Within the depth-psychology corpus, fundamentalism is treated not primarily as a sociological or political phenomenon but as a psychospiritual condition with identifiable structural roots in the soul’s economy. Thomas Moore, drawing on Hillman, advances the most sustained depth-psychological thesis: fundamentalism emerges when spirituality loses its connection to soul — when the complexity, polytheism, and enigmatic imagery proper to soulful life are abandoned in favor of rigid, simplistic, authoritarian certainties. This is fundamentalism as shadow-formation, a compensatory rigidity arising precisely where depth is absent. Iain McGilchrist locates the same pathology in left-hemisphere dominance, diagnosing its hallmarks — literalism, decontextualization, the triumph of form over content — as signs of a broader epistemic impoverishment. Kenneth Pargament approaches fundamentalism empirically, noting its statistical correlation with prejudice and its characteristic inflexibility at both personal and social levels, while carefully refusing to conflate the phenomenon with its more virulent expressions. Karen Armstrong, though writing as historian rather than clinician, traces in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions the conditions under which the loss of apophatic and symbolic sensibility produces literalist rigidity. James Hollis indexes fundamentalism alongside ideology and compliance with convention as obstacles to individuation. Across these voices, a shared argument emerges: fundamentalism is the soul’s default when genuine religious depth fails — a literalization that forecloses the living symbolic encounter it pretends to honor.
Often, when spirituality loses its soul it takes on the shadow-form of fundamentalism. I am not referring to any particular groups or sects, but to a point of view that can seize any of us
Moore argues that fundamentalism is the shadow-form assumed by a spirituality that has lost its depth and soul, a universal psychological possibility rather than a sectarian label.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
When spirituality loses contact with soul and these values, it can become rigid, simplistic, moralistic, and authoritarian — qualities that betray a loss of soul.
Moore identifies the diagnostic signs of fundamentalism — rigidity, simplism, moralism, authoritarianism — as direct symptoms of spiritual life severed from the soul’s complexity and process.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis
It sounded like a fundamentalist confession of faith. I wondered in those first few moments how, if this woman became a patient, we would deal with both her experience of incest and her fundamentalism.
Moore extends the concept of fundamentalism beyond religion to any rigid identification with a fixed story or category, illustrating its clinical presence in therapeutic encounters.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Truth indeed changes its nature, and becomes simplistic, literal, stateable and knowable, explicit and abstracted from context. The body becomes no longer the best image of the human soul, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, but the soul’s prison and antagonist.
McGilchrist diagnoses fundamentalism’s epistemic structure — literalism, decontextualization, the severing of representation from living presence — as expressions of left-hemisphere dominance.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Representations come to replace the living presence they purport to represent… Codes of conduct lose contact with their primary source in life and become bafflingly recondite
A parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist’s thesis that fundamentalism enacts the triumph of form over content and representation over living reality.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
fundamentalism involves a commitment to an inerrant set of teachings about God and humanity, and to an unchanging set of life practices… This commitment leaves little room for personal interpretation or modifications.
Pargament empirically characterizes fundamentalism’s rigidity at the personal level as a vulnerability to prejudice, linking inerrancy and inflexibility to restricted psychological openness.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
The religious lexicon provides an unmistakably clear and distinctive set of labels to describe those committed to the tried-and-true (fundamentalists, traditionalists, conservatives, orthodox) and those convinced there is a better way
Pargament situates fundamentalism within the broader tension between conservation and transformation of significance in religious coping, identifying it as one pole in a recurring historical conflict.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
Religion for most ceased to be a felt apprehension of the transcendent and became an ideological affiliation
Hollis identifies the reduction of religious life to ideological affiliation — a key substrate of fundamentalism — as a consequence of modernity’s severing of myth from metaphysics.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001supporting
fundamentalism, 11, 33, 55, 72, 104–107
An index entry in Hollis confirms that fundamentalism is treated as a recurring thematic concern in his analysis of obstacles to individuation and spiritual authority.
, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001aside
genetic ‘traditionalism’ is not directly associated with actual political (Republican) or religious (fundamentalist, Orthodox) positions. Yet the description of traditionalism does suggest some genetic wiring at the core of conservative, even reactionary, party and church affiliations.
Hillman notes, with characteristic obliqueness, that research on genetically inherited traditionalism may illuminate temperamental predispositions underlying fundamentalist orientations.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside
Even fundamentalist believers in each of these three religions are generally humane and non-violent. However, fanatical religious zealots, usually drawn from fringe fundamentalist groups of all three religions, have shown themselves capable of utter disregard for human life.
Alexander distinguishes between mainstream fundamentalism and fanatical zealotry, framing the latter as a response to dislocation and alienation rather than as the natural product of religious texts.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Cut off from the roots of their culture, people felt disoriented and lost. Some Muslim reformers tried to hasten the cause of progress by forcibly relegating Islam to a minor role.
Armstrong traces the conditions — colonial dislocation, cultural disorientation, forced secularization — that historically generate fundamentalist reactions within Islamic modernity.
, A History of God, 1993aside