Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Analyzing Fundamentalism

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project studies religious fundamentalism, focusing on contrasting groups in a single political entity. The adherents of fundamentalist movements consider their religion to be a system of absolute truth, promote strict conformity to the religious laws and moral precepts specified in the scriptures, and have mustered considerable influence in some regions in recent decades. It is, however, unclear to what extent the groups studied here hold fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes. To make this assessment, this project will launch a full-scale survey of religious fundamentalism and other cultural and sociopolitical values. Building on a earlier study of the subject in the region, this project evaluates the similarities and differences in fundamentalism between people in different groups throughout the region. This project also gauges how fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes among individuals are linked to their (a) religiosity, (b) identity, (c) liberal values, (d) the feelings of insecurity and xenophobia, (e) sources of information, and (f) demographics. Increased understanding of what affects societal values and weakens fundamentalism contributes to a better knowledge of how to engineer peace and avoid conflict. The existence of considerable variability in the fundamentalist movements among the followers of the Abrahamic faiths complicates comparative analysis of the subject, hampers empirical generalization across these faiths, and poses difficulties in theoretical abstraction. To overcome these challenges, this project theorizes that fundamentalists, despite their variabilities across religions and sects, share core orientations toward their own and other religions. These core orientations rest on a disciplinarian conception of the deity, literalism or inerrancy, religious exclusivity, and religious intolerance. To measure these orientations, a fundamentalism scale based on a battery of sixteen survey questions was constructed and validated. This study employs this scale to gauge fundamentalism among a representative sample of 3,300 adult respondents from contrasting groups, using both face-to-face and online interviews. By developing a fundamentalism scale that measures the subject in all the Abrahamic faiths, this project makes a significant contribution to the social-scientific study of fundamentalism and comparative religious studies. The collected dataset will also serve as an infrastructure for comparative analysis and make it possible to engage in scientific dialogue among different researchers studying the subject in the region and beyond. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.