This penetrating book sheds light on the psychology of fundamentalism, with a particular focus on those who become extremists and fanatics. What accounts for the violence that emerges among some fundamentalist groups? The contributors to this book identify several factors: a radical dualism, in which all aspects of life are bluntly categorized as either good or evil; a destructive inclination to interpret authoritative texts, laws, and teachings in the most literal of terms; an extreme and totalized conversion experience; paranoid thinking; and an apocalyptic world view. After examining each of these concepts in detail, and showing the ways in which they lead to violence among widely disparate groups, these engrossing essays explore such areas as fundamentalism in the American experience and among jihadists, and they illuminate aspects of the same psychology that contributed to such historical crises as the French Revolution, the Nazi movement, and post-Partition Hindu religious practice.

Reviews

"This collection is remarkable in both its scope and quality. It includes the most knowledgeable voices, always rigorous and probing, on the overall subject of apocalypticism. There is no other treatment of the subject that integrates its psychological, historical, theological, and cultural dimensions. The volume will surely be indispensable to everyone concerned with this extremely important phenomenon."

--Robert Jay Lifton, author of Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

"Is there a fundamentalist mind-set that leads to violence? The authors of this excellent volume answer yes. Their arguments are so full of insights that they will make this book the indispensable reference for future debates on this subject."

--Marc Sageman, M.D., Ph.D., author of Leaderless Jihad

"This book succeeds admirably in laying out a distinctive set of criteria for understanding religious fundamentalism. Its great virtue is the care with which it deploys the methods and concepts of individual psychology in order to distinguish fundamentalist violence from religious faith."

--Constantin Fasolt, Karl J. Weintraub Professor of History and the College, The University of Chicago