We can all come up with examples of how fundamentalism has harmed the world; has it ever helped anything?
The Protestant Reformation could be considered something of a fundamentalist movement, and breaking the Catholic Church’s hold on Europe might have been a good thing.
Fundamentalist revolution in Iran got rid fo the Shah. I know in the U.S. it’s accepted that Iran is evilevilevil, but Iran at least is a struggling democracy, which is more than you could say for it in the days of the Peacock Throne.
Other than that I’ve run out of examples.
Define “Fundamentalism”.
“Fundamentalism” has taken on a negative connotation these days because of the strong political activism of that community over the last several decades. But if we define fundamentalism as “people who are motivated by religious beliefs they hold very strongly” then I think we owe a great deal to religious fundamentalism. Throughout human history, they have been more motivated to affect change than just about any other type of community. Only quite recently (like, within the last 40 years) was this perceived as a bad thing.
The United States owed much of its early stability and prospects for long-term survival to the stable societies created by communities of Puritans, Quakers, etc.
The Crusades, while not a positive to anyone in the Middle East, ultimately changed European society, and set the stage for the Renaissance.
Ironically enough, given the nick of the OP, monasteries in Western Europe were virtually the only repositories or reading and writing in the region during the Dark Ages.
and so on.
I would add that many of the groups who risked the ocean passage to the American colonies did so to evade religious persecution. Many of those groups might well be considered “fundamentalist,” and they played an important role in shaping American society.
Christian fundamentalists, at least, are responsible for a huge number of soup kitchens, homeless shelters, charitable food pantries, orphanages and similar relief efforts across the globe. In fact, these charities are so ubiquitous that I find the OP to be puzzling, to say the least.
Not to mention the theme parks and time-shares!!
Just kidding.
A lot of religious fundamentalists have done a lot of great things. From the Jewish perspective, for 2000 years the Jewish people have clung tightly to the idea that despite centuries of persecution, the Jews continue to survive (and thrive).
In many different generations of Jewish history, the only “surviving” Jews have been fundamentalist Jews. Those Jews who have assimilated into their broader culture did not have Jewish grandchildren.
I know that it is the subject of another debate on the SDMBs right now about whether the Jewish survival is a good thing, but I think many people would say that it is. One word–Seinfeld.
Robert Kaplan, in his book The Coming Anarchy, argues that in at least some West African nations (Sierra Leone, Ghana), Islamic fundamentalism provides a moral framework that is absent in the otherwise prevalent animist sects. Of course, later in the book he has to make kind of the opposite claim about Sudan.
Doesn’t anyone even remember where the concept “fundamentalism” came from? I mean, it’s not an exceedingly old term by any means. It comes from a series of 12 volumes of essays on the Bible that appeared between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals.
So it kinda depends on what you are talking about. Whether or not any fundamentalists have ever done any good things is a silly question: of course some have. If you want to talk about fundamentalism as a view, and whether its motivated good or bad things, you’re talking about having a discussion that streches into the deepest parts of people’s minds to find what really motivated them. And that discussion, to, is sort of silly.
And of course, the fundamental “old-time-religion” is responsible for most of our allegedly Christian holiday symbols, like mistletoe, gaily-decorated evergreen trees, holly, eggs ‘n’ bunnies in the Spring, etc., which have very little if anything to do with Christianity.