What has accounted for the huge rise in fundamentalist religions?

Question

Please have a sociological perspective. Could comment on early sociologist claims that modernity's accomplishment would be the death or religion, on Dirkheim, Marx, Weber, Smart Neitzsche, Berger and Beckford.

Answer 1

Fundamentalism is both a religious phenomenon, a political movement, and a state of consciousness. It is characterised by profound dissatisfaction about society, preoccupation with religious beliefs, expectation of imminent apocalypse, assumption of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, concretisation of this in terms of actual groups of human beings, and the claim of divine authority to justify violence against the perceived enemies. Like other totalitarian worldviews such as fascism, Stalinism, and neo-liberalism, it claims absolute righteousness for its own beliefs: "God is on our side!" Throughout the millennia, fundamentalism has appeared in many forms including Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Islamic and other varieties, and has led to genocides, crusades, jihads, witch-hunts, tortures, inquisitions, deportations, pogroms, holocausts, terrorist attacks, revolutions, fatwas, coups d'état, human rights violations, collective suicides, and wars.

Fundamentalism is nothing new, but it is lately attracting so many adherents that it has become a global issue. Consider the Christian variety. In the USA, for example, Presidents Reagan and Bush would not have been elected without the backing of the Christian fundamentalist voting block; their advocates now sit on most school boards, where they censor the curriculum and oblige educational textbook publishers to re-write schoolbooks in order to avoid blacklisting and economic boycott. A British firm, recently commissioned to write a History of the Americas series for a major US schoolbook publishing company, was told to change the sentence "Spaniards conquered the Aztecs in Mexico" to "Spanish explorers moved through the land spreading their culture " in order not to offend the fundamentalist lobby (and gloss over the blood-soaked history of Christianity's suppression of pre-conquest Indigenous spiritual traditions in South America). The same firm was also told to change the caption for an illustration of an early Hominid in a book on dinosaurs, so as not to arouse the wrath of creationists who deny the scientific evidence for evolution. Even in England, illustrations of witches flying on broomsticks, such a colourful item of European folklore (and a folk-memory of that old shamanic tradition which was brutally repressed by the Church's massive holocaust of women during the Inquisition), are now strictly verboten in primary school books! This systemic falsification of history has a pernicious and insidious effect on the education of children. Greek Orthodox fundamentalists supported Serbian ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. Russian Orthodox fundamentalists, allied to Mr. Zhirinovski's nationalist right-wing extremists, succeeded in passing a law forbidding the setting-up of any religious organisations outside those officially approved by the State. And the Pope, in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), has also shown fundamentalist tendencies by denigrating other religions and spiritual traditions as inferior to his own.

Hindu fundamentalists have carried out atrocities in India. Jewish fundamentalists in Israel have repeatedly obliged the government of that contry to renege on its peace plan agreement not to build new settlements in the Palestinian occupied territories. And Islamic fundamentalists have carried out terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, France, India, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sudan, Pakistan, Tanzania, and the USA. Desperate economic conditions and social injustice feed fundamentalist feelings in Bangladesh, the Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Khazakstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tadzikhistan, Turkey, and Uzbekhistan. Without government repression, Egypt and Turkey might already have followed in the footsteps of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which have instituted fundamentalists interpretations of Sharia law.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CONTEXT


Take the case of the relationship between the Islamic fundamentalists and the rest of the world. Although this relationship is fraught with publicity, misundersanding and violence, my choice of these particular protagonists does not imply that Islamic fundamentalists are more pertinent to this discussion than any other group. My point is that the violent behaviour which everybody feels so outraged by came about in a historical context which included conquest by the Egyptian and Roman Empires, the spread of the latter's state religion (Christianity), crusades and centuries of religious prejudice, European colonialism and the drawing of political boundaries which suited the needs of the victors in WWI and WWII, followed by a prolonged ideological conflict between two superpowers which obliged Muslim peoples to choose (or be chosen by) either one side or the other, but suffer the consequences of both! Neither of the superpowers' value systems harmonised with the traditional Islamic one, which favours pious religious practice and a distinctly non-consumerist vision of the future. But the rich countries' growing demand for cheap oil – and thus for political influence throughout the Arab world – resulted in the establishment of puppet governments set up, funded, and militarily equipped by the West. These governments serve the demands of their ruling élites and their western masters, but not the basic human needs of their own people. The resulting authoritarianism, poverty, corruption, human rights violations and inequity fuels the fires of fundamentalist resentment. What the West sees as "Islamic fundamentalism" is the backlash to our own economic and political violence.

Answer 2

Here's my thought.
The world has become a place of many choices. Media being what it is and technology being what it is the world is very small and we are more aware than ever of the choices out there as well as all the problems. Some problems have been created by the media and the technology such as sexual issues from body image to teen pregnancy.
Fundamentalist don't have to make any choices. The "rules" are all laid out for them. Don't do this. Do this. Don't read, listen to, watch that. Do read, listen to, watch this. And here's what you should think of it. There is no choice required. People are just tired and overwhelmed, I think. Fundamentalism is safe. It's a way to put the choices on someone else. The Pastor, the Bible, The "rules".

Answer 3

The failure of modernism.

Modernity, a project of the Enlightenment, or better put, its value-system, promised us a better world if we applied "reason" to all human endeavors.

"Reason" such as Keynesian economics, Marxian economics, neoliberal economics, neoclassical economics, etc.

"Reason" was to make the world free from hunger, disease, poverty.

The opposite has happened. Everywhere Europe brought the Enlightenment, he brought modernity, violence, poverty on a new, larger scale.

And then the peoples of the "Third World" were vilified for being violent, for being poor, for taking handouts, for being dirty, for not following the World Bank to a T.

"Reason" brought out death machines, WW I, WW II and the "Final Solution," the nuclear bomb. Before modernity, civilian casualties were generally at 2% of wartime casualties.

Since WW I, civilian casualties are 98% of all wartime casualties.

Just look at how many Iraqis have died under US occupation. Much more than under Saddam...

So, the problem as far as the fundamentalists is that humanity has strayed. God has told us how to live, how to dress, how to act. And we have betrayed God.

We have strayed and are now the victims of our own pride.

Here in the US, conservatives, for example, used to be pro-choice, because of privacy issues. They didn't want Big Brother snooping into a woman's medical records.

Then the fundamentalists hijacked the conservatives. And in doing so, people like Pat Robertson have become very wealthy.

Again, back to the failure of modernity. We haven't reached the capitalist utopia that the neoconservative Straussians had hoped for since the days of Barry Goldwater. So the blame the liberals, gays, etc. And it's easy to hook more and more fundamentalists to conservative causes, and vice versa, because of the alleged "loose" morality of liberals.

Modernity has failed to make a better world. Disease, hunger and poverty are rampant.

It's easy for an Elijah to make his voice heard in an increasingly complex world. Fundamentalism in Christianity, in Hinduism, in Islam, even in Buddhism is on the rise globally, regardless of their millenarian visions....

It's because they hold the easy answers to life...

Answer 4

Where do you get your ideas? What rise of fundamentalist religions are you talking about? Do you have any idea how much bloodier the religious wars of the past have been compared to what we see today?

Also, if you want to understand the roots of violence, you should stop listening to political scientisis' poorly substantiated theories and turn to quantitative conflict research, which has been underway for quite a few years now. Here's a good place to start:

http://www.worldbank.org/research/conflict/papers/civilconflict.pdf

Answer 5

Probably the millenium and how many prophecies predict the end of the world soon. The validity of these prophecies is questionable.