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.

Many have reacted to modernity with a self-conscious refusal to adjust or to assimilate their religious ideas to its demands, with an attitude, that in other words, appears to be characterized by rejection. Moreover, those who reject modernity also tend to vigorously reject the religious thought that has developed as a constructive response to it. To what extent, though, do those who seek to reject modern ideas succeed in sustaining pre-modern religious worldviews within the modern world? This paper argues that, ironically, and as implausible as it might initially seem, the systems of religious belief promoted by those who seek to reject modern thought are no less the product of modernity than are the explicitly modern religious ideas that they typically reject.