Breaking down the question
The command word examine asks for a close analytical inspection: define the phenomena, distinguish them, and probe their social causes and consequences. Three terms must be handled with precision — revivalism, fundamentalism, and globalisation — and the pivot of the question is the phrase in the context of, which demands that you connect the first two explicitly to the third.
Religious revivalism refers to a renewed intensity of religious feeling and observance, a reawakening of faith within a community, often emotional and mobilising. Fundamentalism is narrower and sharper: a militant insistence on returning to the supposed fundamentals of a tradition, a defensive reaction that draws firm boundaries against modernity and internal dissent. The two overlap but are not identical, and a strong answer marks the difference.
Social dimensions signals that the examiner does not want a theological account but a sociological one: the group processes, identity formation, mobilisation, and structural conditions that produce and sustain these movements. And globalisation is the frame — the compression of the world, the flows of people, capital, media and ideas — against which the resurgence of religion must be read.
The paradox the question quietly poses is this: classical sociology predicted that modernity would erode religion, yet the era of intense globalisation has seen religion return with force. Explaining that paradox is the heart of the task.
How to approach it
Begin by defining and distinguishing revivalism and fundamentalism, then set up the secularisation thesis as the expectation against which the resurgence must be measured — the account of religion in modern society supplies both the thesis and its revision.
Then argue the central point: globalisation does not simply erode religion; it provokes and reshapes it. Develop several social dimensions — identity and belonging under conditions of dislocation, the media and technology that carry revival across borders, the politics of resistance to Western cultural dominance, and the diasporic communities that globalise faith.
Use theorists who have addressed the religion-globalisation nexus — Berger on desecularisation, Robertson on glocalisation, Castells on resistance identity, Eisenstadt on multiple modernities. Illustrate with concrete movements across traditions to avoid a single-religion answer. Close with a balanced assessment of whether these are reactions against globalisation or products of it.
Model answer
Classical sociology bequeathed a confident prediction: as societies modernised, urbanised and grew scientific, religion would retreat from public life into private conscience, and perhaps fade altogether. The late twentieth century falsified that prediction. Precisely in the era of intensifying globalisation, the world witnessed a vigorous resurgence of religion — revivalist and fundamentalist — across every major tradition. To examine this is to ask what social conditions globalisation creates that make religion resurgent rather than residual.
Distinguishing the phenomena. Revivalism denotes a reawakening of religious enthusiasm and practice within a community — a warming of faith, often expressed in emotional worship, mass gatherings and renewed observance. Fundamentalism is more combative: it is the militant defence of a tradition's supposed essentials against the corrosions of modernity, marked by scriptural literalism, sharp boundaries between the pure and the impure, and hostility to pluralism and internal reform. Revivalism can be inward and devotional; fundamentalism is characteristically defensive and political. Both, however, are social phenomena — forms of collective mobilisation — and both have flourished under globalisation.
Against the secularisation thesis. The secularisation thesis held that modernity necessarily privatises and weakens religion. The evidence of recent decades forced a revision. Peter Berger, once a leading proponent of the thesis, publicly recanted, declaring the world "as furiously religious as ever" and describing a process of desecularisation. The point is not that modernity has failed but that it generates the very anxieties — dislocation, moral uncertainty, loss of community — to which religious revival offers an answer. Globalisation, the most intense phase of modernity, is therefore not the enemy of religion but, in important respects, its stimulant.
Identity and belonging under dislocation. The first social dimension is identity. Globalisation uproots people — through migration, urbanisation, and the penetration of a homogenising consumer culture — and unsettles inherited certainties. In this condition of anxiety and anomie, religion supplies a firm identity and a moral community. Manuel Castells describes such movements as forms of resistance identity: excluded or threatened groups build defensive "communes" of meaning, and religion is among the most powerful materials for doing so. Fundamentalism, in this light, is less a relic of the pre-modern than a reaction to the globalised present.
Media, technology and the globalisation of faith. The second dimension is the paradox that globalisation's own instruments carry religious revival. Satellite television, cassette sermons, and now the internet allow preachers to reach mass audiences across borders; pilgrimage and religious tourism move on global transport networks; diasporic communities remain tied to homeland faiths through digital connection. Revivalist movements are thus not anti-modern in their means even when anti-modern in their message. Roland Robertson's concept of glocalisation captures this well: the global and the local interpenetrate, and religions are simultaneously universalised in reach and re-particularised in local expression.
The politics of resistance and cultural defence. The third dimension is political. Globalisation is widely experienced as Western cultural and economic dominance, and religious movements become vehicles for resisting it and asserting an alternative civilisational identity. Movements of religious nationalism — across Islamic, Hindu, Christian and other contexts — fuse faith with the defence of the nation or community against a homogenising, secular, Western modernity. Here fundamentalism shades into identity politics, mobilising believers as a political bloc and contesting the state's secular pretensions. S. N. Eisenstadt's notion of multiple modernities is useful: these movements do not reject modernity wholesale but seek a modernity on their own religious and cultural terms.
Diaspora and deterritorialised religion. The fourth dimension is the transnational community. Large-scale migration has produced diasporas whose members often experience faith more intensely abroad than at home, using religion to preserve identity in an alien setting and to link dispersed co-religionists into a global community — an ummah, a global church, a worldwide devotional network. Religion is thereby detached from a single territory and reconstituted as a global imagined community, funded and organised across borders.
Assessment. Are revivalism and fundamentalism reactions against globalisation or products of it? The most defensible answer is: both, and the two are inseparable. They are reactions against the dislocations, inequalities and cultural threats that globalisation brings; but they are also products of it, using its technologies, its migrations and its very compression of the world to spread and organise. This is why the secularisation thesis went wrong: it assumed a one-way street from tradition to secularity, when in fact modernity and religion are locked in a dynamic, mutually provoking relationship.
Two cautions preserve the balance. First, the resurgence is uneven — parts of Western Europe remain strongly secular, so desecularisation is a tendency, not a universal law. Second, revivalism and fundamentalism carry real social costs where they harden into intolerance, communal violence and the suppression of dissent and of women's rights. A sociological examination neither celebrates nor condemns but explains: globalisation, by unsettling identities and concentrating grievances while supplying new means of connection, has made the reassertion of religion one of the defining social forces of our age.
Examiner's perspective
The most frequent weakness on this question is a purely descriptive account of religious movements with globalisation mentioned only in passing. Examiners reward answers built around the link — the argument that globalisation actively conditions revival and fundamentalism, rather than merely coexisting with them. Keep the connective tissue visible in every paragraph.
A second discriminator is conceptual precision. Candidates who distinguish revivalism from fundamentalism, and who deploy the secularisation-desecularisation debate with Berger, Robertson's glocalisation, or Castells's resistance identity, signal genuine theoretical command. Naming the paradox — that classical theory predicted decline yet globalisation delivered resurgence — frames the whole answer intelligently.
Finally, examiners look for breadth and balance. Illustrations should range across more than one religious tradition to avoid a partisan or single-faith reading, and the conclusion should hold together the two truths — that these movements resist globalisation and are enabled by it — while noting the unevenness of the trend and its social costs. That combination of analytical link, theoretical depth and even-handedness secures the top band.