Secularization, religious fundamentalism, and religious extremism

The global religious landscape has undergone several major changes in recent decades, which pose critical challenges to many societies around the world. In this chapter, we review such changes and challenges. We start by explaining how religious communities can be regarded as public goods that fulfil important functions – not just to their members, but to society as a whole. We next describe, for the two largest Abrahamic religions (Christianity and Islam), various trends and phenomena that have the potential to undermine this positive contribution to society, and to give rise to public bads. In particular, we focus on three phenomena: secularization, whereby an increasing number of people disengage from religion and religious institutions; religious fundamentalism, which involves a very strict adherence to the rules and teachings of a religion; and religious extremism, which translates fundamentalist views into extreme actions that most people do not consider reasonable or acceptable, such as violence and other human rights infringements. We stress, however, that the origin of religious violence and religion-based human rights transgressions lies in people’s interpretations of holy scriptures, rather than in the holy scriptures themselves.