Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Analyzing Fundamentalism

这个项目研究宗教原教旨主义，重点是在一个单一的政治实体对比团体。原教旨主义运动的信徒认为他们的宗教是一个绝对真理的体系，提倡严格遵守圣经中规定的宗教法律和道德戒律，近几十年来在一些地区产生了相当大的影响。然而，尚不清楚这里研究的群体在多大程度上持有原教旨主义的信仰和态度。为了进行评估，该项目将对宗教原教旨主义和其他文化和社会政治价值观进行全面调查。该项目以该地区早期的研究为基础，评估了该地区不同群体的人在原教旨主义方面的异同。该项目还评估了个人的原教旨主义信仰和态度与他们(a)宗教信仰、(b)身份、(c)自由主义价值观、(d)不安全感和仇外心理、(e)信息来源以及(f)人口统计数据之间的关系。加深对影响社会价值和削弱原教旨主义的因素的了解有助于更好地了解如何设计和平和避免冲突。在亚伯拉罕信仰的追随者中，原教旨主义运动中存在着相当大的可变性，这使得对主题的比较分析变得复杂，阻碍了这些信仰的经验概括，并给理论抽象带来了困难。为了克服这些挑战，本项目将原教旨主义者理论化，尽管他们在宗教和教派之间存在差异，但他们对自己和其他宗教都有共同的核心取向。这些核心取向依赖于神的纪律观念、字面主义或无误论、宗教排他性和宗教不宽容。为了测量这些取向，一个基于16个调查问题的原教旨主义量表被构建和验证。本研究采用这种量表来衡量来自不同群体的3300名成年受访者的代表性样本中的原教旨主义，使用面对面和在线访谈。通过开发一个衡量所有亚伯拉罕信仰主题的原教旨主义量表，该项目对原教旨主义和比较宗教研究的社会科学研究做出了重大贡献。收集的数据集还将作为比较分析的基础设施，并使本区域内外研究该主题的不同研究人员之间进行科学对话成为可能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project studies religious fundamentalism, focusing on contrasting groups in a single political entity. The adherents of fundamentalist movements consider their religion to be a system of absolute truth, promote strict conformity to the religious laws and moral precepts specified in the scriptures, and have mustered considerable influence in some regions in recent decades. It is, however, unclear to what extent the groups studied here hold fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes. To make this assessment, this project will launch a full-scale survey of religious fundamentalism and other cultural and sociopolitical values. Building on a earlier study of the subject in the region, this project evaluates the similarities and differences in fundamentalism between people in different groups throughout the region. This project also gauges how fundamentalist beliefs and attitudes among individuals are linked to their (a) religiosity, (b) identity, (c) liberal values, (d) the feelings of insecurity and xenophobia, (e) sources of information, and (f) demographics. Increased understanding of what affects societal values and weakens fundamentalism contributes to a better knowledge of how to engineer peace and avoid conflict.The existence of considerable variability in the fundamentalist movements among the followers of the Abrahamic faiths complicates comparative analysis of the subject, hampers empirical generalization across these faiths, and poses difficulties in theoretical abstraction. To overcome these challenges, this project theorizes that fundamentalists, despite their variabilities across religions and sects, share core orientations toward their own and other religions. These core orientations rest on a disciplinarian conception of the deity, literalism or inerrancy, religious exclusivity, and religious intolerance. To measure these orientations, a fundamentalism scale based on a battery of sixteen survey questions was constructed and validated. This study employs this scale to gauge fundamentalism among a representative sample of 3,300 adult respondents from contrasting groups, using both face-to-face and online interviews. By developing a fundamentalism scale that measures the subject in all the Abrahamic faiths, this project makes a significant contribution to the social-scientific study of fundamentalism and comparative religious studies. The collected dataset will also serve as an infrastructure for comparative analysis and make it possible to engage in scientific dialogue among different researchers studying the subject in the region and beyond.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.