Four Lessons from the Study of Fundamentalism and Psychology of Religion

Abstract

What lessons can the study of fundamentalism and the psychology of religion teach the newer field of Radicalization and Involvement in Violent Extremism (RIVE)? Four lessons and an intervention are offered in this article: (1) Religion is a robust human experience and cultural product that adopts a defensive shape when its worldview is threatened. (2) This does not mean that all "fundamentalisms" or radical versions of religion are somehow linked or perform similar functions; rather, they reflect the limited human repertoire to threat, yet within different cultural and historical contexts. (3) Causal explanations on the level of the individual are insufficient to understand these movements. (4) There is a modernist trend to elevate word-based, rational knowing over more implicit, symbolic knowing in both fundamentalism and radical discourses. Fundamentalism and radicalized religion seem to be the left brain's attempt to"do" religion. And, it does this now even more separately from the right brain compared to previous eras.1 (5) An intervention addressing violent extremisms through value complexity draws the above lessons together in an emergentist model that has an empirical track record of success.

Keywords

• Counterterrorism
• Fundamentalism
• Political violence
• Radicalization
• Religious violence
• Terrorism / counterterrorism
• Violent extremism