Religious Fundamentalism
The Word That Wasn't: How 'Fundamentalism' Escaped Its Origins
The word 'fundamentalism' was coined to describe a very specific argument about biblical prophecy in 1910s California — and then the rest of the world borrowed it for almost everything else.
The Idea
Most people use 'fundamentalism' as a synonym for religious extremism, fanaticism, or dangerous rigidity. But the term has a precise origin, and that origin quietly distorts every conversation we have about it today. The word emerged from a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative Protestant theologians in the United States. Their concern was specific: the encroachment of historical-critical scholarship on biblical interpretation — the academic method of reading scripture as a human document shaped by its time, rather than as inerrant divine revelation. The 'fundamentals' they defended included the literal virgin birth, the physical resurrection, and crucially, the verbal inspiration of scripture — meaning every word was God-breathed and therefore accurate. This was a modern reaction to modernity itself, which is the genuinely surprising thing. Fundamentalism didn't emerge from ancient, unchanging tradition. It was invented. It was a 20th-century theological position, shaped by print culture, transatlantic networks, and anxieties that were distinctly industrial-age. When scholars began applying the term to movements in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and beyond from the 1970s onwards — most famously in the University of Chicago's massive Fundamentalism Project — they were borrowing a Protestant category and stretching it across wildly different contexts. Some of those movements shared family resemblances: a sense of embattled identity, a return to textual authority, a rejection of secular modernity. But the fit was always imperfect, and sometimes misleading.
In the World
In 1979, two events shook the world in ways that seemed to demand a new vocabulary. The Iranian Revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, replacing a secular monarchy with a clerical state. And in the United States, Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the Moral Majority, mobilising evangelical Christians as a political force. Journalists and academics reached for the same word to describe both: fundamentalism. But the comparison, while convenient, obscured as much as it revealed. Shia Islam has no doctrine of scriptural inerrancy in the Protestant sense — its clerical tradition is built on jurisprudential interpretation, not a claim that every word of the Quran is literally and historically precise in the way American fundamentalists meant about the Bible. The Revolutionary Guard and the Moral Majority were responding to modernity, yes — but through completely different theological architectures. Martin Riesebrodt, one of the Chicago project's contributors, later admitted the category was always doing too much work. Meanwhile, in India, what gets called Hindu fundamentalism by Western journalists — movements like those associated with the RSS — often makes no strong claims about scripture at all. Its 'return to origins' is more ethnic and civilisational than textual. The word stuck anyway, because it filled a rhetorical need. After September 2001, that need became overwhelming. But a word that explains everything often explains nothing with precision.
Why It Matters
Understanding where a word comes from changes how carefully you use it. 'Fundamentalism' has become a floating label that gets attached to any religious movement that seems threatening, resistant to liberalism, or culturally foreign. That's not useless — there are real family resemblances across these movements — but it can flatten genuine differences into a single alarming silhouette. When you hear the word now, it's worth asking: is the speaker describing a specific claim about scriptural authority? A political programme? A cultural identity? A rejection of pluralism? These are distinct things that require distinct analysis. It also matters because the term carries an implicit adversary — secular modernity — and that framing assumes the secular position as the neutral default. But the anxiety about modernity that drives religious conservatism is not irrational or simply fear-based. It often reflects real losses: of community, of coherent meaning, of intergenerational continuity. Taking those losses seriously, rather than just labelling the response 'fundamentalist', is where more honest thinking about religion and public life tends to begin.
A Question to Ponder
When you use a broad label to describe a movement or belief system, what does the label let you stop thinking about?
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