The reactionary form of religion that is now known as Fundamentalism has its roots in the ancient past, but the term itself is less than a hundred years old. “Fundamentalism” was first applied to a movement within Protestant Christianity that called for a return to the perceived “fundamentals” of Protestant belief, in particular the “inerrancy” or literal truth of the Bible.

Before 1980, the term “fundamentalism” was hardly used outside this Christian context. An occasional historian or social scientist extended the scope of the term to include reactionary movements within Islam, Hinduism, and other religions, but it was not until after the Iranian revolution of 1979 that the term “fundamentalism” entered common parlance in contexts far removed from its Protestant origins.

In this section we deal with fundamentalism in its broader sense. We deal with the special characteristics of religious fundamentalism in a separate section.

Over the last thirty years, religious spokesmen, journalists and ordinary people have used “fundamentalism” more and more loosely in religious and non-religious contexts. Along with “Islamic fundamentalism” (the most common application of the term today), we now hear of fundamentalism in economics, politics, science ("scientism"), and even fashion.

Seeing the need for precision in the use of the term if it was to retain any meaning, scholars in several disciplines began to write about fundamentalism as a social phenomenon from the late 1980s. The Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chicago produced a series of books on the subject between 1991 and 1995 under the editorship of Martin E. Marty and Scott R. Appleby that became benchmarks in the study of fundamentalism. (See Marty and Appleby, 2000, for a précis of the project.) Other writers such as Judith Nagata and Richard Antoun have critiqued and extended Marty and Appleby’s work.

In what follows, the writers have drawn on works by Marty, Antoun, Nagata, and others to arrive at a description of the characteristics of fundamentalism and a working definition of the phenomenon. In another section they apply this description and definition to recent manifestations in the Integral Yoga community to see whether these manifestations deserve the name Fundamentalism.