Religious Fundamentalism and Changing Faces of Nationalism

This article seeks to examine the links between the rise of religious fundamentalism covering radical Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Sikh and Buddhist resistance movements and a spreading wave of nationalism. Despite their diverse origins these movements share in common a stiff opposition to secular ideas and institutions that have been the basis of Weslern modernization projects for the last two centuries. The main focus is to show how religion, with its specific qualities to supply cosmologies, moral frameworks, stable institutions and traditions has come to be a defining character of group identity in more comprehensive and potent ways in the last three decades. A crucial theme of the paper is nationalism, which serves as an ideological cement helping to bind people together and links them fo the broader purposes of the state. As nationalism is ideologically constructed through the interplay of common (or differing) identities most religious movements construct and define their political demands directed internally or viewed as means to challenge and stop what they see as corrupting external threats, through religion.