This chapter argues that throughout history many religions have proved themselves capable of sparking and fueling hostility toward outsiders and even toward people in the same faith who are viewed as unacceptable for one reason or another. We examine recent manifestations of extremism in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, explaining that analysts often disagree about the extent to which religious beliefs and institutions are causally important. Key terms such as religious extremism, fundamentalism, radicalization, and terrorism are defined, noting the crucial importance of maintaining a distinction between the religious extremist and the extremely religious. Though we suggest researchers face many methodological challenges, we explore a broad range of empirical studies on related topics. The chapter also reviews theory and research on why and how people become religious extremists. We further draw on the psychology of radicalization, arguing that nowadays most scholars believe that there are cognitive and behavioral processes at work. Some people may move directly to carrying out terrorist deeds without acquiring much group ideology or religious belief.

Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.

Spirituality, religion and a sense of the sacred can be important areas for creativity and the re-imagining of social work. This chapter explores this arena, arguing that acknowledging and drawing on spirituality and sacredness are significant parts of social work and that to ignore them is to deny an important dimension of humanity. However, spirituality and sacredness are experienced and manifested in different ways and can be affected by dominant narratives in different cultural and political contexts and at different historical times. This chapter avoids making any claims as to the truth or otherwise of any forms of religion or spirituality and instead considers the role that a sense of the sacred and the spiritual can play in the re-imagining of social work.

Both because Islam arose later than Christianity and because of its present largely negative reputation, this chapter is structured somewhat differently from its predecessors. A first section looks at its historical relations with culture, stressing first positive aspects and then the distortions noted by Edward Said and his followers, as well as the more general, detrimental effect of western imperialism. The second section then explores historical restraints upon fundamentalism; first in the four Sunni schools through analogy, abrogation and chains of transmission. Mystical Sufism is then portrayed as an unjustifiably marginalised alternative. The final section then looks at contemporary options, taking first modern Muslim contextualisation before noting possible reasons why Christians could legitimately endorse Mohammad’s modification of earlier biblical stories. The variety of its present forms demonstrates the extent to which it can be seen to be pulled in opposing directions, hope in openness to new ideas restrained by warning pressures to ossify its past.

This chapter takes a closer look at three cognitive frameworks that are conducive to atheism: evidentialism, distantionism, and, particularly, scientism. It also explores whether scientism can rightly be considered a variety of fundamentalism.

Why are religious minorities well represented and politically influential in some democracies but not others? Focusing on evangelical Christians in Latin America, I argue that religious minorities seek and gain electoral representation when (a) they face significant threats to their material interests and worldview and (b) their community is not internally divided by cross-cutting cleavages. Differences in Latin American evangelicals’ political ambitions emerged as a result of two critical junctures: episodes of secular reform in the early twentieth century and the rise of sexuality politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Brazil, significant threats at both junctures prompted extensive electoral mobilization; in Chile, minimal threats meant that mobilization lagged. In Peru, where major cleavages divide both evangelicals and broader society, threats prompt less electoral mobilization than otherwise expected. The multi-method argument leverages interviews, content analysis, survey experiments, ecological analysis, and secondary case studies of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

A broad evangelical consensus dominated American Protestantism in the first half of the 1800s, but the social and intellectual changes of the decades after the American Civil War began to fracture this consensus, creating debate over how to achieve the still agreed-upon goal of Protestantizing the nation. Social shifts included industrialization, urbanization, and immigration from non-Protestant areas of the globe; meanwhile, women’s educational and professional opportunities expanded while the civil rights of African Americans contracted. Intellectual shifts included the popularization of Darwinian evolution and a new “higher critical” approach to interpreting the Bible. The Civil War had also raised hermeneutical questions: Northern and Southern white Protestants had reached polar-opposite conclusions on the morality of slavery. Yet even though subsequent economic, social, and political crises like the world wars and the Great Depression further strained Protestant unity, American Protestants largely retained their cultural dominance throughout this era.

In Chapter 1, I discuss scientism, or the belief that scientific knowledge is the most (or only) legitimate form of knowledge. My argument is that scientism mischaracterizes science as an epistemically privileged and unified method. Actual scientific practice, however, has demonstrated tremendous variability in theory and method across time, place, and disciplinary context, and can best be understood as a historically contingent human activity. Drawing on historical and philosophical critiques, I characterize scientism as a kind of science fundamentalism that insulates scientists from social and moral critique and so contributes to the institutionalization of exceptionalism and privilege. I discuss elements of scientism in professional psychology, using historical and contemporary examples to show that it is a common (perhaps even a majority) position.

Micah Watson argues that an active conscience is the outgrowth of the evangelical mind. Evangelicalism is the form of Protestantism that relies on the truths of historical Christianity while navigating between mainline Protestantism and fundamentalism. For evangelicals, conscience is founded in the Bible, particularly the writings of Paul. It also flowered in the post-Reformation world, where it was taught that an active conscience signaled a person’s salvation. Conscience also led evangelicals to be active against all forms of sinfulness. In the United States, this contributed to the proliferation of voluntary societies, where Christians who were “saved for service” could exercise their consciences to spread the Gospel or stamp out perceived evils (like alcohol use). Watson traces the history of evangelical conscience into the twentieth century, and he describes voices like Carl Henry and others who sought harmony between the pious strand of evangelicalism, and adherents who were committed to social action. Later in the twentieth century, evangelicals sought peace in society more than saving it. Still, evangelicals continue to oppose perceived social evils, including same-sex marriage.

A study of Lagos’s religious marketplace is incomplete without paying attention to the upsurge of religio-spiritual movements such as the Grail Movement and Eckankar since the 1970s. These movements are eclectic in nature because they mix Islam, Christianity, indigenous traditions, ‘Eastern’ religions, as well as non-religious sources. Chapter 6 addresses the question why these movements, which are exogenous to Nigeria and differ radically from mainstream religion, could attract an increasing membership in Lagos. I argue that the answer to this question lies in what van Dijk (2015) calls the ‘too-muchness’ of Pentecostalism. While Chrislam, NASFAT, and Ijo Orunmila have capitalized on Pentecostalism’s spatial appropriation of Lagos by copying Pentecostal styles and strategies, the Grail Movement and Eckankar expanded because they turned away from Pentecostalism and offered an alternative that promised individual spiritual liberation in the here and now. Today their ‘otherness’ attracts especially the newly emerging middle class, who are looking for ways to distinguish themselves from ‘dogmatic’ mainstream believers. Whereas for the aspiring middle class shifting allegiances from institutionalized religion to new religio-spiritual movements is a means to differentiate themselves, for others boundary making is a way to manage religious pluralism.