The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, Second Edition. Edited by Robert A. Segal and Nickolas P. Roubekas. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Fundamentalism Henry Munson Common Criticisms Fundamentalism is a controversial term usually used to describe religious conservatives who insist on strict conformity to a sacred text. It is often criticized for the following reasons: it is polemical, it is used indiscriminately, and it is of Christian origin. The third criticism is the weakest of the three. Words like zealot and puritanical have transcended their original religious contexts, and there is no reason that fundamentalism cannot do the same – as long as scholars do not force all the movements so labelled to fit a Procrustean model based on Christian fundamentalism. But the first two criticisms are more serious. It is true that people and movements are usually called fundamentalist by their critics rather than their supporters. This is true even of American Christian fundamentalists, who once used the term proudly but began avoiding it in the 1980s because of its connotations of bigotry and narrow‐mindedness. However, some of the critics of the term fundamentalism fail to acknowledge that fundamentalists are in fact often bigoted and narrow-minded. Scholars should, of course, avoid polemical terms that attack rather than analyze. And many serious scholars argue that fundamentalism is such a term (see Watt 2017). At the same time anyone committed to the idea that a person’s civil rights should be unrelated to religion or gender is inevitably going to be critical of those who reject this principle. And fundamentalists generally do. The argument that the term fundamentalism is often used indiscriminately is valid. The term is sometimes used, for example, in ways that overlook the distinction between nationalist movements in which religion serves primarily as a marker of national CHAPTER 17