Throughout the twentieth century, religious fundamentalisms emerged as platforms of protest against social and political marginalization that were enormously successful at attracting public attention. The characteristics of fundamentalist groups varied, reflecting their disparate host religions and divergent socio-historical matrices. Still they exhibited some common traits. Quite crucially, fundamentalists around the world acted within the symbolic horizon of an apocalyptic world-view. To fundamentalists the world over, the vital activity on the planet was a raging combat between good and evil. Modern ways of life that detracted attention from this battle were pernicious, and must be resisted. Although all agreed that a battle was raging, they did not agree on its details. Each filled in the scenario of the battle drawing on the textual and ritual resources of their tradition. For American Christian fundamentalists, the battle signalled the end of history and final judgment of humankind in which evil would be overthrown.

Preoccupation with gender was the second though not necessarily secondary key trait that fundamentalists shared. For fundamentalist movements in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, women were important symbolic capital through which their world-view was expressed. Like apocalypticism, the forms that preoccupation took varied depending upon the resources within the tradition and the social context of the group. The sermons of the US Christian fundamentalist preachers teemed with warnings about the dire consequences of expanding women's social freedom beginning in the late-nineteenth century (DeBerg 1990).