Justin Clemens argues in The science of fundamentalism that fundamentalism is more than a stupid hick religiosity or a dot-point religion as the problem of fundamentalism is integrally bound up with the problem of science and technology.

He says that fundamentalism is a (biopolitical) technological response to modern science:

Fundamentalism shouldn’t be opposed to relativism (or secularisation), despite appearances. Its real bond is with modern science, off which it feeds in an antagonistic complicity. Therefore it will never be eradicated as long as our civilisation remains what Neil Postman calls a “technopoly,” that is, as long as we continue to take our socio-political directives from technology.

Clemens says that we need to affirm that fundamentalism is a very reasonable and viable response to a serious epistemo-political paradox of modern life:

fundamentalism isn’t merely ignorant, stupid or prejudiced; rather, it very quickly recognised how science short-circuits the Enlightenment gap between belief and reason in a radical new way. Because only a tiny section of the population has any understanding of, or access to, the grounding processes of scientific experts, the latter’s pronouncements can appear substantially identical to the pronouncements of traditional religious figures. More fundamentally, the grounds available for non-experts to adjudge the claims of experts isn’t and cannot be given scientifically – and there are presently no other commonly accepted rational grounds for making such judgements. What rushes in to fill the void is typically a devil’s cocktail of heterogeneous discourses – nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. – the political correlates of the most primitive psychosexual fantasies. Fundamentalism works here because it at least tries to provide a central text to which all can equally refer and defer, and which often repudiates the contemptible socio-biological traits beloved of neo-fascist movements.