Modernity, religious fundamentalism and the secularization thesis

Religious fundamentalism is often regarded as an attempt to recreate the past by allowing religious believers to inhabit a pre-modern worldview. This paper seeks to demonstrate that this is a highly misleading picture of religious fundamentalism. By examining some of the key characteristics of religious fundamentalism within the Abrahamic faiths, the paper argues that, far from being a throwback to the past, religious fundamentalism is a distinctively modern phenomenon. Finally, an examination of the secularization thesis and its failure to account for current patterns of religiosity, provides further reason to believe that religious fundamentalism is dependent upon other features of modernity