Religious Fundamentalism and Deliberative Democracy 1 José Luis Martí Religious fundamentalism is seen as one of the major threats in 21 st Century, at least for Western countries, and as an obstacle to the expan- sion of democracy, human rights and modernization around the world. For many people, it is closely connected to harsher forms of international terrorism. But fundamentalism entails, no doubt, a broader threat than terrorist attacks. 2 It amounts to the strongest global current enemy of democracy and often violently challenges the ideals of international peace and social progress (Garaudy 1990: ch. 1). This is enough to see why this new phenomenon should concern us, as human beings, provided we defend these ideals. 3 1 This work was written after the discussions which took place at the Tampere Club Meeting on Democracy and Varieties of Fundamentalism, held at Tampere (Finland) on September 6-8, 2007. Although it was not presented and discussed there as such, my arguments greatly benefited from all that was said during the meeting, and from all that I learned from my colleagues. Accordingly, I want to thank all the participants in this two-day meeting, most of whom are also authoring a contribution to this volume. I would like to thank the Tampere Club organization as well for the wonderful attention they provided to the service of knowledge. I want to thank also to Hugo Seleme and Jahel Queralt for having read a preliminary version of this text, and having contributed to improve the outcome with their comments and suggestions. 2 There is, of course, no logical connection between both phenomena. Neither all fundamentalists are terrorists (indeed, not all of them are violent), nor all ter- rorists are fundamentalists. Most terrorists are not even religious. It is true that fundamentalism need not be religious; leaving aside the etymology of the word, the concept can easily be extended to secular extremists as well. However, non-religious terrorists are not all political fundamentalists. I am convinced that many, but surely not all, members of the ETA Basque terrorist group in Spain (or many Jacobins in revolutionary France) are (were) political fundamentalists, at least according to the definition I am going to hold. 3 It is usual to point out that religion in general becoming more and more politi- cally important in our advanced democracies, and a wide array of religious claims