**1. Introduction**

The title of this article may appear provocative. Quite commonly in literature on fundamentalism, authors present it as a strictly religious phenomenon (Pratt 2020; Cowden and Sahdal 2017; Rausch 2015; Ozzano 2009; Marczewska-Rytko 2007; Armstrong 2000; Bruce 2000). The problem is that such a view, quite widespread within the political science of religion, which explicitly or implicitly takes the secularisation paradigm as an axiom (Gierycz 2019, pp. 42–45), is far from self-evident and requires critical analysis. There is much to sugges<sup>t</sup> that (1) fundamentalism is not a strictly religious phenomenon, but rather a specific way of thinking and acting which may thrive in secular just as well as in religious soil; (2) secularisation enhances secular just as much as religious fundamentalist tendencies; (3) religion is, by its very nature, a potential safeguard against fundamentalism. Whether or not it does play such a role in real life is related, to a large extent, to the character of a particular religion. This article discusses these three hypotheses in an attempt to contribute to a critical reflection on the way the relationship between religion and fundamentalism is viewed in the political science of religion.

The problem with any research on fundamentalism is, however, that it seems to be a fuzzy concept, lacking any explicit "semantic contours" (Bielefeldt and Heitmeyer 1998, p. 11, cf. Riesebrodt 2004). It is worth noting that even though the notion of fundamentalism first emerged in the beginning of the 20th century in the context of disputes within American Protestantism, it did not become prevalent in political rhetoric or academic discourse until the end of the 1970s and the revolution in Iran (Haynes 2010). Consequently, the term "fundamentalists" is nowadays used to refer, almost in the same breath, to American Protestants of the end of the 19th century, their distant cousins gathered around the *Moral Majority* in the second half of the 20th century, and the Islamists of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The very fact that groups so distant from one another, both timewise and in terms of the ends and the means used to achieve them, are classified into a single category seems to substantiate the claim that there are some semantic problems involved in the notion. One can hardly fail to notice that in political discourse the notion of fundamentalism is often treated as a stigmatising term, aimed at discrediting a political opponent (Janicki and Władyka 2015). Consequently, in everyday usage it does not belong so much to the parlance of political science but to that of politics, playing an ideological rather than an explanatory role. In view of all of these considerations, before going into a more detailed analysis of the relationship between religion and fundamentalism it is necessary to explain how the notion may be understood in political science and to at least sketch out a theory of fundamentalism which could be used when describing and explaining political phenomena. To this end, it seems advisable to go back to the sources: to the historical context in which the notion of "fundamentalism" first appeared.
