Defining the key terms

These terms can be confusing because they are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes carry different meanings. Maria should be able to distinguish them.

• Modernization: The processes associated with the transition to industrial economies, urbanization, mass education, modern bureaucratic states, scientific worldview, and individualism. Modernization is not unique to the West but historically began in Western Europe and was associated with Western models.
• Westernization: The adoption of specifically Western cultural patterns: Western dress, language, religion (especially Christianity), arts, and political ideologies (liberalism, Marxism, secularism). Westernization is a subset of modernization, but the two are often conflated.
• Secularization: The reduction of religion's role in public life. Government, education, and law become separate from religious authority. A core feature of European modernization that has often been resisted in non-Western societies.
• Traditional society: A society organized around inherited cultural patterns, often centered on religion, family, agriculture, and customary law. This is a useful but limited concept; no society is purely "traditional" or purely "modern."
• Fundamentalism: Movements that seek to return to what they see as foundational principles of a religion in opposition to what they regard as modern corruptions. Originally applied to American Protestant Christians; now applied to similar movements in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and other religions.
• Theocracy: Government by religious leaders or according to religious law. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the leading contemporary example.