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Fundamentalism: Prophecy and Protest in an Age of Globalization

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jcs/cst035

2040-4867

John G. Turner,

Religion, Society, and Development

In Fundamentalism: Prophecy and Protest in an Age of Globalization, Norwegian historian and scholar of religion Torkel Brekke concisely offers an analytical framework for understanding religious reactions against modernity around the world. Roughly twenty-five years after the launch of Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby's Fundamentalism Project, Brekke responds convincingly to critics of applying the term “fundamentalism” across religious boundaries. “[F]undamentalism is a special kind of reaction,” writes Brekke, “to certain developments in the modern world that have taken place in many, perhaps in most, religious traditions” (p. 6). Fundamentalists respond to the “erosion of religious authority in public and private life” (p. 25), a process underway in the West since the Reformation and repeated—sometimes at a dizzying pace—in most other parts of the world as a byproduct of European colonization. In particular, fundamentalists seek to reverse modernity's process of secularization, by which religion gradually became differentiated from other societal spheres and increasingly has been viewed as a private matter with a very limited role in public affairs. Not all religious conservatives are fundamentalists, Brekke cautions. In fact, traditional priestly figures irreversibly lost much of their authority during modernity's globalization, and they sometimes lost it in part because of their links to the secular state, which now claimed supremacy over them. Instead, middle-class lay leaders—applying a term from Max Weber, Brekke calls them “ethical prophets”—gained popular followings through their attempts to reassert religion's role in their societies. In particular, fundamentalists seek to reverse the process by which religion lost its connection to and authority over the spheres of politics, law, the sciences, and education.