“Is religion playing an important role in increasing fundamentalism? Give reasons for your answer.” (2016)
Fundamentalism is a reactive movement that claims the literal, inerrant authority of sacred texts and seeks to reorder public life by them. The term comes from The Fundamentals (1910–15), pamphlets issued by American Protestants. Religion clearly supplies its language and legitimacy. Sociological evidence suggests, however, that the drivers are largely social, economic and political.
Yes: religion plays an important role
- Texts and symbols: Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Fundamentalisms Observed, 1991) found a family resemblance across faiths: selective retrieval of doctrine, moral dualism, absolutism, and a sense of an elect community.
- Sacred legitimation of violence: Mark Juergensmeyer (Terror in the Mind of God, 2000) shows that religious imagery of “cosmic war” turns worldly conflicts into battles between good and evil, which makes compromise harder.
- Charismatic authority: clerics and preachers who claim exclusive rights to interpret scripture gain political power, as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did in Iran in 1979.
- Institutional networks: seminaries, congregations and religious media recruit and mobilise faster than secular bodies.
No: religion is the medium, not the motor
- Reaction to modernity: Karen Armstrong (The Battle for God, 2000) treats fundamentalism as a modern, fear-driven response to secularism, not as traditional religion.
- Globalisation: Anthony Giddens calls it tradition defended in a traditional way in a world that demands reasons. Manuel Castells sees it as resistance identity among those excluded from the network society.
- Politics and grievance: T. N. Madan placed Sikh militancy in 1980s Punjab within its political and economic context, not in the Sikh tradition alone. Paul Brass showed that political actors produce communal violence.
- Cultural defence: Steve Bruce shows that religion hardens where ethnic or national identity is under threat, as in Northern Ireland, and softens once the conflict fades.
- Counter-evidence: most believers are not fundamentalists. The Pew Research Center’s 2021 India survey found 97% belief in God, alongside 84% who said respecting all religions is very important to being Indian.
Current trend
The Pew Research Center reported that 24 of 198 countries had “very high” government restrictions on religion in 2022, up from 19 in 2021. Much of this comes from states and parties using religion politically, not from theology alone.
Conclusion
Religion plays an important but instrumental role. It provides symbols, certainty and organisation, but fundamentalism grows where globalisation, insecurity, identity politics and state failure activate those resources. Reforming, pluralist readings of the same traditions, such as those of Asghar Ali Engineer within Islam, show that religion can equally resist fundamentalism.