RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM — ‘TERRITORY’ OF INNOVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Annotation

The article is devoted to the paradox/paradoxes of religious fundamentalism, which, contrary to its axiomatic understanding as archaic or static, has demonstrated throughout its history a powerful innovative potential and a tendency towards continuous transformation. Being a product of modernity and its dialectical reaction, fundamentalism itself is an expression of reflexive modernity, revealing its internal dialectic as modernity develops, from early to mature and late. As a result, as the “first wave” (first quarter of the 20th century), “second wave” (1970–1990s) and “third wave” (first quarter of the 21st century) of religious fundamentalism are formed and spread in the modern world, fundamentalism increasingly demonstrates its ambivalence/modernist impulse. But at the same time, its “dark side” — irrationalism, relativism, nihilism and violence — is beginning to emerge more and more strongly. In this connection, the article concludes that it is necessary to study fundamentalism in its diversity and variation, and that it is impossible to reduce this phenomenon to a single paradigm. It is obvious that the time has come to reconfigure the “optics,” since fundamentalism today is not only a “one-way movement” (movement backwards) and not even a “reciprocating movement” (movement back and forth), but a “fundamentalist turn” further to the side.

Keywords

religious fundamentalism, neo-fundamentalism, post-fundamentalism, modernity, religious modernism

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The research was carried out at the expense of the grant of the Russian Science Foundation
no. 24–28–00272, https://rscf.ru/project/24–28–00272 /; Тhe Russian Christian Academy for the
Humanities named after Fyodor Dostoevsky