Fundamental confusion ...

Found this article (Religious Fundamentalism and Politics by Jeff Haynes) by searching google: fundamentalism and politics.

Being an impatient person I didn't get past the 5th paragraph. This stumped me:

To many observers and ‘ordinary’ people, religious fundamentalism is always socially and politically conservative, backward looking, inherently opposed to change. But if this is the case how can we explain the activities of militant Islamic groups around the world - often dubbed ‘fundamentalist’ - who strive to overthrow regimes with which they disagree? Other groups which have been labelled fundamentalist - such as ‘born again’ Christians in the United States or orthodox Jews in Israel - seem to fit more closely the conventional wisdom, as they are often linked to very conservative political forces who seek to roll back what they perceive as an unwelcome liberalisation and relaxation of social and moral mores.

The paragraph implies that religious fundamentalists cannot be both conservative and seek to impose their fundamentalist beliefs on others through change in current day political environments, even when the goal of the change is to impose upon the society, country or world the 'correct' laws and codes of behavior from the past. Isn't that what the GOP, along with the US christianists, claim to be doing? Re-creating some magical time from the 1950's through a somewhat violent assault on our laws and the very framework that holds our country together to such an extent that our police forces have been turned into military occupiers in our own cities?

Fundamentalism, conservatism and crusades seem, to me, to be linked concepts --with other hidden authoritarian objectives thrown in for good measure, of course.

I suppose for the author a 'rollback' to the past is conservative but 'striving to overthrow regimes' is not conservative. Though, of course, both may follow from a belief in 'the strict maintenance of ancient or fundamental doctrines of a religion or ideology.'

Really, it's only a matter of degree. If we can still use the term conservatives for those who are said to be 'averse to change and hold to traditional values and attitudes' when this same change-averse group is willing to rollback from present day to some idealized time decades ago, then why not use the term conservative for those who would use shock and awe to bomb a country back to the stone age for their own good?

Or perhaps there is no such thing as a conservative. Or a better definition of conservatives would be that they reject change when they are comfortable with the present but insist on change when the past looks greener? Or there's money to be acquired.