Fundamentalism

Various forms of religious fundamentalism have become politically active since the 1980s, be it the Iranian revolution or the religious right in the USA. The corresponding religious movements join other identity-political actors. An important difference, however, is that the religious actors understand their recourse to transcendence as rendering their own social and political positions unconditional and absolute. In the first phase of dealing with the topic, the focus was on the discursive construction of absoluteness (1994). This was followed by situating the phenomenon within Eisenstadt's theory of multiple modernities (2009). Essential for our theory is the development of a purely formal concept of fundamentalism by the comparison between the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalism (2008): fundamentalism as the absolutization of one's own positions while simultaneously octroying one's own norms on other actors, all this in the context of the politicization of identity formation in modernity. The findings of these studies are now being incorporated into the study of political strategies of religious actors.

 

Selected publications

• Monograph developing a formal concept of fundamentalism by discussing radical Christianity, radical Islam, and Europe's modernity: Kampf der Fundamentalismen. (2008).HW Schäfer.
• On transnational mobilization of fundamentalist religion: “Fundamentalismos, modernidades y tensiones políticas globales” (2008). HW Schäfer.
• On the discursive construction of absoluteness: "Fundamentalism: power and the absolute" (1994). HW Schäfer.

Further literature can be found under "Publications Schäfer and Team"