Are Religions Getting More Fundamental?

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The claim I overheard from a peer is: While the people who are leaving religions or being seen as "spiritual but not religious" and "athiest" are growing in number, the people who are remaining in their major religion are getting increasingly fundamental. The religious are more likely today than in the past twenty years to take religious texts literally, denounce anything about science regardless of what it is, more likely to join a cult, more likely to pray about a problem for God to solve it rather than directly solve it themselves, adopt radical views, and less likely to consider other points of view.

Does anyone have an answer to this? I am very curious if there is an some truth to this. In the past 20 years, I think people are starting to become more clutched to their religion. They do not seem as loose as they used to be.

I think you mean fundamentalist?

I think that the times feel generally less secure so people cling harder to all kinds of things. Faith in whatever, it's not necessarily religion.

All religious fundamentalists take their religion to an extreme which precludes the rights of other people. In essence, they are not following the meaning of the reference you give because they tend to deny others the rights which they themselves demand.

1 - You can't get two fundamentalists to agree what Judisam Islam and Christianity is.

2 - Fundamentalists tend to be hateful racist and judgement. The very opposite of their religious beliefs.

3 - They can't tolerate or understand that other people have different beliefs.

4.- If we all belived the same thing the world would be a very boring place.

BTW this is coming from a Christian I dont belive its right to dislike or hate someone for their religious or non religious beliefs if I did that would be a oxymoron.

When your beliefs are threatened by new developments in society you face a choice: either abandon, modify, or cling to your beliefs.

Many in every religous tradtion are unwilling to do either of the first two so they cling to their beliefs with a death grip out of insecurity.


Traditional sects are forced to compete with other as never before, and to compete with atheism and non religion as never before, and also to compete with the growing trend of turning religion into a buffet where you can pick and choose from more than one tradition.

So those who stay with one sect are often forced to be fanatacal out of insecurity and end up distorting thier creed in order to save it, and actually end up living a xenophobic parody of thier tradtional religion.

For example the extreme Creationism that evangelicals have turned into an industry today did not exist in Christendom in the first nineteen and half centuries before Darwin. Like everyone else early scientists assumed tha God created everything, but that didnt stop those same scientists from recognizing that geologic strata had differing characteristic fossils and that these strata could thus be dated to different times in the past. In contrast modern creationists claim that all geologic strata were laid down at once in THE Flood- which pre Darwin geolists wouldve laughed at.

So this insecurity due to modernity does contribute to a growing fundamentalist streak within many religions.