Fundamentalism Religion And Politics

This book explores the relationships between fundamentalist religious belief, political extremism and outbreaks of religiously inspired violence. Is the post-Cold War world increasingly violent and is this violence the result of strident religious understandings of how societies should be organized?

Although religious fundamentalism is often thought to be confined to monotheistic “religions of the book,” this study examines the emergence of a fundamentalism rooted in the Shinto tradition and considers its role in shaping postwar Japanese nationalism and politics. Over the past half-century, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the National Association of Shrines (NAS) have been engaged in collaborative efforts to “recover” or “restore” what was destroyed by the process of imperialist secularization during the Allied Occupation of Japan. Since the disaster years of 1995 and 2011, LDP Diet members and prime ministers have increased their support for a political agenda that aims to revive patriotic education, renationalize Yasukuni Shrine, and revise the constitution. The contested nature of this agenda is evident in the critical responses of religious leaders and public intellectuals, and in their efforts to preserve the postwar gains in democratic institutions and prevent the erosion of individual rights. This timely treatment critically engages the contemporary debates surrounding secularization in light of postwar developments in Japanese religions and sheds new light on the role religion continues to play in the public sphere.

Misztal and Shupe bring together theoretical and empirical studies that focus on fundamentalist social movements in North and Central America and Eastern Europe and that examine the role religion plays in determining the direction of social evolution.

This book studies the phenomenon of fundamentalism in the United States. It contains historical and contemporary scholarly analysis of the Christian movements that emerged around the time of the Moral Majority.

Discourse on fundamentalism has gained much attention in recent years, particularly in a post-9/11 context where extremist or terrorist threats are more prominent, perilous, and pervasive. This edited volume seeks to spotlight the perspectives of academics and practitioners vis-à-vis global trends in religious fundamentalism and right-wing extremism over the past decade. It presents a collection of works from notable academics and practitioners; including a selection of case studies from Asia to illustrate the contemporary interplay of religion, politics and identity; alongside broader global trends of religious fundamentalism.The chapters that follow attempt to trace the sources and factors that led to the dramatic rise in these powerful forces of faith, which influence societies and politics around the world. Together, they present a carefully curated narrative of the interplay of religion and identity politics globally and across Asia. The prevailing differences in demographics, history and the extent of ethno-religious diversity across country contexts are perused across each chapter, and the ensuing circumstances deliberated upon.As these circumstances change, the ways people interpret their identities, engage in politics, and navigate their religion will also evolve. How we manage the effects of religious fundamentalism must hence begin with an understanding of how religion, identity, and politics interact — and this is what the upcoming chapters seek to illustrate.

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.

How does religious fundamentalism operate in modern global society? This two-volume series analyses the dynamics of fundamentalism and its relationship to the modern state, the public sphere and globalisation. In this first volume, fundamentalism is approached from the perspective of state and community building, ideology and practices within the context of global society, and the ways in which fundamentalism is intertwined with issues of politics, state power, democracy, globalization, political activism and political ideology. Expert scholars in the field address specific contemporary and past fundamentalist movements that have emerged from within mainstream Islam, Christianity, Baha'ism, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism. This is an important study of an increasingly significant and controversial aspect of modern society, and will be essential reading in the fields of Religion, Politics and International Relations.

Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution is a major comparative analysis of fundamentalist movements in cultural and political context, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. Leading sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt examines the meaning of the global rise of fundamentalism as one very forceful contemporary response to tensions in modernity and the dynamics of civilization. He compares modern fundamentalist movements with the proto-fundamentalist movements which arose in the 'axial civilizations' in pre-modern times; he shows how the great revolutions in Europe which arose in connection with these movements shaped the political and cultural programmes of modernity; and he contrasts post-Second World War Moslem, Jewish and Protestant fundamentalist movements with communal national movements, notably in Asia. The central theme of the book is the distinctively Jacobin features of fundamentalist movements and their ambivalent attitude to tradition: above all their attempts to essentialize tradition in an ideologically totalistic way. Eisenstadt has won the Amalfi book prize.