Acta Politica, 2004, 39, (314–317)

r 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 0001-6810/04 $30.00

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Book Reviews
Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World
Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003, US$19.00
ISBN: 0226014983.

Acta Politica (2004) 39, 314–317. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500067

Until recently, comparative politics as a discipline had made little progress in

understanding religious fundamentalism as an explicitly political phenomenon.
The global religious resurgence of the last several decades attracted the
attention of mostly cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and theologians; it
seldom elicited the sort of sustained theory-building or rigorous methodo-
logical endeavor necessary to promote long-term research programmes within
political science. After 9/11 and the war on terrorism, however, a growing
segment of Western political scientists has begun to regard religious
fundamentalism no longer as an epiphenomenon, but rather as a durable field
of inquiry, one with deep implications for studies of the state, society, conflict,
and security.
Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World embodies
this burgeoning interest. This ambitious volume fills a conspicuous lacuna;
unlike previous works based on single case studies, it leverages a classic ‘most
different systems’ comparative method to analyze over 75 observations of
religious extremism across geographical and cultural contexts, ultimately
constructing a universal theoretical framework for understanding all
fundamentalisms. Authored by R. Scott Appleby, Emmanuel Sivan, and the
late Gabriel Almond, this new work is the final rendition of the five-volume
Fundamentalist Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yet
while this historical–empirical series was descriptive in scope, Strong Religion
situates its task as explanatory — it seeks to pinpoint, trace, and explain the
patterns of rise and fall for fundamentalism worldwide. It will be of
considerable interest for three groups of scholars: comparativists examining
state-society relations in countries where religion powerfully shapes public
discourse; researchers studying intra- and interstate conflicts in which religious
claims fuel aggression between ethnic and cultural collectives; and public policy
analysts addressing transnational fundamentalist influences, from moral and
religious rhetoric to their intersection with violence and terrorism.
Two questions propel this work. First, what local, regional, and global
factors have caused the emergence and growth of fundamentalist movements
within every major religion? Second, what analytical characteristics link all
fundamentalisms across cultural and political borders — ‘is it possible, and
 Book Reviews
315

appropriate, to understand fundamentalism as a singular phenomenon — as a

genus containing species’ (p. 6)? Before approaching these queries, Almond
et al. define fundamentalism not as an essential trait of any religion, but rather
as a contingent configuration of ideology and resources. It is the historical
counterattack from marginalized religious groups against secularism, moder-
nity, and globalization. Fundamentalism is ‘strong religion’ because funda-
mentalists seek to renew religious identity, empower religious communities,
and vanquish secular institutions; they require religion to be strong ‘because its
enemies are perceived as powerful and potentially overwhelming’ (p. 19).
This study generates three theoretical conclusions of interest. First, all
religious fundamentalisms share ‘family resemblances.’ Ideologically, they are
reactive in orientation — they arise because the modern state apparatus,
secularized civil society, and mainstream coreligionists have eroded religion’s
central role in ordering society; these entities raise the ire of fundamentalists
because they threaten traditional religious authority. Indeed, ‘defense of
religion is the sine qua non of fundamentalism’ (p. 94). Moreover,
fundamentalist groups follow functional logics in their modes of leadership,
membership, and resource capacity. Historical sketches of early twentieth
century American Protestantism (from which the term ‘fundamentalism’
sprouted), post-war Comunione e Liberazione, Haredi Jewish sects, Sikh
militants, and Islamists show that these entities adhered to recurring
organizational paths in their political development. The authors subtly mold
the prototypical fundamentalist movement into a distinctive analytical
construct, and classify different variants with new theoretical language.
These findings wield critical importance. While acknowledging the cultural
nuances of each observation, the authors present the first fungible typology of
fundamentalisms across spatial and temporal contexts. By mapping these
movements across a common spectrum, they also find striking parallels
between groups as diverse as Al-Qaeda, the Jewish Kach, and Christian anti-
abortionists; they all locate their identities as millennial crusaders battling
corrupt governments and social evils in a Manichaean world, whose very
existence hinges upon this vision of titanic struggle against political chaos.
Religious actors have long been categorized as collective agents in the vein of
rational choice, a mechanistic view that has obscured the governing social
realities that influence their behavior and goals. The historical–comparative
analysis presented here thickens this view with penetrating insights.
Second, the authors parse out three sets of explanatory variables that
account for all known fundamentalist movements, which are structure, chance,
and choice. Structural factors include broad economic, educational, and
communicative trends, as well as proximate variables like the internal
composition of the host religion and the geopolitical environment. Chance
encompasses contingent events that trigger or intensify fundamentalisms, such
Acta Politica 2004 39
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as social revolutions, while choice comprises the deliberate decisions made by

these groups. Recognizing the ‘many variable, small N dilemma’ of deriving
causation from relatively few cases without use of statistical methods, the
authors hypothesize a robust explanatory model in which these clusters of
variables influence a fundamentalist movement across six dependent dimen-
sions — origins, ideology, organization, strategy, mobilization, and decline.
Applying this qualitative grid to case studies of the Hindu Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh and Zionist radicalism, they discover that leadership
‘plays the quintessential creative role in the formation, transformation, and
maintenance of fundamentalist movements’ (p. 142). They may be blessed with
charisma in a time of crisis (chance), deploy innovative tactics of recruitment
and resistance (choice), or be incited by the repression of a ruthless regime
(structure).
This ground-breaking model is the result of iterated cross-case comparisons
between nearly 80 cases of religious fundamentalism, and offers analytical
purchase in accounting for all major movements. It transcends the familiar
structure–agency debate over religiosity by recognizing the salience of
both, while adding contingency as an intervening feature. However, the
authors fail to assess the relative causal significance of each factor. In one
exercise, they briefly tabulate the numerical frequency of these variables in a
subset of 16 cases, but their rating system is arbitrary and assigns weighted
value on a monotonic scale. The model is thus extremely vague about the
totalistic effects of these factors across the universe of observations; there is no
precision on the independent variable. The authors leave such exercises as
heterogeneous specification and empirical testing for other scholars, and seem
content with their non-statistical framework as simply a basis for future
expansion.
Finally, the interaction between fundamentalism and its political environ-
ment produces opportunities for both violence and moderation. Almond et al.
transpose fundamentalists against democratic and authoritarian contexts, and
find that the cohesive strength of movements is positively correlated with the
coerciveness of the domestic regime. For instance, Islamist brotherhoods have
rapidly grown in Middle Eastern countries because the repressive policies of
the autocratic center radicalize moderates and alienate much of the population,
broadening the support base of these groups. Furthermore, strategies of
fundamentalists covary with the democratic nature of the state. ‘In their
transformative and conquering efforts fundamentalists encounter ideological
and cultural resistances in a pluralist, secularized society,’ a situation which
limits them into enclaves, relaxes their radicalism, and dilutes their popularity
(p. 218). Notably, when religious fundamentalists tap ethnic or nationalist
grievances, the results tend to be explosive; contemporary ethnoreligious
conflicts are, on balance, more protracted and violent than those of the purely
Acta Politica 2004 39
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317

ethnic variety. Cross-time comparisons of the Palestinian and Kashmir–Jammu

discord offer enduring evidence of this amplification process.
This engenders an unambiguous conclusion: democratization is the best way
to reduce fundamentalist mobilization. The ‘solvent effect’ is that democratic
societies, by virtue of the market, rule of law, and participatory institutions,
force even extreme militants to accommodate the mainstream center and
adhere to legal means of expression, which paradoxically leads to their decline.
Economic and political reforms can prevent ‘wave after wave of tactical
violence’ (p. 241), especially when they minimize longstanding cleavages in
multiethnic societies. However, this platform rests on ambiguous reasoning. It
ignores new comparative research highlighting the dangers of illiberal
democracies and transitional instability, and it also offers little advice on
fundamentalist groups that already commit violence. If potential militancy can
be thwarted with responsive, democratic engagement, then how do responsive
audiences deal with movements currently immersed in violent campaigns, such
as Al-Qaeda?
Despite its occasional weaknesses, Strong Religion does much to sharpen the
‘Western myopia ony religious power’ (p. 2). It demarcates the lineaments of
the fundamentalist worldview while offering an explanatory framework that
greatly enriches current understandings of its growth, strategy, and decline.
The authors convincingly argue that religious fundamentalism constitutes an
integral facet of modern politics, and in doing so lay a promising foundation
for future theoretical and empirical research.

Sean L. Yom
Department of Government,
Harvard University.

Acta Politica 2004 39