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Haynes, Jeffrey (2017) Book review : Competing fundamentalisms: violent extremism in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 18 (3). pp. 352-353. ISSN 2156-7697
‘Religious fundamentalism’ is a term that has for several decades been a staple of writing about the involvement of religion in politics. Often treated as a generic issue in the context of the world religions, ‘religious fundamentalism’ is often associated with conservative or rightwing understandings of the world, articulated by people who appear to believe that the world would be a better place if everybody lived by the word of God as articulated in their particular faith’s holy scriptures.
Clarke is interested in identifying what ‘religious fundamentalisms’ have in common, as expressed through Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Clarke takes the reader through competing theories for what he terms ‘violent (religious) extremism’, including cultural, social, political, economic, and psychological explanations. None of these, he claims, includes a specific role for ‘religion’. For Clarke, however, religion is central to explanations for and the content of (violent) religious fundamentalism, as each of the faiths he focuses on have holy scriptures that at times extol the virtues of using violence to ‘deal with’ enemies of the faith or backsliders within it.
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