WHY RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM?
This quick survey should be enough to indicate that religious extremism is a problem of significant scale and that it is not limited to any single religion, ethnic group, or region of the world. About ten years ago the University of Chicago Press published five huge volumes, almost needing a wheelbarrow to carry the whole series, prepared by the Fundamentalism Project and edited by Martin E. Martin and R. Scott Appleby. Scores of authors try to track the various kinds of fundamentalisms (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu), find some kind of definition for this admittedly loose and metaphorical term, and trace what seems to be a new surge of fundamentalism around the world. So what are we to say about the sources of fundamentalist reaction? When we ask a question like this, we mean at least two things. One is a question of “explanation,” asking “why” it happens. While this question is inevitable, it is always risky, for the answer can be both simplistic and reductionist. The other i
