Digby points the way to an amazing article by Davidson Loehr which looks at fundamentalism and draws some fascinating conclusions.
From 1988 to 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored an interdisciplinary study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. More than 100 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.
They identified five characteristics shared by virtually all fundamentalisms.
Paraphrased from the original, these characteristics are:
1) Rules must be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of life. The rigid rules of God