Reply #23: Our society underwent a period of rapid and accelerating change in the 20th century,

[Occam Bandage]

driven by the geometric acceleration of technological and economic innovation, and with many friction points from World Wars to culture wars.

Before the latter half of the 20th century, the last major fundamentalist upheaval in America was in the middle of the 19th century, as the country converted from an agricultural to an industrial urban society, and fought a major civil war over the ensuing societal and political changes. This is when "in God we trust" was added to currency, and this is when soldiers sang songs of "the Glory of the coming of the Lord" as they marched to war. As America adapted to this new world, however, the fundamentalist spirit waned, and religious fervor subsided.

Before that, the previous major fundamentalist upheaval occurred around the time of the American Revolution, as mercantile colonialism gave way to independent capitalism. Before that, the previous major fundamentalist upheaval occurred as the American colonies began to take on a stable identity and build a new culture out of the rough and hostile land.

We are in a world now in which we may never become truly native. Moore's law still holds, and each decade brings greater changes than the decade before it. Paradigms are built in one year and shattered four years later. Cultures continue to merge and blend, and economies open as jobs, goods, languages, and values hop international flights and end up on the other side of the world. The world spins faster and faster, along newer and stranger axes.

Meanwhile, more and more people turn to the solid groundings of the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, as new and innovative fundamentalist sects offer claims of reassurance and shared fiery anger at the endlessly changing world.

So long as the world exists, there will be religions to react to it. So long as the world changes, there will be fundamentalists to shake their fists at it. I doubt fundamentalism is going away any time soon.