Religious revivalists are young, urban, modern, well-educated professionals

Evidence

Participants in the religious resurgence come from all walks of life but overwhelmingly from two constituencies, both urban and both mobile. Recent migrants to the cities generally need emotional, social, and material support and guidance, which religious groups provide more than any other source. Religion for them, as Régis Debray put it, is not “the opium of the people, but the vitamin of the weak.” The other principal constituency is the new middle class embodying Dore’s “second-generation indigenization phenomenon.” The activists in Islamic fundamentalist groups are not, as Kepel points out, “aging conservatives or illiterate peasants.” With Muslims as with others, the religious revival is an urban phenomenon and appeals to people who are modern-oriented, well-educated, and pursue careers in the professions, government, and commerce. Among Muslims, the young are religious, their parents secular. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the common assumption that religious fundamentalism is driven by the poor, uneducated, or rural — echoes similar findings about religious resurgence in various modernization contexts.
• SEED: Potential essay on how ‘modernization’ and religious fundamentalism grow together rather than in opposition — the second-generation-indigenization dynamic of elite children reclaiming tradition.