The desire for simple, absolute truth is a constantly beckoning security blanket, and not all Protestants (or followers of other world faiths) can resist the allure. The term “fundamentalist” is tossed about promiscuously, but it can be seen as an “insistence on a monopoly of knowledge grounded in the fear of alternative knowledges, particularly ‘scientific’ modes of knowledge generated in modernity, which the ‘God-knowledge’ people cannot control.” Fear, then, is at the very pulse of fundamentalism. There is a lot of fundamentalism in the United States and increasingly in Latin America.

refer to Sacred Choices, by Daniel C. Maguire, p. 123