sociology fundamentalism essay

Fundamentalism: Origins and Influence

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Fundamentalists are not in search of fundamentals. They have found the Truth. All they seek is a society solidly based on that Truth. Modern society, after all, has veered away from the true path and undermined the sacred tradition. It has offered false gods. It has called into question the very value of fundamentals. Modernity is thus in need of a spiritual and political revival that would restore a tradition in terms of which people can lead meaningful lives. Only such a restoration would give society itself the fundamentals it requires. Institutions would once again serve an ultimate moral purpose. Politics would become a matter of giving practical form to sacred principles. Full membership in the community would be granted to those who share and abide by the true faith. No sphere of life could evade the influence of the all-encompassing fundamentals. The fundamentalist search, which I have just sketched in an ideal-typical fashion, is thus not so much an effort to find meaning where there was none, but rather a collective attempt to bring certain fundamental, sacred principles to bear on society as a whole. For some American Protestants, it means above all making the US a Christian country again; for Islamic activists, it means taking seriously the “neglected duty” of engaging in jihad and establishing an Islamic state (cf. Jansen 1986). To use the sociological jargon and identify a possible common denominator in the family resemblances sketched by Marty and Appleby (1991), their fundamentalism constitutes a form of value-oriented dedifferentiation, aimed at the reconstruction of society. Precisely this larger ambition, perhaps more than the deep values particular groups claim for themselves, makes fundamentalism sociologically interesting.

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Lieteke van Vucht Tijssen

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Jan Berting

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Lechner, F.J. (1995). Fundamentalism: Origins and Influence. In: van Vucht Tijssen, L., Berting, J., Lechner, F. (eds) The Search for Fundamentals. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8500-2_6

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The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism

2006, Annual Review of Sociology

Religious fundamentalism has risen to worldwide prominence since the 1970s. We review research on fundamentalist movements to learn what religious fundamentalisms are, if and why they appear to be resurging, their characteristics, their possible links to violence, and their relation to modernity. Surveying work over the past two decades, we find both substantial progress in sociological research on such movements and major holes in conceptualizing and understanding religious fundamentalism. We consider these weaknesses and suggest where research might next be directed.

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The Special Section builds on an international and interdisciplinary workshop that took place in March 2021 as part of the project "Fundamentalism" at the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" at Münster University and pursues a goal both historical-empirical and theoretical. First, empirical case studies will be presented that can be used to study fundamentalist tendencies in different religions and cultures. Second, we are concerned with examining these case studies to see how far the concept of fundamentalism we have developed in this project can be applied to them. Die Special Section baut auf einem internationalen und interdisziplinären Workshop auf, der im März 2021 im Rahmen des Projektes "Fundamentalismus" am Exzellenzcluster "Religion und Politik" der Universität Münster stattgefunden hat und verfolgt sowohl ein historisch-empirisches als auch ein theoretisches Ziel. Erstens werden empirische Fallbeispiele vorgestellt, anhand derer sich fundamentalistische Tendenzen in unterschiedlichen Religionen und Kulturen studieren lassen. Zweitens geht es darum, die dargestellten Fallbeispiele immer wieder daraufhin zu prüfen, inwieweit der Fundamentalismusbegriff, der in diesem Projekt entwickelt wurde, auf sie anwendbar ist.

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This chapter introduces the concept of religious fundamentalism but also questions the validity and usefulness of the concept. After tracing the origins of the term in North America, the chapter discusses earlier research that attempts to define fundamentalism and apply it in other contexts. Particular attention is paid to tradition, authority, politics, and violence. Some of the features attributed to ‘fundamentalism’ are in fact shared by other religious orientations, and some movements have been rather arbitrarily excluded from discussions of fundamentalism. Since the most salient feature of the movements discussed is reactivity against the perceived marginalization of allegedly authentic religion, it is suggested that ‘reactivism’ would be a more useful term. This conclusion is supported by sustained case studies of two very different organizations often characterized as fundamentalist, the Society of St Pius X (Catholic) and al-Qaeda (Sunni Muslim).

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September 11, bomb attacks in Madrid and London with hundreds of victims, burning automobiles, homes, police stations, and churches all over the world: Truth claims paired with violence or its justification yield fundamentalism. This phenomenon can be found in all religions and worldviews. And yet a critique is justified: The term ‘fundamentalism’ is often used unjustly as a polemical form against those who think differently. This absorbing book enlightens and sensitizes to a serious problem in our terminology which hinders really understanding the problem. As a sociologist the author defines fundamentalism as a militant truth claim and then finds corresponding currents in all religions and worldviews.

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This paper examines the process of emergence of religious fundamentalism through development parameters. Therefore this research work reflects an analytical discussion on how the level of religious fundamentalism can be explained by the economic, political administrative and legal parameters such as GDP, Employment to Population ratio, Government Effectiveness, Voice & Accountability, Rule of Law (World Justice Project Report) and Rule of law (Governance Indicators).

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Why won’t Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other liberals refer to the motivations of Omar Mateen or the self-proclaimed Islamic State as “radical Islam?" This essay gives a historical analysis of differing American conceptions of religious fundamentalism and sketches some of the policy implications that have resulted.

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Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism .

Another argument against the view that religion is losing its influence is the rise of religious fundamentalism.

• Fundamentalism refers to the process of returning to the basics of a religion and the belief in absolute truth. 
• They tend to believe in the exact wording of the sacred texts and will often cite quotations to justify their actions and beliefs. 
• Usually sects.

Elements of religious fundamentalism

• They have a world rejecting stance and often isolate themselves from mainstream society.
• They attempt to shock the population through extreme views or acts of terrorism to gain public attention.

The influence of cosmopolitanism  

• Giddens  believes that globalisation has triggered the recent rise in fundamentalism due to the rapid promotion of cosmopolitan values.

Giddens  cosmopolitanism  cont.

• In all societies around the world, individuals with conservative values are feeling marginalised by a more liberal world view that seeks to undermine traditional assumptions on issues such as gender differences, abortion and sexual activity etc. 

Postmodernity

• The individual turns to fundamentalist movements to protect their conservative values which are now under threat in a cosmopolitan world.

Castells  cont.

• Those who attempt to embrace change by engaging with New Age movements.

Cultural defence  

• Bruce argues that religious fundamentalism is mainly caused by individuals feeling under threat to adopt different beliefs due to globalisation.
• Bruce identifies two types of fundamentalism.

Western (Christian)

• Often are reacting to changes within western society such as secularisation.
• E.g. The Westboro Baptist Church.

Third world (Islamic)

• Often reacting to external influences that are attempting to erode their way of life with secular and cosmopolitan values.
• E.g. Islamic State.

Secular fundamentalism

• Davie claims that fundamentalism is not confined to religion.
• This can be evidenced by an increase in support for far right political groups in western societies who are ‘protecting’ conservative values that were once dominant but no longer respected by the liberal majority.

1 Theory & Methods

1.1 Sociological Theories

1.1.1 Marxism

1.1.2 Feminism

1.1.3 Social Action Theories

1.2 Sociological Methods

1.2.1 Types of Data

1.2.2 Positivism & Interpretivism

1.2.3 Research Design

1.2.4 Research Considerations

1.2.5 Values in Research

1.2.6 Modernity & Post-Modernity

1.2.7 Sociology as a Science

1.2.8 Sociology & Social Policy

1.2.9 End of Topic Test - Sociology Methods & Theories

1.3 Sources of Data

1.3.1 Introduction

1.3.2 Experiments

1.3.3 Surveys

1.3.4 Longitudinal Studies

1.3.5 Questionnaires

1.3.6 Types of Questionnaires

1.3.7 Interviews

1.3.8 Observation

1.3.9 Case Studies

1.3.10 Documents

1.3.11 Official Statistics

1.3.12 End of Topic Test - Sources of Data

2 Education with Methods in Context

2.1 Role & Function of the Education System

2.1.1 Introduction

2.1.2 Functionalist Theories

2.1.3 Marxist & Feminist Theories

2.1.4 The New Right

2.2 Educational Achievement

2.2.1 Social Class: Internal Factors

2.2.2 Social Class: External Factors

2.2.3 Social Class: Attitudes to Education

2.2.4 Social Class: Difference in Achievement

2.2.5 Gender

2.2.6 Ethnicity

2.3 Relationships & Processes Within Schools

2.3.1 Processes

2.3.2 Labelling

2.3.3 Categorisations

2.3.4 Student Experience

2.3.5 End of Topic Test -Education with Methods

2.4 Educational Policies

2.4.1 Equality

2.4.2 Privatisation

2.4.3 Marketisation

2.4.4 Government Policies by Party

2.4.5 Globalisation

2.4.6 End of Topic Test- Educational Policies

2.4.7 Practice Exam Question - Social Policies

3 Option 1: Culture & Identity

3.1 Conceptions of Culture

3.1.1 Culture

3.1.2 Mass Culture

3.1.3 Popular Culture

3.1.4 Global Culture

3.1.5 End of Topic Test - Culture and Identity

3.2 Identity & Socialisation

3.2.1 Identities

3.2.2 Socialisation

3.2.3 Secondary Socialisation

3.2.4 Theories of Socialisation

3.2.5 End of Topic Test - Identity

3.2.6 Practice Exam Question - Socialisation & Equality

3.3 Social Identity

3.3.1 Social Class

3.3.2 Upper & Middle Class

3.3.3 Working & Underclass

3.3.4 Social Class Evaluation

3.3.5 Gender

3.3.6 Changing Gender Identities

3.3.7 Ethnicity

3.3.9 Disability

3.3.10 Nationality

3.3.11 End of Topic Test - Social Identity

3.4 Production, Consumption & Globalisation

3.4.1 Production & Consumption

3.4.2 Globalisation

3.4.3 Evaluation

3.4.4 End of Topic Test - Production

4 Option 1: Families & Households

4.1 Families & Households

4.1.1 Definitions

4.1.2 Functionalist & New Right Perspectives

4.1.3 Marxist & Feminist Perspectives

4.1.4 Postmodernist Perspective

4.1.5 End of Topic Test - Families & Households

4.1.6 Practice Exam Question - Function of Family

4.2 Changing Patterns

4.2.1 Marriage

4.2.2 Divorce

4.2.3 LAT Relationships

4.2.4 Child-Bearing

4.2.5 Lone Parenthood

4.2.6 Diversity

4.2.7 The Sociology of Personal Life

4.2.8 Government Policies Post-WW2

4.2.9 End of Topic Test - Changing Patterns

4.3 The Symmetrical Family

4.3.1 The Symmetrical Family

4.3.2 Evaluation

4.4 Children & Childhood

4.4.1 Childhood

4.4.2 Childhood in the UK

4.4.3 Childhood as a Social Construct

4.4.4 The Disappearance of Childhood

4.4.5 Child Abuse

4.4.6 Domestic Violence

4.4.7 End of Topic Test - Family & Childhood

4.5 Demographic Trends UK

4.5.1 Introduction

4.5.2 Birth Rates

4.5.3 Death Rates

4.5.4 The Ageing Population

4.5.5 Studies on the Ageing Population

4.5.6 Migration

4.5.7 Globalisation

4.5.8 End of Topic Test - Demographics UK

5 Option 1: Health

5.1 Social Constructions

5.1.1 The Body

5.1.2 Health, Illness & Disease

5.1.3 Disability

5.1.4 Models of Health & Illness

5.1.5 End of Topic Test - Social Constructions

5.2 Social Distribution of Healthcare

5.2.1 Social Class

5.2.2 Gender

5.2.3 Ethnicity

5.2.4 Regional

5.3 Provision & Access to Healthcare

5.3.1 The NHS

5.3.2 Inequalities in Provision

5.3.3 Sociological Explanations

5.3.4 Inequalities in Access

5.3.5 Inequalities in Access 2

5.3.6 End of Topic Test - Distribution Health

5.4 Mental Health

5.4.1 The Biomedical Approach

5.4.2 Social Patterns

5.4.3 Social Constructionist Approach

5.5 The Globalised Health Industry

5.5.1 The Functionalist Approach

5.5.2 The Postmodernist Approach

5.5.3 The Globalised Health Industry

5.5.4 End of Topic Test - Mental Health & Globalisation

6 Option 1: Work, Poverty & Welfare

6.1 Poverty & Wealth

6.1.1 Types of Poverty

6.1.2 Types of Poverty 2

6.1.3 Distribution of Wealth UK

6.1.4 Sociological Theories

6.1.5 Sociological Theories 2

6.1.6 Distribution of Poverty UK

6.1.7 End of Topic Test - Poverty & Wealth

6.2 Welfare

6.2.1 The Welfare State

6.2.2 Theoretical Approaches to Welfare

6.3 Labour Process

6.3.1 Nature of Work

6.3.2 Technology & Control

6.3.3 Work & Life

6.3.4 The Effects of Globalisation

6.3.5 Globalisation & Worklessness

6.3.6 End of Topic Test - Welfare & Labour

7 Option 2: Beliefs in Society

7.1 Ideology, Science & Religion

7.1.1 Types of Religion

7.1.2 Ideology & Belief Systems

7.1.3 Social Stability & Religion

7.1.4 Social Change & Religion

7.1.5 End of Topic Test - Ideology, Science & Religion

7.2 Religious Movements

7.2.1 Religious Organisations

7.2.2 New Religious Movements

7.2.3 New Age Movements

7.2.4 Practice Exam Question - Growth of NRMs

7.3 Society & Religion

7.3.1 Social Groups & Religion

7.3.2 Gender & Religion

7.3.3 End of Topic Test- Religious Movements & Society

7.4 Contemporary Religion

7.4.1 Secularisation UK

7.4.2 Against Secularisation

7.4.3 Secularisation US

7.4.4 Fundamentalism

7.4.5 Economic Development & Religion

7.4.6 End of Topic - Contemporary Religion

8 Option 2: Global Development

8.1 Development, Underdevelopment & Global Inequality

8.1.1 Development

8.1.2 Underdevelopment & Global Inequality

8.2 Globalisation & Global Organisations

8.2.1 Globalisation

8.2.2 Transnational Corporations & International Agency

8.2.3 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs)

8.3 Aid, Trade, Industrialisation, Urbanisation

8.3.1 Development: Aid & Trade

8.3.2 Development: Industrialisation & Urbanisation

8.3.3 Development: Environment & War

9 Option 2: The Media

9.1 Contemporary Media

9.1.1 New Media

9.1.2 Control of the Media

9.1.3 Sociological Approaches: New Media

9.1.4 Globalisation

9.1.5 News Selection

9.1.6 Moral Panics

9.1.7 End of Topic Test - Contemporary Media

9.2 Media Representations

9.2.2 Social Class & Ethnicity

9.2.3 Gender

9.2.4 Sexuality & Disability

9.2.5 Practice Exam Questions - Presentation of Women

9.3 Audiences

9.3.1 Media Theories

9.3.2 Media Theories 2

9.3.3 Media Representations & Audiences

10 Crime & Deviance

10.1 Crime & Society

10.1.1 Functionalism

10.1.2 Subcultural Theory

10.1.3 Marxism

10.1.4 Realism

10.1.5 Other Approaches

10.1.6 End of Topic Test - Crime & Society

10.1.7 Practice Exam Questions - Social Construction

10.2 Social Distribution of Crime

10.2.1 Ethnicity

10.2.2 Gender

10.2.3 Globalisation & Crime

10.2.4 Media & Crime

10.2.5 Types of Crimes

10.2.6 End of Topic Test - Social Distribution of Crime

10.3 Prevention & Punishment

10.3.1 Surveillance

10.3.2 Prevention

10.3.3 Punishment

10.3.4 Victimology

10.3.5 End of Topic Test - Prevention & Punishment

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XXII Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon

• Published: January 2022
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Abstract: Early interpretations of fundamentalism tended to explain it largely as a social phenomenon. It was seen primarily as a reaction of rural and small-town culture to modernity and urbanization. Stewart Cole and Norman Furniss, and William McLoughlin offered versions of this theme. Ernest Sandeen, by contrast, argued that fundamentalism was primarily a theological movement based on dispensationalism combined with Princeton Theology’s view of the inerrancy of the Bible. Both these approaches contain elements of truth. Fundamentalists tended to be people of northern European ethnic stock. Fundamentalist churches grew rapidly among people who had recently moved to a new part of the country. One helpful analogy is that their experience might resemble that of immigrants, of finding their old ways being ridiculed by the mainstream culture. So they might feel like strangers in their own land.

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Liberal Fundamentalism: A Sociology of Wokeness

S ix years on from the events at Ferguson, Missouri, and the explosion of cultural radicalism that Matthew Yglesias calls the “Great Awokening,” it’s now possible to see the woke movement for what it is: a decentered liberal ideology whose moral innovators impel it toward fundamentalism.

The Awokening’s roots are more liberal than socialist. At this ideology’s core is a simple emotional binary that began with the minoritarian liberalism of the nineteenth century, in which minorities are viewed warmly and majorities coolly. I term this the liberal iden­tity. The history of the liberal identity has been one in which the emotional volume has been steadily turned up on this affective pair­ing, while the chosen form of “minority” has been narrowed to concentrate on totemic racial, gender, and sexual categories. This is not because these categories universally align with the most disadvantaged persons, but due to their politico-symbolic potential.

At the extreme, minorities are viewed as hyper-fragile children that must be protected from all harms, however microscopic or imaginary. The majority is hated and feared as a vicious predator against whom one must constantly stand on guard, and which should be attacked remorselessly.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky observed that people “aren’t rational, they rationalize.” Jonathan Haidt makes a similar point with his metaphor of the elephant and the rider. Our “elephant” is the fast-thinking emotive driver of our behavior, while our “rider” tells us a story about why we act as we do. Split-brain experiments neatly show this, where a subject with a split brain laughs in response to scientists making funny faces on one side of a split-vision divider and tells the scientists on the other side that he is laughing because of what they are wearing. Likewise, the ideological somersaults of the cultural Left (the “rider”) are largely rationalizations for the liberal identity, its subconscious “elephant.”

The liberal identity has steadily diverged from liberal principles, and its blend of ideas is now best characterized as left-modernism , a blend of cultural egalitarianism and modernist individualism. Since the 1960s, left-modernism has absorbed revolutionary cadences from Marxism, ratcheting its tone upwards towards today’s “woke” funda­mentalist apogee. Novels, film, and educational campaigns, which re­peatedly evoked sympathy for minority groups—especially blacks—while featuring white saviors as leads, have instilled a clear narrative in the minds of left-liberals over decades. Little wonder, then, that when someone from the majority actually or symbolically assaults a minority, especially when this involves the sacralized category of race and a central script such as police violence against black Americans, this resonates with liberal tropes and memories, activating uniquely intense outrage. Similar assaults involving minority-minority or ma­jority-majority pairings don’t elicit the same reaction.

Minority status alone doesn’t purchase left-modernist sympathy. A small demographic share matters mainly as an indicator of powerlessness and disadvantage. Mormons are fair game to be ridiculed in productions like The Book of Mormon , as are evangelicals. Jews, being largely white and prosperous, receive reduced attention, though left-modernism’s worship of trauma means it is willing to police anti-Semitism, especially if it comes from the Right. Left-modern­ism’s emphasis on psychic egalitarianism means that no mat­ter how small whites become as a share of the U.S. population, they will be viewed as benefiting from the unearned psychic privilege of having been historically dominant. Perhaps it would take a significant period of ethnic subordination, akin to that experienced by the for­merly domi­nant Muslims of North India after 1947, before they get to call themselves a disadvantaged minority.

The liberal identity’s decentered structure means it resembles dis­tributed schismatic religions like Protestantism or Islam more than centralized ones like Catholicism. Its lack of any high church estab­lishment, however, pushes it beyond Protestantism or Islam. Indeed, there are almost no internal checks on its radicalism.

Viewing wokeness as a highly decentered liberal religion helps us understand the movement’s extremism, its witch hunts, and its awakenings. It explains why high-status people and elite institutions mouth its mantras, why its moderates can’t stand up to its fundamentalists, and why it is both the product of, and an engine of, polari­zation.

Liberal Origins

Why liberal fundamentalism? After all, illiberalism in the name of “social justice” is this movement’s calling card. This cognitive disso­nance doesn’t arise from liberal principles, but from liberal identity . Liberalism’s concern with the tyranny of the majority has produced a minoritarian sensibility that has morphed into a perfectionist left-modernism, which is profoundly illiberal.

What Isaiah Berlin terms negative liberalism—the set of procedures that seek to regulate conduct by maximizing a person’s freedom sub­ject to the rights of others—is logically sound. But logic is not enough to inspire passionate social action. Even if the aim is limited to negative liberalism—ensuring equal rights for all individuals—liberals must rely on the same movement strategies as their adversaries. This means generating symbols, narratives, sacred events, heroes, slogans, and charismatic leaders. Once again, these don’t just die when a movement like women’s suffrage succeeds. They survive as memes (in the sense of Richard Dawkins’s original coinage)—cultural replicators like viruses whose aim is to perpetuate themselves.

This will to replicate is useful if a meme’s job remains unfinished. But at other times they persist as powerful social identities which stretch their goals through “concept creep” to ensure that they con­tinue to stay relevant and can call upon our passions and resources. What Douglas Murray refers to as “St. George in retirement syndrome”—slaying phantom dragons—is the result.

When liberalism was about metaphorically slaying despotic elites, its narratives were grounded in ideas of “the people,” like democracy and nationhood. Once liberalism turned from defending the rights of disenfranchised majorities to protecting minority rights, the narrative shifted. When it came to the rights of Catholics and Jews (in Protestant countries), racial minorities, or homosexuals, the “bad guys” were the majority, who menaced minorities in need of protec­tion. The emotive pairing of majority with malice and minority with empathy began this way. What started as a modest habit of mind has deepened into a reflexive demonization of majorities and lionization of minorities, which is the “elephant” driving the “rider” of contemporary left-modernism.

In theory, liberalism could have mothballed its mytho-symbolic arsenal once equal rights had been achieved for disenfranchised groups. It could have remained agnostic about the merits of majority and minority culture. But the liberal army was a living, breathing force, inspiring loyalty, meaning, and identity among its followers. The liberal conscience collective became a distinct entity from liberal principles, complete with its myth of the avant-garde and memories of struggle. The liberal community became willing to violate liberal principles to maintain solidarity and meaning.

Consider the fateful shift from color-blind racial liberalism to affirmative action represented by President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech, in which he argued that it is not enough to liberate blacks through “equality of opportunity,” but that society must achieve “equality as a result.” Johnson was correct that social policies to improve the lives of blacks were reasonable, but this was not a liberal argument and therefore represents a major conceptual rupture with the logic of civil rights. Nevertheless, in the liberal con­sciousness, there is no break. Pre- and post-1965 liberalism appear as parts of a seamless organic whole. This sleight of hand only goes unnoticed because of the continuity provided by liberal emotions, narrative, identity, and organization. This wasn’t lost on astute ob­servers like Bayard Rustin, who rightly saw the change as a betrayal of liberal principles. All of these aspects show how different the liberal emotional-symbolic web is from liberal logic. The former can smooth over logical contradictions in a way the latter, by definition, cannot.

Liberty and equality overlap when there are barriers to the equal treatment of individuals. Once the question shifts to abridging liberty to achieve equal outcomes, the two part ways and we supposedly get liberalism and egalitarianism. In reality, however, a liberal identity that has become accustomed to empathizing with minorities against oppressive majorities will incline liberals to depart from liberal princi­ples and adopt egalitarianism, all the while retaining the “liberal” label. Various means were designed to square this circle, from assert­ing that the weak need equality before they can exercise their rights to John Rawls’s theory that if people had to choose a set of rules before knowing how privileged they would be, most would opt for left-liberalism.

As a result, liberalism split into its right-liberal and left-liberal halves. In the United States, gun rights, anti-government sentiment, and anti-communism represent a right-liberal tradition that harks back to the “Don’t Tread on Me” principles of the founding. But Penn’s tolerant Pennsylvania, the founders’ deism, anarchist individualism in the nineteenth century, and liberal Progressivism in the early twentieth century have also birthed a left-liberal tradition. Today’s woke legions are direct descendants of the early anarchists and liberal Progressives.

Left-Modernism: A Radical Successor of Liberalism

What we have witnessed over the past century is a steady radicalization of the liberal identity’s pro-minority/anti-majority emotional antinomy.

The liberal Progressive movement of the first decade of the twentieth century is an important chrysalis for today’s dominant ideology, the blend of liberal and leftist ideas that I term left-modern­ism. Liberal Progressivism brought together university-educated lib­eral Protestants like John Dewey and Jane Addams with freethinkers like William James and Felix Adler. While most Progressives favored restricted immigration and temperance alongside social welfare and economic support for the working class, the liberal Progressives were the first to combine leftist social reform with a truly cosmopolitan vision of the country. By 1910 they had influenced the ecumenical mainline Protestant elites of the Federal Council of Churches, who embraced pluralism and the humanist rationale for liberal immigration. The liberal Progressives didn’t fully abandon assimilation, but exchanged Milton Gordon’s Anglo-Protestant “transmuting pot” for Israel Zangwill’s “crescent and cross” global fusion. Already, Dewey chafed against the “New Englandism” of his birth, yearning for diver­sity. In theory all groups were equal, including WASPs, but the affec­tions of Addams, Dewey, and others were generally reserved for immigrant groups like Italians and Jews, while a wary eye was kept on the Anglo-Protestant majority.

With the minoritarian liberal template now established, a new generation began the iterative process of amplifying the majority-minority binary, explicitly denouncing the Anglo-Protestant heritage of the country. The modernist avant-garde of 1910s Greenwich Vil­lage combined experimentalism in the arts with enthusiasm for the new immigrants who were remaking the ethnic composition of major Eastern Seaboard cities between the 1880s and 1920s. Randolph Bourne, the doyen of the Young Intellectuals in the Village, urged his fellow Anglo-Saxons to slough off their stale provincial upbringings and leverage the interesting new immigrants to find the “cosmopoli­tan note.” Immigrants like Jews, by contrast, were urged to “stick to” their faith and culture and not to succumb to the temptation to assimilate and thereby become “cultural half-breeds.” Elite young modernists began embarking on “slumming” excursions to the Jewish Lower East Side or up to Harlem to take in the new black jazz. The Anglo-Protestant heartland was derided as uninteresting.

The result is what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism : ethnicity as wonderful for minorities, poisonous for majorities. This contradiction in the worldview of the left-modernist bohemians established a minoritarian, anti-majority mold which occupies the very soul of today’s woke culture. This isn’t to say that empathy for minorities wasn’t sorely needed at the time, or that attention to the excesses of majority behavior was unwarranted. Yet once the emotional valences had crystallized, the world became a much simpler place, where reflex rather than logic ruled. It became considerably more difficult to take a nuanced, contextualized view of the Anglo-Protestant majority group and its identity. To cherish Anglo-American traditions and accomplishments in world-historical context, for instance, or to appreciate the difference between Anglo-Protestants’ attachment to their group and its traditions, and whites’ maltreatment of out-groups, became impossible.

While the Young Intellectuals criticized Anglos for being provincial, their successors in the 1920s were considerably less restrained, cranking anti-majoritarianism up several notches. The sale of alcohol had been prohibited by the Low Church Protestant–inspired Vol­stead Act of 1920, while the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 established new immigration laws that severely curtailed the influx from southern and eastern Europe. Outraged, 1920s essayist H. L. Mencken attacked the ethnic majority:

The Anglo-Saxon American[’s] is a history of . . . blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him. . . . The normal American of the “pure-blooded” majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed. . . . His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him . . . and he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.

In Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920), Carol Kennicott, the lead character, longs to escape her midwestern town, run by an Anglo‑Protestant middle class of “standardized background . . . scornful of the living. . . . A savourless people, gulping tasteless food . . . and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” Sarah Jeong and others who make similar criticisms of white people today are the intellectual descendants of the early left-modernists.

Left-modernism’s roots lie in minoritarian liberalism, not socialism, which envisioned a majoritarian uprising of the working masses. In this sense, socialism was closer to ideas of “the people,” like nationalism and populist democracy, than to left-liberalism. In addi­tion, socialists of the Second International (1889–1916) tended to believe that only “advanced” societies and peoples were ready for revolution. Immigrants from what Marx termed primitive, slave, or feudal societies would forestall the revolution with their backward consciousness. Socialists were also generally supportive of both na­tionalism and imperialism. Eugenics and immigration restriction were both popular with socialists, while advocacy on behalf of African Americans was pioneered by the liberal naacp in 1908, whose concerns were typically viewed by socialists as bourgeois.

At the same time, left-leaning liberals—the so-called lyrical Left—had a tense relationship with socialism. While drawn to the utopian dreams of Marxism, many of these left-modernists found themselves repelled by Soviet socialism’s doctrinaire conformity and political demands. As the Young Intellectual Floyd Dell confessed, he was drawn to luxury, sensuality, and self-indulgence rather than the drab­ness of socialist struggle, preferring Freud to Marx. Still, many bohemians hoped the two balls could be kept in the air. The Soviet Central Committee disabused them of this illusion in 1932 with the diktat that experimentation in the arts was forbidden, and only social­ist realism would be tolerated.

Twentieth-Century Cancel Culture

Many among the rising “New York Intellectuals” generation of 1930s left-modernists were ex-Communists who lost their faith when Stalin banned artistic experimentation. The rift deepened as Stalin began purging dissidents during the 1936 Moscow Show Trials and signed the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Instead of the Communist dream, cultural radicals gravitated to an expressive liberal-cosmopolitan utopia that resembled that of the earlier Young Intellectuals. Some cooperated with the CIA to undermine Soviet Communism.

Nevertheless, the Marxist habit of shutting down debate with moralistic sound bites and purity tests followed the New York Intellectuals as they transitioned from Communism to cosmopolitan liberalism. In Communist circles, “bourgeois” was a moral statement, an epithet designed to silence discussion and dissent. This was joined by the use of “fascist” in the 1930s. In 1937–39, the present danger of fascism produced a “concept creep” in the use of the term among left-modernists who had gravitated to liberalism. Now it was not only Nazis but liberal-nationalist American Scene artists like Thomas Hart Benton or architects like Frank Lloyd Wright who were attacked by left-modernist critics such as Stuart Davis as fascist and racist. Cancel culture is the product of this transposition of moral rhetoric from class conflict to cultural conflicts around ethnicity and race.

In the wake of World War II, as second-generation New York Intellectual Daniel Bell noted, the once-vibrant intellectual Right all but disappeared in Europe and America. Communist and anti-Com­munist versions of the Left battled for supremacy, with the latter emerging triumphant. What Lionel Trilling termed the “adversary culture” had been confined to small groups of bohemian writers and artists, though aspects of its outlook were adopted by the urban upper-middle classes as early as the 1920s. By the 1940s, a reflexive sympathy for minorities was becoming common in some East Coast establishment circles, whether among progressive Democrats and the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches or liberal business executives such as 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. In the 1960s, the massive expansion of universities and national television spread the countercultural liberal identity to a rising “knowledge class” of tertiary-sector workers.

Along with the spread of drugs and the sexual revolution came a rise in accusations of racism and, later, sexism. Left-modernism’s initial wave of emotional enthusiasm, the First Great Awokening, began around 1964 at Berkeley, moving into high gear in the late sixties. Race, and later gender and sexuality, took center stage as the Left increasingly pivoted away from traditional class concerns toward those of the left-modernists.

Meanwhile, former Marxists embraced the cause of black civil rights and anti-imperialism, as well as feminism and gay liberation. Herbert Marcuse brought critical theory’s Freudian focus and con­cern with anti-Semitism into the American context. Despairing of working-class revolution in the West, he embraced the cause of disadvantaged identity groups. For instance, Angela Davis, a leading Black Panther, studied under Marcuse in Frankfurt and San Diego. The productive tension between revolutionary Marxism and liberalism injected a political radicalism into left-modernism, lending it a sharper moral edge which focused on its emerging holy trinity of racism, sexism, and, in due course, homophobia.

With landmark civil rights legislation passed in 1965, the mainstream accepted the need for change, and the racist charge now carried a moral weight in the wider society that had previously been limited to progressive circles. As Paul Krugman recalls , statues of coachmen in front of nice Long Island homes were suddenly repainted from black to white during the summer of 1965 to remain au fait with the new taboo.

The sacralization of race by left-modernists would prove monumentally important in the decades to come. The anti-WASP ethos of the early left-modernists gradually evolved into a generalized anti-whiteness as white Catholics and Jews assimilated into a new un­hyphenated white majority. Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” and Noel Ignatiev’s 1990s critical race theory trope of “abolishing the white race” stem from the same liberal mindset as Mencken and Bourne’s anti-WASP diatribes.

This development, it should be stressed, originates not with Marx­ism but with liberalism’s minoritarian sympathies and anti-majority ethos. In effect, liberalism’s categories of majority and minority cultural identities were plugged into socialism’s oppressor-oppressed terminal, filling the blank slots left by the bourgeoisie and the pro­letariat. While those who point to wokeness as a cultural form of Marxism are partially correct, these influences came later, and ferti­lized a preexisting liberal matrix.

Competitive Radicalization: The Woke Moral Economy

A centrally directed system like a machine consists of a control center that directs the entire apparatus. Complex systems like flocks of birds work from the bottom up, with order emerging from the uncoordinated activities of individuals following simple rules. A command economy is centrally directed by a state bureaucracy while a market operates as an uncoordinated complex system. Individuals following price signals generate a system that matches supply with demand.

The same distinction holds for idea systems. At the extreme, the fashion system is an almost perfect marketplace, with virtually no limit on experimentation. Sumptuary laws once regulated what each social stratum was permitted to wear. Once this collapsed, a market model took over in which new trends, often originating with dandies or bohemian innovators, were picked up by the fashion-conscious upper class. These then percolated down the social scale. The lowest classes were always behind, with higher-status groups using fashion as a means of distinguishing themselves. We find this pattern even in first names, with lower-status groups slower to adapt to new conven­tions than elite strata.

Do values behave the same way? The marketing firm Cultural Dynamics uses the terms pioneer, prospector, and settler to describe three values groups, with pioneers the first to experiment with new trends. Once an idea goes from weird to safe, the trendy prospectors seize on it to distinguish themselves. The conservative settlers are the last to change, only adopting new values once they become well-established.

Moral orders differ to some extent from fashion orders inasmuch as they enforce norms of behavior and set out the values of society. There is a stronger punitive aspect here, which can take the form of ostracism or even physical punishment. But value trends operate in similar ways to fashion trends.

Among moral idea systems, Catholicism, communism, and Irish republicanism are examples of ideas with centrally controlled com­mand structures where official doctrine flows from the top down. Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism, by contrast, possess competing religious authorities, with wide latitude for preachers, imams, and rabbis to innovate. While national establishments like Iran’s mullahs can exert power, in democratic societies it is difficult for the religious authorities to clamp down on moral innovators. Anarchism and liberalism, the two main sources of left-modernism, are even more distributed than Protestantism, approaching levels of dispersion not so different from that of the fashion system.

Fundamentalist Tendencies

One of the characteristics of highly decentered moral systems is a tendency toward fundamentalism. Protestantism is a break from Catholicism, and while Lutheran and Anglican establishments tried to create new hierarchies, dissenting preachers armed with their own interpretations of Scripture forged new sects. Presbyterians separated from Anglicans, the Free Church broke from Presbyterianism, and so on down to the independent Protestant ministries of today. Schisms occasionally produced liberal offshoots like Unitarianism but more often pushed in the direction of textual literalism, resistance to mo­dernity, or emotional expressivism. New sects like the Methodists and Baptists or, later, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, inveighed against established denominations or secular authorities, accusing them of being corrupted by worldly forces. In Islam, dissident imams echoed this line of reasoning, assailing the laxity and un-Quranic mores of sultans and their official clergy.

Why fundamentalism? One reason lies, oddly enough, in value consensus. When everyone agrees that morality stems from the word of God as written in the Bible, it’s very difficult to argue against Scripture in favor of rationalism or syncretism. The fundamentalist gets to occupy the moral high ground and holds cultural power. Something similar occurs in ethnic conflicts when, within a group, extremists “outbid” moderates who wish to sign a peace deal. Since everyone identifies with the community first, moderates can easily be cast as sellouts who are betraying the memory of communal martyrs who died in past conflicts. In Northern Ireland, for example, the hardline Loyalist Ian Paisley accused the moderate David Trimble of being a “Lundy”—the name of a famous seventeenth-century Protestant traitor who tried to trick the inhabitants of Londonderry into surrendering to the Catholics—for signing up to the Belfast power-sharing agreement. Soon after, Paisley’s party defeated Trimble’s. Similar outbidding processes have occurred in hot spots such as Sri Lanka and the former Yugoslavia. Once again, the reason has to do with value consensus: everyone is loyal to their ethnic group first rather than the multiethnic state, so accusations of disloyalty work to shut down competing claims.

So too with left-modernism. Whenever an institution like a uni­versity or newspaper comes to be mainly populated by the cultural Left, value consensus is assumed and left-modernist moral entrepreneurs rise up to “outbid” others in their commitment to communal values. Even where centrists rather than extremists are dominant, appeals to the liberal identity—in which minorities carry a positive valence while majorities are viewed as threatening—are tricky for moderates to morally contest. Fundamentalist innovators like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, or keyboard social justice warriors like Alyssa Milano, are left-modernism’s Sayyid Qutbs and Jerry Falwells. Moral entrepreneurs pioneer politically correct terms like “Latinx” and “ lgbtq ,” or tropes like cultural appropriation. They advance new issues like transgender emotional safety, institutions such as speech codes, or religious practices like jazz hands and taking the knee. Their religious equivalents are prayer breakfasts, speaking in tongues, Christian rock, terms like “pro-life,” and educational cam­paigns like creationism.

Protestant fundamentalism’s politics has typically focused on a small number of mobilizing issues that people can easily grasp. Ritualism in the Anglican church in twentieth-century England, drink and the saloon in early twentieth-century America, and, more recent­ly, abortion, school prayer, or gay marriage. Liberal fundamentalism also tends to prioritize a few high-profile issues. It cares a bit about disability and poverty, but mainly concentrates on the holy crusades of race, gender, and sexuality. The “critical” race, gender, and queer theories detailed by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories are the philosophical riders, but the elephant push­ing the movement is the liberal identity.

Rather than Scripture, the core of the left-modernist faith is the minoritarian liberal identity, with its affection for minorities and hostility to the majority. This paves the way for a leftism that seeks to weaken the strong and strengthen the weak. Transposing the leveling impulse from “scientific” majoritarian Marxism to anti-scientific minoritarian liberalism is what led to organizing around race, gender, and sexuality. This in turn enacted a victim-oppressor moral hierarchy, with racial groups deemed oppressed on top, followed by wom­en and sexual minorities, with other intersectional categories lower down the scale.

As John McWhorter notes, the religion of anti-racism has its high priests (like Ta-Nehisi Coates), its rituals (taking the knee), and its incantations. White males are the fallen, and redemption comes in the form of prostration to, and allyship with, “people of color.” In place of the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, or the Workers’ State, comes the multicultural utopia of equality-in-diversity. The communal emotions called forth by religious reasoning give rise to periodic waves of mass enthusiasm and innovation. The First Great Awakening (1725–50), Second Great Awakening (1815–40), and the Azusa Street Revival (1906–15) furnish examples from American Protestantism. Left-modernism has similarly enjoyed three Great Awokenings. The first took place in the late 1960s, the second in the late 1980s and early ’90s when “political correctness” came into vogue, and the third from 2014 with the explosion of social media and the catalyst of the Ferguson riots.

We can visualize these waves by tracking the use of the terms “racism” or “sexism” over time. As figure 1 shows, each Awokening corresponds to an upsurge in the use of the word “racism” in Ameri­can English–language books. A very similar pattern holds for “sex­ism.” Importantly, each wave consolidated and built upon the success of previous waves. This reflects left-modernism’s successful “march through the [elite] institutions,” beginning with universities in the 1960s and spreading to the media and corporate world, beginning in the early 1990s but especially since 2014.

As the liberal identity and its left-modernist ideology spread, it pushed on an open door. Few in the academy had the wherewithal to mount a sustained intellectual pushback against left-modernist moral­ism. Conservatives were preoccupied with economics and foreign policy and hoped to curry favor with the Left by acting as rule-takers in the cultural realm. The main constraint on wokeness at the time was the supply of activists and the breadth of their imagination. Both expanded as grievance studies fields and equity and diversity officers proliferated. This led to the unfolding of left-modernist logic and personnel into new frontiers like trans rights and fat studies. In the past, left-modernist activists might interfere with a speaker, such as James Coleman, whose 1976 American Sociological Association con­ference address on the impact of busing on white flight featured pick­eters with swastika signs on stage. At other times they might occupy a building and demand fifty ethnic studies professorships, as at San Francisco State University in 1968. In the political science faculty of the University of British Columbia in 1995, an entire department was paralyzed for months by nonspecific accusations of “systemic” racism and sexism. This could have happened far more often if activists were better organized and globally connected. If activists had social media in the late 1960s or early ’90s, I have little doubt they would have hit upon cancel culture.

In some religions and nationalist movements, an establishment which is viewed as the repository of tradition can check fundamentalists. Fundamentalists threaten the power of the religious and political establishment, who act to suppress them, as in Egypt, which jailed the Islamist Sayyid Qutb. Among Irish nationalists, dissident extremists who wanted to continue the armed struggle after 1998 had to contend with the prestige of the Provisional IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, which had signed up to the deal. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the regime could step in to curb the activities of pro-regime moral innovators, as when Zhou Enlai unleashed the People’s Liberation Army against Red Guards who wanted to destroy the Forbidden City. Often establishments will accuse extremists of being heretics or dividing the community, a charge which Official Unionists leveled at Ian Paisley and which Jewish rabbinical authorities aimed at ultra-Orthodox rabbis.

For liberals, there is no analogous power center. There seems to be a vacuum at the heart of liberalism, with no established institutions able to successfully counter the claims of woke innovators. While the courts tend to uphold traditional liberalism and many liberals excoriate wokeness and cancel culture in the media, they are not systematically organized into a network within universities, newsrooms, foundations, or corporations. No liberal Vatican exists which can draw on traditional legitimacy and organizational depth to curtail the moral authority of woke preachers. Instead, universities, sections of the media, and corporations tend to swiftly fall into line behind the latest radical movement and buzzword.

Secularization, Leading to Polarization

Fundamentalism is often a response to secularization. The desire to draw a firm line between religion and secular modernity leads to the desire to define a set of anti-modern doctrinal fundamentals which cannot be abridged. This can alienate moderates from the faith. Since the mid-twentieth century, liberal or modernist sects, such as main­line Protestantism or reform Judaism, have been hemorrhaging mem­bers to both nonreligion and strict religion. Secularization lends ur­gency to fundamentalism, but fundamentalism also propels moderates to leave religion.

Likewise, the populist challenge to minoritarian liberalism in Europe since 2014, and in America since 2015, has profaned liberal sacred values by campaigning to reduce immigration and openly at­tacking political correctness. This has invigorated left-modernist fun­damentalism. Radical excesses in turn power populism, with Trump leveraging public disgust with political correctness to his advantage. The result is a ratcheting polarization and culture war. In the middle, people are forced to take sides. Some liberals climb aboard the woke express while others find themselves “red-pilled,” alienated from minoritarian liberalism, and move right. Some conservatives shift the other way in response to populism.

Polarization is less evident in elite institutions, however, whose policies and pronouncements on race, gender, and sexuality remain uniformly left-modernist. This is why Trump exiting the scene may reduce radical outrage, but is unlikely to slow the woke express. Institutions with a progressive ethos, like the feminist academic jour­nal Hypatia , are highly responsive to woke accusations because they are deeply invested in left-modernist iden­tity.

It’s one thing for moral innovators to appear in such progressive spaces, but how might we explain phenomena like woke corporations or their “bobo” (bour­geois bohemian) employees who seem so keen on adopting the latest moral fashions? Recall that in the fashion system, elites seize on new styles devel­oped by bohemian innovators to distinguish themselves from those below. In the Cultural Dynamics values model, the mores of the pioneer values innovators influence the trendy prospectors who work in the new knowledge economy, with the older, more working-class settlers resisting value change. Woke morals enjoy high status, and many employees in tertiary industries are liberal graduates. Firms are keen to adopt left-modern­ist moral innovations to both please their woke employees and to distinguish themselves from their less “pro­gressive” competitors. Sig­naling left-modernist virtue through adver­tising campaigns or diver­sity training programs is therefore partly about a company trying to keep up with, or attain a status advantage over, its competitors.

But this puts the cart before the horse. Firms are hardly going to take up the latest evangelical Christian cause. Left-modernism’s moral status thereby stems from a liberal fundamentalist elite operating beyond the business world. Only after left-modernism’s sacred val­ues, such as anti-racism and anti-sexism, are recognized as the curren­cy of the moral realm do companies act to maximize their quantity of these goods. As Max Weber noted, people act in self-interested ways, but only within a preset value system. Left-modernist moral supremacy comes first, and the virtue-signaling status machine second. In effect, status considerations are secondary to moral authority.

The moral DNA of elite institutions is provided by a taken-for-granted minoritarian liberalism that began over a century ago, bor­rowed from cultural Marxism in the sixties, and has been deepening its grip on elite institutions ever since. This laid the seedbed for today’s left-modernist innovators to assert moral authority, pressing organizations for implicit bias training, equity, and diversity policy, and, where necessary, the canceling of problematic employees and products. There is no countervailing moral power in most institutions, and thus no competing source of values to counter the tide of liberal fundamentalism.

Private Truths, Public Lies

Religions, whether otherworldly or secular, sometimes retreat from the world, while at other times they pursue power to rule and harm others. Salafism is usually quietist, but when mixed with Marxist theories of action, produced bin Laden’s Salafi-jihadism. In Algeria, Islamic fundamentalists during the civil war in the 1990s turned out­ward, killing fellow citizens whom they accused of being insufficiently “woke” in Islamist terms (i.e., attentive to God’s law). Islamists who make accusations in the name of their society’s sacred values signal their virtue and gain moral stature. This allows them to punish dissent.

The same transpired in colonial Massachusetts, where hapless women were accused of being witches while no countervailing mo­rality to Puritanism existed. In 1960s China, the best way to neutralize an enemy was to tar them as a “capitalist roader.” Today, moral entrepreneurs win plaudits by slinging the “racist” charge. Those whose lives and reputations are destroyed are scalps to be displayed as trophies on social media, as when journalist George Eaton of the New Statesman celebrated his canceling of Roger Scruton by posting a photo of himself swigging a bottle of champagne.

Once a taboo comes to be respected, even a small number of liberal fundamentalists is enough to quell opposition. Moderate liberals who might speak against woke innovations like safe spaces fear that others will view them as reactionaries or racists for standing against sacred minoritarian values. Their view of what others might think pulls down a veil of silence. This produces Timur Kuran’s “private truths, public lies” in which public reality becomes the performance of a lie. The best the majority can do is to drag its feet or change the subject in the hope that activists will go away. They won’t.

On the one hand, the woke system is like the emperor’s new clothes, a fragile illusion waiting to be exposed. A critical mass of open dissenters can set off a cascade in which fence-sitters move, con­vincing the next set of undecideds, and eventually exposing the entire racket. Desacralizing wokeness is therefore partly a matter of suffi­cient dissidents raising their voices until a tipping point is reached and a self-fulfilling dynamic collapses the entire edifice. This means that even one brave person in a committee meeting or studio audience can be enough to unmask its pretensions, desacralizing liberal fundamentalism. In complex systems, small causes around a tipping point can have massive effects.

On the other hand, left-modernist extremism is durable due to its hold on the consciousness of well-educated people. Even if its lack of logical and empirical foundations is exposed, it has a claim on the emotions of many liberals. A wide swath of opinion cleaves to the minoritarian liberal identity which underpins left-modernism and is the dominant moral reflex of western societies. While nervous about woke overreach, most have imbibed stories about right-wing excess while remaining comparatively ignorant of the sins of the Left. Even if there is a vague sense that Mao or Stalin did something wrong, there are no emotional attachments to these stories equivalent to the sins of Jim Crow or the Nazis. Film, novels, and schoolbooks offer few psychosocial profiles of leftist regimes, failing to bring them to life. Liberals instinctively fear the Right more than the Left, and thus there is a deep sympathy for the sacred values that left-modernist moral entrepreneurs skillfully evoke.

Might Wokeness Be Desacralized?

Consider two examples of successful moral defenestration. In the late nineteenth century, temperance was viewed as a prestigious moral crusade. Between 1890 and 1920, however, the class composition of the leading temperance organization, the Women’s Christian Temper­ance Union (WCTU), slid from elite to lower-middle. By the 1920s, the American elite endorsed prohibition repeal and stood against the now lower-status WCTU. In 1933, thanks in part to Al Capone’s antics, the elite won the argument and alcohol was sold once again.

Another case of downward value mobility is the way social class counteracted fundamentalism among American white Protestants in the early twentieth century. Fire-and-brimstone Baptists held the religious high ground over the more moderate Presbyterians and Episcopalians, but Baptists who achieved upward mobility tended to switch to become Methodists or Presbyterians, who in turn graduated to Episcopalianism. Secular prestige offset moral power to keep fun­damentalism at bay until this system collapsed in the late twentieth century.

While raw status considerations played a part in the resistance to fundamentalist pressure in both cases, this was bolstered by a rising liberal ethos that endowed the modernizing side with moral authority. Likewise, in the case of Ulster Unionism, liberal moral appeals played an important role within the Protestant middle class, helping to counteract Ian Paisley’s accusation that voting for the 1998 Belfast Agreement was a betrayal of the Unionist community.

It’s similarly easy to imagine liberal fundamentalism losing pres­tige. Professors in grievance studies disciplines have long held lower status than those doing work where conceptual clarity, measurement, and testing are the measure of excellence. Top-cited journals tend to be quantitative, analytic, or, for historians, archive-driven. Increasingly frequent attacks on the excesses of cancel culture from liberals occupying prestigious positions are difficult to rebut. Edgy comedians such as Dave Chappelle lend a hipness to the growing anti-woke counterculture. Might the lower status of the fundamentalist left eventually spell its demise? While this is necessary, it is not, in my view, a sufficient condition for change.

Steven Pinker’s rationalism may be higher status than the critical race theory of Ibram X. Kendi, but the rationalists lack the moral authority to contest left-modernism. Their emotional arsenal—heroes, memories, narratives, symbols—cannot compete with left-modern­ism’s victim-oppressor pantheon of heroic resistance to slavery, imperialism, and patriarchy, with the promise of a millennium of equality and diversity. To change course we need to replace the elephant, not just the rider.

Appeals to freedom of expression and reason need to be augmented by the cultural work of constructing a usable past, complete with memorials and martyrs. Given how much blood has been spilled to win the right to freedom of expression, this shouldn’t be difficult, but the truth is that most in the West, especially the young, only know the culture of minoritarian liberalism. It’s in their music, their movies, their TikTok, their schools. They know far more about Hitler and slavery than Stalin. Few have any idea about the struggle for press freedom and habeas corpus in eighteenth-century Britain or the ex­cesses of the Cultural Revolution in China.

It is noteworthy that those who have successfully answered back to left-modernism have invoked religion or patriotism. Basketball player Jonathan Isaac of the Orlando Magic refused to take the knee, citing the Bible and God’s glory. Chicago Red Stars soccer player Rachel Hill also stood for the anthem, citing her family’s military service. The problem is that both nation and religion are viewed as lower-status values and are therefore unlikely to win over the elite professionals who run society’s liberal institutions. Both are also identified as morally problematic by left-modernists. While faith and flag are critical for buttressing resistance within the nongraduate settler population, these forces are unlikely to dent the growing problem of institutional left-modernism.

The way forward must therefore involve bolstering an emotionally compelling narrative of freedom which foregrounds the threats ema­nating from a politics of psychic redistribution. Government has an important role to play here, balancing the teaching of minoritarian narratives of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust with an equivalent appreciation of the illiberal atrocities and cultural totalitarianism committed by perfectionists claiming to speak for the weak, like Stalin and Mao. Revulsion at the thought control portrayed in Orwell’s 1984 needs to become a cultural reflex. This will balance today’s minoritarian liberal sensibility with an equally potent vigi­lance against the threats that those speaking the language of equality pose to expressive freedom.

Communism is majoritarian, but its central cultural program—ideological control of free speech, internal purging of the impure, authoritarian and arbitrary justice, brainwashing, and prop­aganda—have been taken over by today’s minoritarian Left. Today’s liberal fear of majority tyranny must be counterbalanced by the horror of leftist thought control in order to undergird a rational liberal order that prioritizes science, logic, and evidence over left-modernism’s feelings-based, minoritarian epistemology. Together with an appeal to national solidarity and the falling intellectual pres­tige of wokeness, a more balanced liberalism can reappear to restore sanity.

The institutional power of left-modernism must also be addressed. Across the media, there is already plenty of viewpoint diversity, but in the policies and pronouncements of elite institutions there is virtually none. Liberal institutions like universities, government agen­cies, and the courts are vital to protect. Their institutional prerogatives, however, cannot be permitted to override individual rights. Democratic governments must proactively intervene when a state-controlled and state-funded institution has been captured by a pres­sure group and has become corrupt, no longer upholding the rights of individuals. This is a delicate balance, as elite institutions are needed to safeguard liberalism, and state power should always be limited by the constitution and to the minimum required to protect people’s rights. But liberal institutions can be captured, and cannot simply be permitted to break or reinterpret the law and do whatever their activist captors desire. This means conservatives need to temper their instinctive fear of using government policy, recognizing that democratically elected governments are more likely to uphold freedom than institutions captured by left-modernists.

When southern universities failed to admit black students in the early 1960s, or when schools in Britain came to be controlled by Islamists, the government had to step in to protect students’ rights. Governments should regulate universities on an annual basis, fining them or withdrawing funding if they fail to uphold due process or academic freedom, and providing avenues for the accused to appeal to a higher government authority. Employment law should be changed so that companies cannot fire “at will” but only for just cause. Political discrimination should be included among the list of protected characteristics except where politics is central to an organization’s mission. These measures will remove chill effects, emboldening dis­senters and undercutting the power of political correctness. Like the child who exposes the emperor’s new clothes, this can upend the entire moral economy of liberal fundamentalism. On the other hand, a Biden presidency, which is predicted as of this writing, could re­move the few restraints that currently exist, abetting the spread of left‑modernism.

Patrick Deneen, Christopher Caldwell, Ryszard Legutko, and other conservative critics of liberalism correctly identify liberalism as central to the excesses of cancel culture. But in throwing the baby of liberalism out with the bathwater of left-modernism, they are making a grave mistake. Principles of negative liberalism are essential for a good society. They underpin much of what the West has achieved. What instead needs reform is the liberal identity, a mytho-symbolic construct that reflexively fears majorities and venerates minorities. This gives rise to a liberal fundamentalism which demonizes the former and sacralizes the latter. What is required is to rebalance this fundamentalism with a healthy Orwellian fear of egalitarian thought control, backed by a proper understanding of the history of leftist attacks on expressive freedom. Alongside the draw of national loyalty and prestige of scientific reason, this coalition of forces can shift elite institutions back to the cultural center, reducing the need for popu­lism and healing today’s divided societies.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IV, Number 4 (Winter 2020): 188–208.

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Fundamentalism.

Roughly speaking, fundamentalism is a label that refers to the modern tendency – a habit of the heart and mind (Marty & Appleby 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1995) – to claim the unerring nature of a sacred text and to deduce from that a rational strategy for instrumental social action. The final goal is to achieve the utopia of a regime of the truth (Pace 1998), gain political power, and rebuild organic solidarity, in jeopardy because of relativism, secularism, and weakness due to the eclipse of religion’s social function of integration. This tendency has arisen in various socioreligious contexts: in Protestantism and Catholicism, Islam and the Jewish communities (both in Diaspora and in Israel after the 1967 Six Day War), in contemporary Hinduism and Buddhism, and, to some extent, even in a particular faction of Sikhism (the Khalsa, the religious order of warriors, defenders of the truth and the sacred boundaries of the Punjab). Fundamentalism made its appearance in contemporary times with such manifestations as the first march of the Moral Majority in the United States and the Iranian revolution (1979); the intensification in Sri Lanka of the tension between the Sinhalese Buddhists and the Tamil Hindu from 1977 to 1983; the appearance in Israel of many nationalist religious movements whose aim was to regain and defend the biblical boundaries of the people of Israel (Eretz Israel ) from 1977 to 1980; and, in the Punjab, from 1984 to 1988 there was an acute crisis in relations between the Sikhs and the Indian government, culminating in an attack by the Indian army on the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the subsequent assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi by a Sikh.

In light of these events, many scholars hold the view that fundamentalism is a modern global phenomenon involving the historic religions, for the most part. One of the most impressive attempts at a comparative analysis was the ‘‘Fundamentalism Project,’’ carried out by a team of researchers coordinated by Marty and Appleby and sponsored by the American Academy, which was published in five volumes. In summing up the authors’ analysis, five common features characterizing fundamentalist movements can be identified.

First, fundamentalism is characterized by the type of social action dominated by the attitude of fighting back. This means, on the one hand, that the social actors claim to be restoring a mythical and sacred order of the past, but, on the other hand, they act with great innovative power of mobilization. The sacred becomes the means for gaining political power. Without this close relation between religious narrative and political rhetoric, with constant mutual contamination between the two, it is impossible to distinguish between the manner of fundamentalist movements and that of traditionalist or conservative ones. The former aim to assume the absolute and unerring truth of the sacred text to legitimate a new social order, the order of animmanent god (the law), pure and integral, to affirm and preserve a pure collective identity. Retracing its collective memory, fundamental ism comes up with a sacred language that inspires the discipline of the body and the mind; through this, it implants common habits in the hearts of the people, an image of solidarity. In contrast to the modern idea of ‘‘atomized’’ individuals in a fragmented society, this solidarity creates a mystical community of Brothers.

The second element highlighted by the authors of the ‘‘Fundamentalist Project’’ – fighting for – is implicit in the foregoing: the ultimate goal of the movement is political, despite the furious and intense religious motivations. For instance, at the beginning of the changes in Iran in 1977–8, Islam was perceived as a set of instruments promoting liberation from dictatorship and the modernization of the country run by the Pahlavi dynasty. There was an Islamic liberation theology that later became, when the Ayatollah Khomeini gained power, a political project to create an integral Islamic state, a process which moved away from the centralized power of the state, shifting the traditional role of the Shiite clerical institution. Up to the time of the revolution, the Shiites were the interpreters of the sacred text without any claim to impose a single model of society or political order. Yet, after coming to power, the ayatollah began to offer a sort of state hermeneutics of the sacred text. In spite of the traditional pluralism within the Shia in the matter of interpretation of canon law, the Khomeini regime imposed a uniform, and unbearable, straitjacket on a society with some degree of social differentiation, accustomed to perceiving the difference between religion and politics.

The third feature – fight with – refers to a specific repository of symbolic resources of use in the crusade for restoring identity and gaining political power. As a rule, fundamentalists move toward a mythical past contained in a sacred text, the shrine of the secret of the social order. Thus, they distill – drop by drop – the functional language of social action, the socio-logos of the society in question. In this sense, the fundamentalist approach to both the sacred text and social action is selective: fundamentalists actually interpret the text, whilst pretending to claim its inerrancy, it’s a historicity, and generally its structural refractoriness to any rational (historical and critical) hermeneutics.

The fourth element is the fight against. If fundamentalism were a label that could be applied to any kind of (religious) politics of identity (in which case, for instance, the former President Milosevic of Serbia acted as a fundamentalist when he tried to combine nationalist rhetoric with a discourse on the Orthodox origins of the Serbian nation), it would be very easy to demonstrate the link between the fundamentalist mentality and the need for an enemy. Being a fundamentalist assumes the idea and feeling of being threatened by an enemy (real or imagined) as regards one’s identity, territory, and survival. When he assassinated Israeli President Rabin in 1995, Yigal Amir believed he was doing what was best, since Rabin, by making peace with Arafat, was yielding to the Palestinians territories that, according to extremist movements, belonged to the promised land given by God to his people. Finally, the fifth feature of fundamentalism – fight under God – represents a simple corollary of the previous assumptions. It refers to the intensity of the militants’ conviction that they are ‘‘on the right path.’’ They are certain they are called directly by a god to carry on with radical determination the struggle against the enemy. Thus, symbolic and physical violence are legitimized. Sacred violence becomes a logical consequence of the missionary function the fundamentalist feels he has received from God. The fundamentalist believes he carries out the function of defender of the rights of God and executor of his will on earth.

The term fundamentalism has given rise to heated controversy among scholars, the most significant objection being that it has been used to classify different phenomena present in very diverse socioreligious contexts. In other words, we should guard against reducing every radical conservative religious viewpoint to a manifestation of fundamentalism. Other scholars point out the difficulty of comparing different religions under the same label, fundamentalism: religions which are monotheistic with those of a non theistic or polytheistic nature, or religions entailing the crucial importance of a sacred text (the Bible, Koran, Adi Granth) with others that do not.

Apart from these objections, those social scientists who accept the concept and assume a comparative and global approach to studying fundamentalism are divided on another issue: whether the phenomenon should be interpreted as an expression (or the quintessence) of modernity or as a simple reaction to modernity. The contrast refers to a broader debate within social theory about the classic dichotomy between tradition and modernity, postmodernity, and globalization.

To sum up, four main points of view emerge. In the first approach, fundamentalism is a clear reaction to modernity, a defensive protection against the individualization of belief and socio-religious identity (Meyer 1989). The second orientation is well represented, among others, by both Lawrence (1989) and Eisenstadt (1999); they hold that fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, a direct consequence of modernity, characterized by the rejection of modern ism. Using the advantages of modernity (the techniques of propaganda, the logic of social mobilization, lobbying in the public and political arena, and so on), fundamentalism, according to Eisenstadt, is urged on by a modern Jacobin utopia in antithesis with modernity. Lawrence believes, on the other hand, that the disjunction between modernity and modernism enables fundamentalism to become a transnational movement claiming to give a new and absolute basis for social action and human knowledge, to the social order and the source of political power. The third approach stresses the relationship between fundamentalism and secularization (Kepel 1991), fundamentalism being a countertendency to the gradual eclipse of the sacred many scholars had predicted two decades ago.

The last point of view underlines the importance of the political objectives of the fundamentalist movements’ social and religious action (Greilsammer 1991; Vander Veer 2000): their struggle tends to focus all religious energy on the public arena and consequently on political action, according to the crucial hypothesis that only through political power will it be possible to reestablish the divine law and safeguard one’s identity (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish, and so on). The way the fundamentalist mentality bridges the gap between religion and politics is characterized by a double abstraction used in the hermeneutics of the sacred text, as pointed out by Bhikku Parekh (1992): by abstracting from the tradition (sometimes in contrast to the traditional authority or a consolidated school of juridical thought and theological doctrine) and inventing a set of religious narratives and a political rhetoric of identity abstracted from a literal interpretation of the text itself. In this sense, fundamentalism is able to invent a tradition by reifying a sacred text and drawing from it paradigms of social action, sometimes without any substantial relation to the historical and theological context in which the sacred text was written. Even when a religious tradition does not refer to a single revealed sacred text – such as Buddhism or Hinduism – one of the most striking phenomena we have seen is the selection of one, among many other sacred texts, and the consequent construction of a sociological and cognitive map; the idea being that in the text we find the roots of our collective memory and identity, the sacred boundaries of the territory we inhabit, and the source of political authority. When such a discourse is produced by an elite of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka during the process of nation building (which has been going on since 1955), or by a network of neo-Hindu groups and political par ties (in India since 1979), which has gradually managed to gain power (with the Bharata Janata Party), there is no doubt that the habits of the heart and the attitudes of the mind are fundamentalist oriented.

References:

• Eisenstadt, (1999) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
• Greilsammer, (1991) Israel: Les hommes en noir. Presse de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris.
• Kepel, (1991) La Revanche de Dieu. Seuil, Paris.
• Lawrence, (1989) Defenders of God. Harper, San Francisco.
• Marty, E. & Appleby, S. R. (Eds.) (1991) Fundamentalism Observed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Marty, E. & Appleby, S. R. (Eds.) (1993a) Fundamentalism and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Marty, E. & Appleby, S. R. (Eds.) (1993b) Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Politics, Economics, and Militance. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Marty, E. & Appleby, S. R. (Eds.) (1994) Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic Character of Movements. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Marty, E. & Appleby, S. R. (Eds.) (1995) Fundamentalism Comprehended. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Meyer, (1989) Fundamentalismus. Rowohl Taschenbuch, Hamburg.
• Pace, (1998) Il regime dellaverita`. Il Mulino, Bologna.
• Parekh, (1992) The Concept of Fundamentalism. University of Warwick Centre for Research in Asian Migration, Occasional Papers in Asian Migration Study, No.1.
• Vander Veer, (2000) Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Category: Fundamentalism

Karen armstrong – september 11th 2001, islam and the west.

Karen Armstrong argues that there is no inherent incompatibility between the Western and Islamic world, but sees economic and political factors as the main reasons for increasing tensions in recent decades.

Armstrong’s arguments can be used to criticise Huntington’s ‘ Clash of Civlizations ’ thesis, which sees increasing conflict between different cultures/ religions as an inevitable outcome of globalisation brining ‘incompatible’ civilizations into closer contact with each other.

Islam and the failure of modernisation

Armstrong points out that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most Muslim intellectuals looked up to the process of modernisation occurring in the West at that time, and wanted Islamic countries to become more like Britain and France.

Some Islamic scholars even claimed that Britain and France were more Islamic than Islamic countries: Islam advocates the sharing of resources, and there was a trend towards this in so countries in early 20th Europe.

Armstrong characterises modernisation as consisting of:

• Technological evolution moving countries beyond being agricultural, and making people less dependent on nature.
• Increasing productivity and innovation.
• Higher levels of education for the general populace. 
• Greater inclusion of people from diverse religious backgrounds
• The development of the ‘modern spirit’ which involves more people engaging in politics, science and intellectual pursuits more generally.

Western imperialism and human rights

Western countries occupied most Muslim countries, including Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Algeria. There were attempts to introduce democracy in many countries, the historical record of Western occupation of Muslim countries has not exactly been conducive to ‘positive modernisation’ –

in many countries, the West backed autocratic leaders when it suited them (in return for access to oil supplies for example) and these leaders tended to deprive people of their human rights, suppressing freedom of speech for example.

In Iran for example, the Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was installed in power in 1953 in a coup supported by the American and British. He was a particularly ruthless leader who ordered a massacre in Tudeh Square in 1978 in which nearly 900 people were killed. He was overthrown the year after in the famous Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Then in 1979 In Iraq, the British and Americans supported the installation of Saddam Hussein as a dictator , because he was hostile to Iran.

A further effect of Western occupation was to increase divisions and inequalities: money derived from British oil companies for example tended to go to the minority of autocrats, and very little trickled down to the ordinary people. In fact there is something of a history of exploitation of poor workers by wealthy corporations operating in Islamic countries.

In Iran for example, the British and then the Americans backed the Pahlavi shahs as dictatorial leaders. These turned out to be particular

The Causes of Fundamentalism

Armstrong argues that the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism is a reaction against the nationalist and secularist ideologies imposed on them by the West, which basically failed the average citizen in Muslim countries.

Fundamentalists believe they are fighting for their survival against a Western Imperialism that wants to wipe out Islam from existence.

Future Prospects:

Armstrong believes that there is no reason why Islam cannot co-exist with the West, because most Muslims are not Fundamentalists and there is plenty of room for interpreting Islam as ‘being all about peace’.

Like Lowkey does in this video:

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Armstrong isis thus more optimistic about the prospect of peaceful co-existence between religions when compared with Huntington.

Haralambos and Holborn: Sociology Themes and Perspectives edition 8.

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The causes of Fundamentalism

Steve Bruce argues that the main causes of Fundamentalism are modernisation and secularisation, but we also need to consider the nature of the religions themselves and a range of ‘external factors’ to fully explain the growth of fundamentalist movements.

Modernisation has undermined religion in at least three ways:

• Social life has become separated from religious life (linked to the process of differentiation )
• Rationalisation means that people are more likely to seek scientific explanations for behaviour rather than religious explanations
• Bruce argues that in certain societies ‘religious traditionalist’ feel as if their way of life is under threat, and so they take steps to defend their traditions against the erosive influence of modernisation.

However, Bruce also argues that the existence of a group of traditionalists who feel threatened is not sufficient to explain the rise of Fundamentalism, a number of other factors are also important:

Other factors which explain the rise of religious fundamentalism:

Bruce argues that the following factors make it more likely that Fundamentalism will emerge:

• Where there is ‘ideological cohesion’ – around a single God and/ or sacred text for example. Fundamentalism seems to be stronger in Christianity and Islam, not so strong in Hinduism and Buddhism.
• When there is a common enemy to unite against – Bruce notes that Islamic Fundamentalism is often united against the USA.
• Lack of centralised control (ironically) – It might be that Catholicism has not developed fundamentalist strains because the Pope and the Vatican tightly control dissenters. However in Protestant Christianity and Islam, there is more freedom for individuals on the fringes to claim to have found a ‘more authentic’ and fundamentalist interpretation of those religions.
• The existence of marginalised individuals facing oppression – Fundamentalism needs recruits, and if a Fundamentalist group emerges with claims that it can provide a better life for people if they just adhere to the faith, it is more likely to grow
• Bruce further argues that the nature of Fundamentalism is shaped by how the political institutions deal with Fundamentalist movements: where they are blocked access to political representation, movements are more likely to turn to violence.

Further Analysis

Bruce argues that both the external factors above and religious beliefs themselves are important in explaining the rise of Fundamentalism.

He also points out that the specific histories of Christianity and Islam have affected the way the see politics. Christianity spent much of its early life as an obscure sect, on the political fringes, so is more concerned with ‘day to day’ (non-political) life, whereas Islam quickly came to dominate states in its early history – thus Islam is more concerned with politics than Christianity.

Bruce also argues that the nature of religion affects the way Fundamentalism is expressed – Christianity tends to emphasise the importance of belief, while Islam emphasises the importance of actions, thus Islam is more likely to develop violent forms of fundamentalism compared to Christianity.

Finally, Bruce argues that Fundamentalism has no chance of succeeding in the West, but it might in the less developed regions of the world.

Haralamabos and Holborn: Sociology Themes and Perspectives edition 8.

What is Religious Fundamentalism?

The early 21 st Century has seen the rise of various Fundamentalist groups, for example:

• The increasing influence of the New Religious Right in the United States
• The rise of Zionism in Israel
• The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Steve Bruce: Communal and Individual Fundamentalism

• Communal individualism is that usually found in less developed countries and is primarily concerned with defending communities (or nations) against what are perceived to be ‘modernist’ threats such as western materialism, individualism, multiculturalism, and human rights. These are typically seen by ‘communal fundamentalists’ as secularising forces which undermine religion.
• 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.

Five Key Features of Fundamentalist Movements

According to Chapman et al (2015) Fundamentalist movements share the following characteristics:

• A literal interpretation of religious texts, which are seen as infallible – they take their ‘moral codes’ straight from their sacred texts. A good fundamentalist is supposed to lead their life in accordance with the original sacred text of the religion, and there is little room for flexibility in this. However, one of the major criticisms of Fundamentalism is that religious texts are often obscure and they have been interpreted at some point by whoever is in power, so there is no such thing as a ‘literal interpretation’.
• They regard all areas of social life as sacred – Fundamentalists tend to impose their views on others in a society, and police people’s day to day behaviour closely to make sure that day to day life is being lived in line with their interpretation of the sacred text.
• They do not tolerate other religions – they have a monopoly on truth, and when Fundamentalists take power, they tend to purge the symbols of other religions from their area and persecute people of other faiths.
• They have conservative beliefs – Fundamentalists tend to support traditional gender roles and are against ‘progressive’ liberalisation, such as women playing a greater role in work and politics and they tend towards tolerance and even celebration of sexuality diversity.
• They tend to look at past religious eras with nostalgia , and sometimes want to change society back to how it used to be, before secularisation, when society was more religions

Chapman et al (2015) Sociology AQA A-Level Student Book 2

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Fundamentalism essay.

This Fundamentalism Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Fundamentalism is a label that refers to the modern tendency to claim the unerring nature of a sacred text and to deduce from that a rational strategy for social action. The final goal is to achieve the utopia of a regime of the Truth, gain political power and rebuild organic solidarity. Many scholars hold the view that this is a modern global phenomenon involving the historic religions, for the most part. There are five common features characterizing fundamentalist movements, according to Marty and Appleby’s research.

First of all, the type of social action dominated by the attitude of fighting back. The social actors claim to be restoring a mythical and sacred order of the past in contrast to the modern idea of atomized individuals in a fragmented society. The second element – fighting for – is implicit in the foregoing: the ultimate goal of the movement is political, despite the furious and intense religious motivations. The third feature – fight with – refers to a specific repository of symbolic resources of use in the crusade for restoring identity and gaining political power. They actually interpret the text, whilst pretending to claim its inerrancy, its a-historicity, and generally, its structural refractoriness to any rational hermeneutics. The fourth element is the fight against. There is a link between the fundamentalist mentality and the need for an enemy. The fifth feature – fight under God – refers to the intensity of the militants’ conviction that they are ”on the right path”. They are certain they are called directly by a god to carry on with radical determination the struggle against the enemy. Thus, the symbolic and physical violence are legitimized.

The social scientists who accept the notion of fundamentalism in a comparative and global approach are divided whether the phenomenon should be interpreted as the quintessence of modernity or as a simple reaction to it. In a first approach, fundamentalism is a clear reaction to modernity, against the individualization of belief and socio-religious identity. The second orientation argues that fundamentalism is a direct consequence of modernity; using the advantages of modernity (i.e. the modern means of communication). A third approach stresses the relation between fundamentalism and secularization: the former witnesses the countertendency to gradual eclipse of the sacred.

Bibliography:

• Marty, M. E. and Appleby S. R. (eds.) (1995) Fundamentalism Comprehended. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
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Globalisation & Religious Belief

Last updated 14 Nov 2018

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A key feature of contemporary society, especially according to postmodernists, is the process of globalisation: how society has become more interconnected across the world, economically, culturally and politically. This has had a number of effects on religion and belief.

Peter Beyer (1994) identified three key impacts of globalisation on religion:

• Particularism – religion has increasingly been used as an avenue for anti-globalisation activity. While one feature of globalisation is a sort of cultural homogenisation (the creation of a single, global popular culture) religion is often seen as the opposite of that: a symbol of how people are culturally different from one another, rather than the same. This has contributed to a rise in fundamentalism and is a feature of political conflict in many areas of the world.
• Universalism – however there is also some evidence of the opposite trend. While small fundamentalist groups might emphasise their difference from other people, the major religions have increasingly focused on what unites them. Far from the feared clash of civilisations (which will be returned to later) religious leaders emphasise shared values and common concerns. Indeed, inter-faith dialogue through global communication has helped to diffuse conflict between religions.
• Marginalisation – Beyer also notes that religion is increasingly marginalised in contemporary society, playing less part in public life, although this may well be a rather Eurocentric view and may be caused by other social changes rather than globalisation.

Another way in which globalisation has impacted on religion is the way religions have made use of global communications . Religious groups are able to take advantage of modern technology to recruit new members, spread the word and keep in contact with other members of the religion. While with some of the more fundamentalist, anti-modern, anti-global religious organisations this can hold a certain irony, it is one of the ways in which religion is much less linked to nationality than it once was.

Religious identity is much less attached to national identity than it once was. Most of the main world religions are international in character and while some countries still have clear state religions, it is certainly less a feature of national identity in the West than it used to be. However, people do still sometimes refer to countries like the UK as “Christian countries”.

A significant exception is India. Meera Nanda (2008) argues that Hinduism is closely related to Indian nationalism. In a survey 93% of Indians considered their culture “superior to others” and increasingly Indian national identity and Hinduism are seen as effectively the same thing. In other words, Hinduism has become what Bellah called a civil religion. Through the worship of Hindu gods, Indians are worshipping India itself.

There were “World Religions” long before the process of globalisation is thought to have begun. Christianity, Islam and Judaism in particular have been present across many nations and continents. However, some sociologists suggest that globalisation has led to the rapid spread of some religious organisations. David Martin (2002) points to the growth of Pentecostalism (a Christian denomination) through the developing world. Martin contrasts Pentecostalism with Catholicism. Martin argues that various features of Pentecostalism endear it to people in poorer parts of the world in an era of globalisation. First, people choose to join the church rather than being born into it. Second, it is viewed (rightly or wrongly) as being on the side of the poor, rather than being an enormously wealthy institution. Third, it is not associated with state or government whereas the Catholic church is often closely connected to the state. Finally, it is less hierarchical than the Catholic church. As such in areas where the Catholic church was once dominant but is now stagnating and losing support, Pentecostalism is flourishing.

While Martin presents one way in which religious institutions themselves have responded to globalisation, Giddens (1991) presents another which is becoming ever-more apparent in contemporary society: fundamentalism.

• Globalisation (Beliefs)
• Religious Beliefs
• Fundamentalism
• Late Modernity

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