Political, Religious, and Philosophical Varieties of Postmodernism (I need a professional's advice!)

I'm increasingly coming around to the position that religious fundamentalism is deeply indebted to modernity and hence not a traditional way of interpreting religious texts or living.

I've seen postmodern conservative theologians appeal to Wittgenstein's idea of language games in order to insulate themselves from criticism, roughly saying, "This is our game. It has different rules. You cannot criticize." Is that a kind of connection that you're looking for? This appears to be a defensive action, given the power disparity between religious vs. secular scientific worldviews, the latter of which has become more and more successful. I'm sure the religious would prefer to not use Wittgenstein at all because it implicitly admits defeat: religion doesn't occupy as many aspects of life as it used to. If you're worldview is secure, you don't need to appeal to postmodern ideas defensively. Other defensive actions, like intelligent design, concede much away (the Abrahamic God), but are nevertheless sought by religious conservatives because they legitimize their beliefs in the public sphere to some degree, in a world that's increasingly secular.

Fundamentalism then expresses alarm at religion's own loss of status and pride of place within social life and simultaneous erosion of traditional social institutions, and then seeks to reestablish the prelapsarian premodern time where their worldview was not under severe assault. Is fundamentalism thereby "indebted" to modernity or postmodernity? That feels too strong, and not own the fundamentalists would see it. Modernity may have helped loosely cause modern fundamentalism (through the Enlightenment, Darwin, Nietzsche, logical positivism, etc), but fundamentalism arose in hostile opposition to modernity not long after it became apparent that there was a new schism developing, between those adapting their beliefs to modern science versus those who did not want that. This would suggest that religious fundamentalism isn't "indebted" to modernism, but rather is a response that refuses to accept modernism, preferring greatly that modernism hadn't rolled around in the first place. But I'm not an expert on this, so discount my opinion here appropriately.

/r/askphilosophy Thread