Social Psychology and Religious Fundamentalism

Abstract

Religion is obviously shaped by the social context within which it exists. Hence, one might expect some legitimacy to the concept of rural religion. Furthermore, if there is even partial truth to the claims that, relative to more cosmopolitan cultures, rural cultures are less heterogeneous, less tolerant of divergencies in belief and action, and less abstract in their conceptualizations, then these claims should hold true to the same extent for rural religion as they do for rural culture in general. In this sense, religious fundamentalism is not unanticipated in rural areas. Yet, as we shall see, it is more than just a curiosity that the persistence of the faith of the rural Roman (the paganus) became an English word for unbeliever (pagan) and the religious conservatism of the English heath dwellers became another word for unbeliever, heathen (Smith & Zopf, 1970). Yet these terms conceal a bias that also characterizes the scientific study of religion in general and of religious fundamentalism in particular. The problem of bias, noted through many chapters of this text, is even more apparent when investigators confront not only a rural culture unlikely to be their own, but also a religious fundamentalism dominant in that culture and to which they are unlikely to subscribe. Within psychology's sister science, the scientific study of religion has always been of importance, so much so that at least one eminent sociologist (Freidrichs, 1971) has found developmental paralleIs in the

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