Torkel Brekke's book is a sustained argument that the term fundamentalism is an appropriate descriptor of many contemporary religious-political movements around the world. Brekke disagrees with those who limit the term's applicability to those Christians who coined it to describe themselves; instead, he argues for applying it to Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus. Brekke's thesis is that fundamentalism should be defined as a set of shared ways of reacting to the globalization of Western modernity rather than as a set of shared theological commitments.

Brekke argues for his thesis in two parts: first, a historical narrative of the development of the preconditions for fundamentalism, and second, a catalog of fundamentalist political “struggles.” He opens by describing the features of Western modernity relevant to fundamentalism: secularism understood as social differentiation. In the West, secularism develops organically as religious authority is differentiated from the state, law, science, and education. Religion comes to be understood as something different from culture and politics; it becomes “objectified.” Whereas the premodern understood his religion as merely part of his specific locality, the modern Methodist (for example) sees her religion as something universal: independent of the particular place she lives or the political system governing her. Colonialism and other intercultural exchanges globalized Western modernity (secularism understood as differentiation). As a result, people throughout the world adopted Western ways of thinking about religion, regardless of their different religions. Colonialism and globalization made Christianity into the model of what a “religion” is. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others began objectifying their own traditions, understanding them as a “religion” — something different from politics and culture. Simultaneously, colonial rulers separated religious authority from political, legal, scientific, and educational institutions.

Brekke is at his strongest here, as he describes how colonialism and globalization changed the conception and practice of religion. After charting the spread of differentiation and an objectified concept of religion around the world, Brekke shows how these processes affected the practice of religion by tracing the adoption of lay preaching — “ethical prophecy,” to use Weber's term — by religious actors in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Just as Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhist adopted a Western conception of religion without adopting Christianity, so too did they adopt Christian styles of religious practice without adopting Christianity. Brekke provides historical examples to show how religious traditions without a tradition of lay preaching to the masses adopted it in order to compete with Christian proselytizing. And with these two conditions in place — an objectified conception of religion and the practice of lay preaching — fundamentalism is possible. Brekke's definition of fundamentalism requires an objectified concept of religion; fundamentalists believe they know what their religion “really” demands, demands quite different from local practices. Further, fundamentalists are lay members of their religion, separate from and often opposed to traditional religious authorities.

However, Brekke does not see an objectified concept of religion and the practice of lay preaching as sufficient to fully define fundamentalism. What is missing is fundamentalists' characteristic political goal: to work against secularism, to “de-differentiate,” in Brekke's term, their societies. Brekke argues for the commonalities between fundamentalist religious-political movements in the United States and the postcolonial world by cataloging fundamentalist political “struggles” in the second half of the book. He describes attempts by Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists to reintegrate religion into the state, law, science, education, and gender relationships. Here, however, his analysis is neither as logically cohesive nor persuasive as in the first half of the book. When describing the spread of an objectified concept of religion and the practice of lay preaching, the commonalities across religious traditions are rich and surprising. The catalog of fundamentalist political struggles, in contrast, does not have as clear an explanation. Brekke does not sufficiently explain why “de-differentiation” is the goal of all fundamentalists with the same clarity that he explains why they adopt an objectified concept of religion or the practice of lay preaching. Furthermore, the political aims Brekke surveys are not as similar. Buddhist and Hindu fundamentalist attitudes toward science, for example, lack the strident anti-evolution stance common among fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, and Brekke does not even discuss Buddhism in his chapter on the struggle over women. Fundamentalist Buddhists are also considerably less strident in their campaigns on behalf of religious law than the Hindus, Muslims, and Reconstructionist Christians Brekke discusses.

This weakness is unfortunate, since it is precisely putative “fundamentalists'” political aims that most need to be understood, explained, and assessed. Brekke seems unaware of the serious political stakes attached to labeling religious-political movements “fundamentalist.” So labeling a movement typically implies that it is both anti-liberal and anti-democratic and ought to be opposed by governments who promote liberalism and democracy as foreign policy objectives. The adoption of an objectified concept of religion and the practice of lay preaching, by themselves, are far from anti-democratic; instead, they are closely associated with successful democratization (consider Robert D. Woodberry's “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.” American Political Science Review 106:244–274). A cohesive explanation, then, of fundamentalists' political aims is essential to establishing Brekke's thesis. For example, he asserts, “the fundamentalist idea of establishing a state where religion, politics, and law are one is to a very large extent an invented tradition, although it is presented as a return to the basics” (106), but he does not discuss what motivates fundamentalists to invent such traditions and propagate them.

While these are serious weaknesses, Brekke's Fundamentalism remains a considerable accomplishment. He presents, in one clear, succinct, and well-organized volume, rich information about the development of fundamentalist religious movements in the United States and the postcolonial world, and he offers a persuasive theoretical structure and narrative history that explains key portions of that development. This alone makes Fundamentalism not only of interest to students of religion and politics but also to those of democratization, political identity, and ethnic conflict more generally.