Accounting for Fundamentalisms features treatments of fundamentalist movements, groups that often make headlines but are rarely understood, as part of the multivolume Fundamentalism Project. This book remains a standard reference source for comprehending the dynamics of fundamentalist movements around the world. Surveying fundamentalist movements in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, the contributors to Accounting for Fundamentalisms describe the organization of these movements, their leadership and recruiting techniques, and the ways in which their ideological programs and organizational structures shift over time in response to changing political and social environments.

"This book presents an innovative psychological framework for understanding religious fundamentalism. Blending extensive research and incisive analysis, the highly regarded authors distinguish fundamentalist traditions from other faith-based groups and illuminate the thinking and behavior of believers. Offering respectful, historically informed examinations of several major fundamentalist groups, the volume challenges many commonly held stereotypes. In the process, it stakes out important new terrain for the psychological study of religion" -- BOOK JACKET.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, religious fundamentalism has dominated public debate as never before. Policymakers, educators, and the general public all want to know: Why do fundamentalist movements turn violent? Are fundamentalisms a global threat to human rights, security, and democratic forms of government? What is the future of fundamentalism? To answer questions like these, Strong Religion draws on the results of the Fundamentalism Project, a decade-long interdisciplinary study of antimodernist, antisecular militant religious movements on five continents and within seven world religious traditions. The authors of this study analyze the various social structures, cultural contexts, and political environments in which fundamentalist movements have emerged around the world, from the Islamic Hamas and Hizbullah to the Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries of Northern Ireland, and from the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition of the United States to the Sikh radicals and Hindu nationalists of India. Offering a vividly detailed portrait of the cultures that nourish such movements, Strong Religion opens a much-needed window onto different modes of fundamentalism and identifies the kind of historical events that can trigger them.

This third volume of the Fundamentalism Project provides a systematic overview of the advances made by antisecular religious movements over the past twenty-five years. The distinguished contributors to this volume - economists, political scientists, religious historians, social anthropologists, and sociologists - focus on the impact these movements have had on national economies, political parties, constitutional issues, and international relations on five continents and within the religious traditions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. Do fundamentalisms tend toward political activism, and how successful have they been in remaking political structures? To answer this question and others, the contributors discuss the anti-abortion movement in the U.S., the Islamic war of resistance in Afghanistan, and Shiite jurisprudence in Iran. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby conclude the volume with a synthetic statement of fundamentalist impact on polities, economies, and state security. The Fundamentalism Project is a monumental undertaking by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that involves an international group of scholars. Taken together, the volumes in this series will become a standard reference for educators and policy analysts for years to come.

The Fundamentalism Project Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby Around the world, fundamentalist movements are profoundly affecting the way we live. Misinformation and misperception about fundamentalism exacerbate conflicts at home and abroad. Yet policymakers, journalists, students, and others have lacked any comprehensive resource on the explosive phenomenon of fundamentalism. Now the Fundamentalism Project has assembled an international team of scholars for a multivolume assessment of the history, scope, sources, character, and impact of fundamentalist movements within the world's major religious traditions. Fundamentalisms and Society shows how fundamentalist movements have influenced human relations, education, women's rights, and scientific research in over a dozen nations and within the traditions of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Drawn from the fields of anthropology, sociology, history of religion, and history of science, the contributors cover topics such as the educational structures of Hindu revivalism, women in fundamentalist Iran and Pakistan, and the creationist cosmos of Protestant fundamentalism. In a concluding essay, William H. McNeill situates contemporary fundamentalisms within a world historical context. The Fundamentalism Project, Volume 2 Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby direct the Fundamentalism Project. Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, is the senior editor of the Christian Century and the author of numerous books, including the multivolume Modern American Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Appleby, a research associate at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Church and Age Unite!” The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.

The Fundamentalism Project vol. 1.

In this fifth volume of the Fundamentalism Project, Fundamentalisms Comprehended, the distinguished contributors return to and test the endeavor's beginning premise: that fundamentalisms in all faiths share certain "family resemblances." Several of the essays reconsider the project's original definition of fundamentalism as a reactive, absolutist, and comprehensive mode of anti-secular religious activism. The book concludes with a capstone statement by R. Scott Appleby, Emmanuel Sivan, and Gabriel Almond that builds upon the entire Fundamentalism Project. Identifying different categories of fundamentalist movements, and delineating four distinct patterns of fundamentalist behavior toward outsiders, this statement provides an explanatory framework for understanding and comparing fundamentalisms around the world.