1. Published online by Cambridge University Press: The former approach is called particularism, the latter methodism. To most Americans the term fundamentalist conjures up images of Biblethumping Protestants, which is far from the case. "What is religious fundamentalism?" Usage Notes Plural: fundamentalisms A ( noun) fundamentalist advocates for ( adjective) fundamentalistic principles. (2018, December 18). In the remainder of this section, I suggest that there are three individually necessary (NC) and jointly sufficient conditions, but that they are so imprecise that, even though they are accurate, they will not do to provide a truly explicative definition. The purpose of this section, then, is to identify the kind of definition that can be fruitfully employed in research on fundamentalism.Footnote 13. An example of a definition that may not be fair is one that implies that fundamentalism comes with various epistemic vices, such as closed-mindedness, dogmatism, intellectual pride, cowardice, conformity, wishful thinking, rigidity, obtuseness, gullibility, imperviousness to evidence, and overconfidence.Footnote 11 Such definitions have actually been offered in the literature (Glock and Stark (Reference Glock and Stark1966), 333; Krger (Reference Krger2006); Pohl (Reference Pohl, Wood and Watt2014)). (Reference Kidd, Battaly and Cassam2020). Fundamentalism Definition Fundamentalism Definition fnd-mntl-zm Meanings Synonyms Sentences Definition Source Word Forms Origin Noun Filter noun Religious beliefs based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Hostname: page-component-7ff947fb49-jx7j5 He argues that fundamentalism, which shifts this balance between authority structures and the indescribable divine, emerged after medieval society in Europe gave way to the modern era. The aim of this article is to define fundamentalism, one of the main drivers of conflict in our world. (Reference Almond, Sivan, Appleby, Marty and Appleby1995), 405408. These people had a set of well-defined ("fundamental") values. After the Scopes Trial here in the United States, for example, Christian fundamentalists became much more extreme and much less interested in engaging with other factions of society. anger or resentment), engage in various practices and rituals (e.g. Some other definitions can be equally sound. To be a member of a religion is to trust that the beliefs and actions of that religious community represent the wishes of a divine power. For example, Gamal Abdel Nassers idea of separating religion and politics in Egypt was quite violent, evidenced by the number of Muslim Brotherhood members he placed in torture prisons. When asked specifically about Islamic fundamentalism, Armstrong said that this current phenomenon is not necessarily about going back to fundamentals, as it has been for some Christian fundamentalists. 2023. December 18, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-religious-fundamentalism/. Sowell (Reference Sowell2007), 2530) and some have called this liberal secular process the immanentization of hope (Gierycz (Reference Gierycz2020), 10). Coreno, Timothy. With this turn the subject of the fervor and focus of faith is not the holy itself but various empirical states of affairs.. This problem was first spelled out in epistemology: in providing an analysis of knowledge the challenge was where to start. Members must accept their main texts (e.g. He added that it is imperative for religious leaders to be more inclusive, even if they disagree with people of different faiths or who hold different views. Religions certainly didnt disappear, but they were no longer the core of society. Additionally, several political groups in Islamic nations, such as Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt and Iraq, regard political extremism as a central part of their lives. It also applies to secular fundamentalisms, though. Religious fundamentalism is a focus on differences between members of society on the basis of their subscription or non subscription to a particular faith. 4. A Bible conference held in New York in 1895, for instance, claimed that there were five fundamentals to the Christian faith, core tenets that were non-negotiable, namely the inerrancy of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus Christ, his virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, and his physical resurrection. 19. On the other hand, it will be stipulative in some regards, because the concept can be tightened and further explicated, thereby fine-tuning our use of the term.Footnote 14. The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels. Because such a view clashes with the norm in contemporary society (pluralistic, liberal, etc.) As we saw, some take it that only Christian literalism should count as fundamentalism and then try to come up with a definition. Third, to focus on individuals would fail to do justice to phenomena that are by their very nature interpersonal. Although many of these may not have actually happened, it does show that people should not rush to judgment based on either holy texts or the actions of a few. Clearly, then, arbitrarily choosing one of these definitions will not do. Individualist fundamentalism is more likely to be found within developed nations and is mainly associated with the New Christian Right in the United States - it is concerned with maintaining traditional values within the context of a stable liberal democratic nation state. This is pivotal when it comes to definitions of natural kinds, such as water, atom, gold, and universe. What they have in mind are such attitudes and thinking styles as oversimplification, dualistic and uncritical thinking, and mind control (Krger (Reference Krger2006)). part II. Of course, nominal and real definitions may say two rather different things about the same object and yet both be entirely true because they try to capture something different about it, namely our use of a term and the object's real nature. December 18, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-religious-fundamentalism/. Thats where search filters come in. After that, various kinds of definitions and their interrelations are spelled out. I agree that this is an important conversation, but rather than seeking to settle that debate here, I have tried to provide a framework that can take different views on board. (Baurmann (Reference Baurmann2007), 157158), Others provide both necessary and sufficient conditions, like Luca Ozzano: a fundamentalist movement is, a more or less coherent array of groups and organizations which, grounding its ideology on a selective re-interpretation of sacred texts, acts in the public sphere in order to make as suitable as possible to its worldview lifestyles, laws and institutions, taking a dialectic stance towards modernity and opposing other segments of society, identified as unyielding rivals. Another kind of property of fundamentalist movements has to do not so much with their content (e.g. I hope that the notes on how to go about defining fundamentalism in this article and the BicFam definition that I provided show how a definition that can meet the desiderata will be a fruitful starting point for coming to understand better each member as well as the intriguing family as a whole. Such global fundamentalism is controversial as a concept: it is not at all uncommon in the fundamentalism literature to apply the term solely to religious movements (see various contributions to Wood and Watt (Reference Wood and Watt2014)). Most scholars, for instance, agree that fundamentalism does not necessarily come with a disposition to violence, whereas extremism usually and terrorism always does.Footnote 5 Third, one definition can be more fruitful than another. Similarly for environmental extremism: the world, before the Industrial Revolution and other similar human activities, was balanced and unpolluted, but since then things have gone down the drain, and we now ought to bring back the original good state in nature (some extremists add: with whatever means available). Their views on gender and sexuality are rather traditional. For this reason, Armstrong said that when other cultures have not had time to secularize, at their own pace, secularism has often had negative consequences. Moreover, one would not lose anything by way of precision, because one could still define religious fundamentalism in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions such as literalism and infallibility about holy scriptures. Religion: a source of fundamentalism or a safeguard against it? Building for proximity: The role of activity centers in reducing total miles traveled, How will AI change work? If it is true for fundamentalist movements, it may still do injustice to some of the individuals involved. On a broad understanding, which also includes such movements as extreme environmentalism, Hindutva nationalism, and neo-Nazism, such necessary or sufficient conditions are hard to identify, as these movements are partly simply too different from one another. (Reference Almond, Appleby and Sivan2003), 95. The article is structured as follows. This means, among other things, that an accurate definition covers both secular and religious fundamentalism, and right-wing (or conservative) and left-wing (or progressive) fundamentalism. Support JSTOR Daily! 3. If one's definition implies that it is part and parcel of fundamentalism that it comes with epistemic vices, then that may fail to do justice to the individuals involved. Neo-Nazism rejects the universality of human rights parlance, in particular modern-day feminism and the idea that Jews are equal citizens. Others believe that it should also include other forms of religious fundamentalism, such as Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism. We saw that a movement is fundamentalist only if it meets the three necessary conditions, but this does not hold for the stereotypical properties: enough of them will do, none of them are necessary. In that sense, fundamentalism is very much a modern movement, one that is against any form of imposition, including secular governance. This purpose is often overlooked, but a definition may aim at doing justice to the individuals or groups involved. For a recent exposition of this idea, see, for instance, Lackey (Reference Lackey2020). It is hard to find definitions in the fundamentalism literature that are explicitly phrased in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. It can be summarized as follows: The BicFam Definition of fundamentalism, A movement is fundamentalist if and only if (i) it is reactionary towards modern developments, (ii) it is itself modern, and (iii) it is based on a grand historical narrative. This is, of course, true for Wahhabism: there was a good state by way of the Caliphate, that was destroyed by human sin, and we now ought to bring the Caliphate back. Alternatively, one might provide a descriptive definition, that is, spell out the meaning of a term but in doing so stay faithful to actual usage in the relevant domain (like daily life or science). https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-religious-fundamentalism/, IvyPanda. A definition that is pejorativewhether that is accurate or notmay impede research, because potential subjects may refuse to participate in qualitative research and it may trigger biases in researchers or lead to tunnel vision.Footnote 12 A definition that meets all the other purposes but cannot be operationalized may be useless for particular projects. Delivered to your inbox! 11. These activists usually think that they have a corner on the truth, and do not tolerate other viewpoints or practices. Organizations such as these often become politically active, and support the conservative political right, including groups like the Moral Majority. These are claimed to be completely historically accurate and infallible. Or, as Susan Harding puts it, fundamentalists were in fact always fully inside modernity (Harding (Reference Harding2000), 270). Stipulative definitions, unsurprisingly, stipulate the meaning of a term: they impart a particular meaning, whether or not that meaning actually agrees with prior uses of the term in ordinary language or the scientific literature. Let me be explicit that a proper definition should meet all these five desiderata. Yet, as we will see, doing so is hardly worthwhile for most kinds of definition. Religious fundamentalism has a political nature and identity and feels threatened and insecure against enemies and the forces of evil. For instance, the seminal Fundamentalism Project (Marty and Appleby (Reference Marty and Appleby19911995)) defined fundamentalism in such a way that it studied various kinds of non-Christian fundamentalism, but no non-religious or secular versions of fundamentalism, such as fascism and extreme environmentalism. The idea is that there once was (these are historical claims) a perfect, paradisaical state, which was lost due to human error, and that we now ought to bring back the original and perfectly good state. They embrace some sort of cosmic dualism in which the free, white world fights against the dangers of multiculturalism and nowadays often also identity politics. Render date: 2023-07-01T09:52:58.898Z Chane cited a survey that showed that a large majority of Protestant pastors think Islam is a violent religion. In line with this issue was the development of Darwinism, which questioned the authenticity of the Christian creation story. 3. However, the general traits themselves are so remarkably similar that it would be problematic to treat them as a different phenomenon. Therefore, it is important to understand the consequences of certain actions toward religious movements. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Religious fundamentalism is here taken to be a collection of infallible beliefs or principles that provide guidance regarding how to obtain salvation. Religious fundamentalism (RF) is a relevant topic in the world today. On Wednesday, February 22, 2012, the BrookingsProject on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World hosted a discussion with Karen Armstrong, author, most recently, ofThe Case for God and Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, and the Rt. "coreDisableSocialShare": false, To save this word, you'll need to log in. Religious fundamentalism refers to the belief of an individual or a group of individuals in the absolute authority of a sacred religious text or teachings of a particular religious leader, prophet,and/ or God . This is a challenge, for in aiming at all five, one will necessarily have to balance them. Some of these properties are listed by Almond et al. The Rt. In fact, one can pursue each kind of definition that I distinguish here for fundamentalism. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church as an institute may believe in the virgin birth of Christ and discourage contra-conception, even if many Roman Catholics think and act otherwise.Footnote 2 Second, some beliefs, acts, symbols, and rituals cannot be embodied by a single person, but only by multiple members, such as the practice of female circumcision in various African fundamentalist movements. Fundamentalism was used at first to describe some people in the Protestant community in the United States in the early 20th century. 30. Fundamentalists claim that their view is certain and that there is no room for doubt . 5. See Kindermann et al. Cases in point include the use of the internet to spread Islamic fundamentalist teaching and opposition of American. American Satmar, Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History, Conclusion: an interim report on a hypothetical family, Fundamentalisms Observed, The Fundamentalism Project, Epistemic Duties: New Arguments, New Angles, Group ignorance: an account based on case studies of fundamentalist and white ignorance, Islamic education and the limitations of fundamentalism as an analytical category, Biological determinism, evolutionary fundamentalism and the rise of the genoist society, The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, The psychological and behavioural bases of Islamic fundamentalism, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, Right Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/definitions, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/01/afghanistan.terrorism9, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. If you are the copyright owner of this paper and no longer wish to have your work published on IvyPanda. That this will not do, should be clear even from comparing only a few dictionary definitions. This is also pointed out by Ackerman and Burnham (Reference Ackerman and Burnham2019) for the closely related field of terrorism. On the contrary, it wholeheartedly embraces climate studies. Fecundity. 14. I call it an explicative definition of fundamentalism both in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and in terms of stereotypical properties, a definition that I therefore dub the BicFam definition of fundamentalism. Smart (Reference Smart1989), 594). This means that there is a time-index to the definition: fundamentalist movements can only be found in modern times, typically since the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. from your Reading List will also remove any One can only point to things like people, books, institutions, rituals, symbols, rules, and so on. 15. A final necessary condition is that fundamentalisms embrace a grand, overarching historical narrative about the world that assigns a particular place to humans and value to their lives. It is matter of extensive debate how we should construe modernity. Neo-Nazism takes it that Europe was once populated by Caucasians and that with mass immigration everything went wrong; Europe needs to become white again. Another way in which fundamentalist movements are particularly modern is that they are remarkably good at making use of (social) media and technology. The group also said it was important to stick to what faith (and a more literal translation of . Literalism and infallibility are as such not sufficient for fundamentalism; some people were literalists long before there were any fundamentalists. Precision. Wahhabism), others do not (e.g. One would expect that defining fundamentalism has received ample attention in the literature. For the reactionary nature of neo-Hindu fundamentalism, see Battaglia (Reference Battaglia2017). As it turned out, there is good reason to think that such a definition would rule in not only non-Christian varieties of religious fundamentalism, but also non-religious kinds of fundamentalism, such as fascism and environmental extremism. (Reference Almond, Sivan, Appleby, Marty and Appleby1995), 403).Footnote 18 Others, such as J. S. Krger, have followed suit: What I shall understand by fundamentalism is something else than mere conservatism, traditionalism or orthodoxy but rather: the selective combination of traditional and modern/post-modern cultural and religious elements to protect and promote collective identity and interests in contemporary society (Krger (Reference Krger2006), 888). Evangelical groups now manifest their fundamentalist inclinations through the political sphere, education (in the form of primary and secondary schools), as well as their publications. Taylor & Horgan (Reference Taylor and Horgan2010) initially define fundamentalism in terms of behaviour rather than belief, but in the ensuing discussion they focus almost entirely on belief. Only the Free Dictionary mentions the opposition to secularism, Merriam-Webster and the Free Dictionary mention principles whereas the other two refer to holy scriptures, and Merriam-Webster, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Cambridge Dictionary do not allow for non-religious fundamentalism, whereas the Free Dictionary does. Putting a bit of flesh to the bones, we can distinguish three stereotypical properties here: Fundamentalist movements tend to acknowledge fewer rights for certain groups of people: women, homosexuals, people of other faiths, persons of other races. 25. As one of the reviewers for this article pointed out, this may in fact also show the risk of fundamentalism in some contemporary liberal understandings of politics in the Western world. For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I would like to thank Benjamin Anderson, Imane Amara, Maria Bouwman, Anne Dijk, Daan Dijk, Scott Gustafson, Rahel Kellich, Nora Kindermann, Clyde Missier, Ruth Tietjen, Ren van Woudenberg, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. 29. Hence, our focus is on fundamentalism as a movement. Work on this article was made possible by the project EXTREME (Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. Still others take it that it should also cover non-religious phenomena, such as extreme environmentalism and neo-Nazism. . After a few preliminary comments, I distinguish five purposes that definitions can have: accuracy, precision, fairness, clarity, and fecundity. Yet, it does not seem to work well in the case of fundamentalism. Says Appleby: Fundamentalist movements are the historical counterattacks mounted from these threatened religious traditions, seeking to hold ground against this spreading secular contamination and even to regain ground by taking advantage of the weaknesses of modernization (Almond et al. 1. Instead, what some left-wing radicals and fundamentalists, such as extreme environmentalists, reject about modernity is its almost unlimited use of technology: its systematic employment and exploitation of the natural world in particular. 378403. I thank Rahel Kellich for carefully copy-editing the manuscript. There are a couple of accounts of fundamentalism in the literature that do not have such a time index (Denemark (Reference Denemark2008), 579; Jones (Reference Jones, Strozier, Terman, Jones and Boyd2010), 220). 26. Among other things, we shall see that one can define something in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or in terms of a family resemblance, two approaches that are often considered to be mutually exclusive. Central aspects of life, including scientific inquiry, education, and government, began to fall outside the control of religious structures. The disjunctions in this definition are, of course, inclusive. 3. It is needed for comparative studies, such as those on fundamentalisms in different religious or even secular movements, it is crucial for a fruitful interaction between theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative work, and it is pivotal for operationalizations that can then be used in empirical work. Just like the Islamic fundamentalists mentioned above, Christian fundamentals are also politically conservative. Something else may run through our rivers at some point, but then it is no longer water. 22. One that will do spells out each of these conditions in terms of various stereotypical properties that are jointly so rich that the resulting definition is truly informative. See, for example Almond et al. 9. Over time, scholars began applying it to similar phenomena in other religious traditions, such that it became possible to be speak of fundamentalist Islam or Hinduism. Second, it is not obvious how each of these definitions is to be understood: do they provide sufficient conditions, necessary conditions, a combination of necessary and sufficient conditions, stereotypical properties? The idea that movements are fundamentalist only if they are religious at their core does not do justice to the complex relation of religious and non-religious elements in various fundamentalist movements. Karen Armstrong began the talk by saying that the term fundamentalism, a western concept, is often misunderstood and used incorrectly. Another route is to pursue a definition in terms of a family resemblance.Footnote 15 This notion was canonized by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (Reference Wittgenstein1953). I will defend this broad understanding of fundamentalism below. Closely related to this, systematic definitions of fundamentalism would improve consistency across studies.Footnote 6. A definition is more precise to the extent that, for instance, it indicates the exact boundaries of the definiendum. I realize that that may sound contradictory, but I will show below how the two can go well together. According to prominent Protestant theologian Edward Farley, who passed away in 2014, this isnt all wrong. Of course, fundamentalist movements often have further properties, such as organizational characteristics like authoritarian structures.Footnote 30 I have not included them here, though, as most of them are not truly distinctive of fundamentalism; various terrorist, fanaticist, and extremist movements share the same properties. The literature on fundamentalism is vast, comprising work from criminology, economics, law, philosophy, political theory, psychiatry, psychology, religious studies, sociology, and theology. In the end, those who do not belong to the group can only save themselves and the world by joining that particular fundamentalist group. Some of these take it that a perfectly free and democratic state of equality can and should be established in our lifetime, partly by way of science. 2:00 pm EST Under attack, they often retreat from the outside world, creating a world unto itself, with their own education systems, publishing houses, etc. This method, widely used in ethics and conceptual analysis, consists in working back and forth among our considered judgements about particular scenarios that are supposed to be cases of fundamentalism, general ideas about what makes a movement fundamentalist, and various desiderata that a definition of fundamentalism ought to meet, revising each of these elements until we have reached an acceptable coherence among them.Footnote 9 This means that there is indeed a principled way to start: namely on both sides simultaneously and then work back and forth until we have been able to strike the right balance. Let us start with four preliminary comments to bring more focus to our main question and show the value of reflection on how to define fundamentalism. (Reference Torrey1917)). Christian fundamentalism, movement in American Protestantism that arose in the late 19th century in reaction to theological modernism, which aimed to revise traditional Christian beliefs to accommodate new developments in the natural and social sciences, especially the theory of biological evolution.
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