**2. Two Interpretations of the Term "Fundamentalism"**

The term "fundamentalist" was first used in the United States to describe the proponents of a series of Protestant publications entitled *The Fundamentals*, which defended a literal interpretation of the Scripture. Their publication was a reaction to the progressing domination, especially among the Lutherans and the Calvinists, of a historical and critical exegesis of the Bible, with its characteristic scientism and positivism. With an aim of "liberating" the Biblical text of anything that could not be reconciled with a rationalist logic, critical exegesis in fact undermined the entire supra-rational dimension of the Revelation: anything that looked like a myth or referred to apparently miraculous phenomena (Schlegel 2003). In opposition to a modernist direction in biblical interpretation, in the years 1910–1915 a group of American Protestants published a series of booklets which, as announced by their title (*The Fundamentals*), defended "fundamental matters"; indisputable truths of the faith, opposing the modernist tendencies in Protestantism. The booklets discussed biblical and doctrinal issues (the salvific role of the cross, the resurrection of Jesus, the infallibility of the biblical text), as well as matters of worldview (booklets aimed against the Catholic Church, socialism, Darwinism, etc.). Protestants supporting *The Fundamentals* believed in a literal interpretation of the Scripture, ruling out any symbolic or moral reading of biblical texts (Schlegel 2003). One frequently cited example of this approach was the claim that the world's creation in six days should be unquestioningly accepted. In fact, this issue became the source of a social depreciation of the fundamentalist stance following the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. The trial also significantly a ffected the character of the term "fundamentalism" itself; even though initially it did not include a value judgement, after the Scopes Monkey Trial it acquired a pejorative ring.

The fundamentalist experience at the turn of the 19th and 20th century can be read in two ways which lead to two approaches of fundamentalism today. On the one hand, it may be stressed that fundamentalism was initially an objection to a relativisation of the Revelation. In this perspective, fundamentalism may be understood as an approach which looks for absolute, universal foundations of knowledge (Kijas 2010), and thus as the opposite of relativism. Understood this way, fundamentalism refers to the cognitive attitude to reality. In this approach, which may be called substantial, the notion of "fundamentalism" does not contain a value judgement. According to Ernest Gellner, fundamentalism understood in epistemic terms in fact represents, in both its religious and its rationalist version, one of the two possible (the other being relativism) essential worldviews. In this perspective, a religious fundamentalist is simply someone who accepts religion in its full form as the foundation of knowledge about reality, without attempting to "bend" or relativize, compromise or mitigate (Sacks 1991), one who represents "strict adherence" to religious doctrine (Rausch 2015, p. 29) while believing that its doctrine presents the fundamental truth about God and the human condition. A secular version of such an understanding of fundamentalism would be a rationalist fundamentalism which continues the tradition of the Enlightenment revolution in science and which is an option for all those who do not have religious faith, but who reject the intellectually insubstantial o ffer of relativism (Gellner 1992).

While the approach to fundamentalism outlined above may help introduce some order into philosophical or theological discussions, it does not seem satisfactory from the perspective of a political scientist. In the political perspective, the notion of fundamentalism seems to mean something else. In order to make this di fference evident, it is enough to point out that if religious fundamentalism were to be defined as "consistent religiousness" in the context of the secular age, this would mean a "fundamentalist a ffiliation" of both Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope Francis, or—referring to groups—the Pentecostal charismatic movements and organisations like Gush Emunim. The explanatory value of this approach is—as far as political perspective is concerned—practically null, since in this way a fundamentalist is both someone who accepts violence as a form of political struggle and one who rejects such methods, one who respects human rights and one who does not, one who strives for absolute power and one who makes no such claims, etc. The only sensible conclusion in such an approach would appear to be the confession made by Steve Bruce, who says in the summary of his book that "we do not need an explanation of fundamentalism as such" (Bruce 2000, p. 122).

If we can see, however, that there is a significant di fference between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fraternities of Jerusalem, we must conclude that there is a specific type of religiousness or, more broadly, perception of reality di fferent from its other forms. In this approach, our attention is focused not so much on the content of beliefs or worldviews, but on the form in which they are articulated and experienced. In the context of the historical beginnings of fundamentalism, its other interpretation could thus be derived not so much from the fundamentalists' objection to the relativisation of the Revelation, but rather from the form in which this objection was expressed, characterised—at least in popular opinion—by such features as limited discursiveness or animosity towards interlocutors. This approach does not relate fundamentalism to the matter from which it emerges, but focuses on the mindset, way of acting, and goals pursued by fundamentalists. Consequently, it is not about the content based on which such an attitude develops, but the attitude itself that is decisive in determining whether we are dealing with fundamentalism or not. Defined on the ground of social sciences methodology, this other, formal understanding of fundamentalism, which stays in respect to proposals presented in Fundamentalism Project by Almond et al. (1995), recognises that first of all "what matters is not what people believe in, but how they defend their beliefs...and how they substantiate them" (Wnuk-Lipi ´nski 2004, p. 273). In this approach, it is emphasised, therefore, that fundamentalism is an attitude.
