Contemporary fundamentalist Christianity in Finland: the variety of religious subjectivities and their association with values

In sharp contrast to both academic and public expectations on secularisation, religious

fundamentalism has lately exhibited vitality both socially and culturally. This raises

questions regarding its characteristics and nature; and from the increasing academic

interestamore definite and nuanced understanding of its defining features has emerged.

In this article we address the internal diversity of religious fundamentalism. The findings

we report are from a mixed-method study of Christian fundamentalism in Finland. The

methods we used were the Schwartz!s value survey using the PVQ-R questionnaire with

Wulff!s Faith Q-sort based on Q-methodology. We explore both values and religious

subjectivities and the potential relationship between these. Our results indicate that

contemporary religious fundamentalism should not be comprehended as a singular trajectory

with some defining internal features, but rather as a negotiation between a diversity

of individual motives and external and contextual influences. This finding can

shed further light on the potential variation and change of contemporary fundamentalism

in different contexts.