7 - Fundamentalist Experience

Summary

This chapter investigates fundamentalist experience in self-described fundamentalist communities in order to ascertain the structures and motivations of their experiences. It shows how fundamentalist experience provides an alternative space and time, thus separating itself from society and living in highly structured fashion. Such experience is marked by an intense preoccupation with corporeality in particular, although affect also plays an important role. Fundamentalist communities provide a whole vision of the world – a way of being in the world – that makes other ways of living impossible to envision. Fundamentalist experience is essentially not at home in the world and is marked by profound angst about its own existence. It therefore cannot allow individual appropriation of religious life, but imposes tight control on its members. Fundamentalist experience is deeply marked by the desire for assurance and security in the face of the loss of the home, the world, and one’s identity within it.