Religious: Fundamentalism

The concept of ‘religious fundamentalism’ is very widely used, but also very controversial, for both theoretical and ‘partisan’ reasons. The term was coined in the context of American Protestantism, and was reportedly used for the first time in July 1920 by pastor Curtis Lee Laws. The first thorough comparative work about religious fundamentalism was Defenders of God by Bruce Lawrence, who probably was the first scholar to openly propose and defend a comparative approach to the study of the phenomenon, criticizing the idea that fundamentalism was ‘the special preserve of Protestant Christianity’. Although the concept of ‘fundamentalism’ became widely used in comparative perspective only in the 1980s, in other religious traditions ante litteram phenomena of fundamentalism had already developed. Many of the residual works on fundamentalist movements focus on the religions of India’s sub-continent. A rather huge corpus of literature deals with Hindu fundamentalism, regarded as a kind of religious nationalism with some features similar to the Jewish movement.