Lassander, Mika, & Peter Nynäs (2016, July). Contemporary fundamentalist Christianity in Finland: The variety of religious subjectivities and their association with values. Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, 2(2), 154–184. (Link: https://doi.org/10.14220/jrat.2016.2.2.154) (Access: https://www.vr-elibrary.de/toc/jrat/2/2)
Abstract: In sharp contrast to both academic and public expectations on secularisation, religious fundamentalism has lately exhibited vitality both socially and culturally. This raises questions regarding its characteristics and nature; and from the increasing academic interest a more definite and nuanced understanding of its defining features has emerged. In this article we address the internal diversity of religious fundamentalism. The findings we report are from a mixed-method study of Christian fundamentalism in Finland. The methods we used were the Schwartz’s value survey using the PVQ-R questionnaire with Wulff’s Faith Q-sort based on Q-methodology. We explore both values and religious subjectivities and the potential relationship between these. Our results indicate that contemporary religious fundamentalism should not be comprehended as a singular trajectory with some defining internal features, but rather as a negotiation between a diversity of individual motives and external and contextual influences. This finding can shed further light on the potential variation and change of contemporary fundamentalism in different contexts.
Mika Lassander <mika.lassander@abo.fi> and Peter Nynäs <peter.nynas@abo.fi> are in Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland.
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