RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

Against the background of defining, theorizing, humanizing, nationalizing, andglobalizing religion in South Africa, this essay recalls the diverse ways in whichreligious fundamentalism has registered in South Africa as an ‘inauthentic’ claim onreligious authenticity. Tracking academic and media attention to religious fundamentalismat ten-year intervals, we find Christian fundamentalism appearingduring the 1970s as contrary to the apartheid state, during the 1980s as legitimatingthe apartheid state, and during the 1990s as resisting the new democratic dispensation.By the 1990s, however, attention to religious fundamentalism, locally andglobally, shifted to focus on varieties of politicized Islam. As this brief historicalreview suggests, the term, ‘fundamentalism,’ whether applied to Jesus People inJohannesburg during the 1970s or People Against Gangsterism and Drugs duringthe 1990s, has been a recurring but shifting sign of a crisis of authenticity. Inconclusion, South African perspectives on religion, the state, and authenticity can bedrawn into analyzing the current crisis of fundamentalism in our rapidly globalizingand increasingly polarized world.