Fundamentalism

FUNDAMENTALISM IS the belief that a given religious group has absolute historical foundations and was chosen by a divinity to become a holy nation, so that its radical political views are dogmatically justified and need to be defended in a militant and belligerent way, especially against modern and foreign worldviews. Although fundamentalist has been used as a secular adjective characterizing any person or group holding dogmatically to a given position, the origins of the term are related to three traditional monotheistic religions.

Fundamentalist attitudes were first ascribed to Pentecostals in the United States. But the same phenomenon was observed in the reaction of conservative sectors of the Catholic Church to modernism. Moreover, orthodox Judaism developed similar characteristics based on Zionism. In the same way, some radical ...