Abstract
My first academic presentation was memorable for one reason, a comment from a member of the audience. I have mercifully forgotten the details of a panel on “Fundamentalists and Gender,” organized some decades back for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. What still stands out to me is the first question out of the box: “Okay, but what can we do to stop these people?”
David Harrington Watt, now Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies at Haverford College, has likely had similar experiences. While many of us might be neutral toward theosophists or Pentecostals or southern Presbyterians, fundamentalism is an intellectually polarizing subject. Often, the price for studying them is disavowing them, making sure others know that scholarly curiosity in no way suggests empathy.
The problem, however, goes beyond occasional social awkwardness at academic conferences; the larger point of Watt’s illuminating critique of “antifundamentalism” is moral and political. His book traces in clear, accessible prose how the word has been weaponized against the perceived opponents of western modernity, Muslims in particular. In the contemporary imagination, fundamentalists are not just stodgy reactionaries, bound to catch up with the rest of us sooner or later, but irredeemably, intrinsically evil. Their unforgiveable sin, Watt argues, is rejecting their “duty to accept and affirm the universal truths discovered by the European Enlightenment” (xvii). Pointing fingers at fundamentalists is, in his view, a sly form of western imperialism.
Watt would have us use the “fundamentalist” label sparingly and specifically, referring only to the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American Protestants who coined it and then wore it proudly. Credit usually goes to Baptist Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Watchman-Examiner, who published an article in 1922 lauding the efforts of the denomination’s “fundamentalists,” men (mostly) prepared to “do battle royal” for the sake of doctrinal purity. But the idea of rock-bottom certainties, of some irreducible core of Christian doctrine, was already in currency by then, as witnessed by the publication in The Fundamentals (1910–15), twelve volumes with ninety densely written articles on everything from the Virgin Birth to the Second Coming.
How did this term, invented to describe a relatively small group of white, mostly northern, mostly Calvinist, and somewhat stuffy American Protestants, come to describe a threat to global security? Watt’s book is in many ways an extended bibliographic essay, tracing scholarly construction of fundamentalists as the “dangerous other.” The story begins in the 1920s, the era of the so-called fundamentalist/modernist controversy, with the warning in Harry Emerson Fosdick’s controversial sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Before the smoke had even drifted from the denominational battlefields, eminent scholars like H. Richard Niebuhr and Talcott Parsons were already taking Fosdick’s implied warning to heart. Fundamentalists were not just doctrinal conservatives; in the new social science orthodoxy, they were deeply maladjusted, unable, or unwilling to adjust to changes that most people—including leading academics—had taken in stride. In ensuing decades, the portrait grew more contradictory and more ominous. Fundamentalists were, on the one hand, doomed zealots lolling around in the “dustbin of history,” and on the other hand, they represented a broader threat to American democracy. Fundamentalists and anticommunists were of a piece, sitting side by side in Richard Hofstadter’s searing indictment of “antiintellectualism.”
Like everything else, fundamentalism went global in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the early 1990s, as Watt notes, was a kind of golden age for the subject, as the western world struggled to explain the frightening irrationality of “Muslim Rage,” to use the phrase coined by Princeton historian Bernard Lewis. Civilizations were clashing, and scholars were taking notice. The signal effort and perhaps the main target of Watt’s critique is the Fundamentalism Project, a massive scholarly collaboration led by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Like the original Fundamentals, these books were likely more talked about than read word for word, five thickly written essay collections published by the University of Chicago Press between 1987 and 1995. The project’s goal was in some ways fairly modest, tracking “family resemblances” in militant, oppositional forms of religion around the world. Though the participants did not agree that “fundamentalism” was the right word to describe what was happening—some rejected it outright—most agreed that there was something out there that needed hypothesizing, a cultural phenomenon calling for a unified theoretical explanation. The resulting construct was simple but compelling: though fundamentalists were subservient to the literal authority of sacred texts, deeply moralistic especially in regard to gender and family issues, and sometimes prone to violence, they were not culturally backward. In complex and paradoxical ways, fundamentalism was both a creation of modernity and a reaction to it.
In some ways, the core issue in Antifundamentalism is methodological, pitting the narrative approach of historians against the theory building of religious studies. Watt’s overview demonstrates his preference for the former, his conviction that a complex cultural phenomenon like fundamentalism requires particularly delicate surgical tools. But, as the historiography of the past several decades demonstrates, historians are sometimes better off not left to themselves, especially when bigger questions need asking. In the 1980s and 1990s, their perspective on fundamentalism was relatively narrow: the oft-cited foundational studies by Ernest Sandeen and George Marsden were intellectual history more than anything else, countering the antiintellectual picture drawn by Parsons and Hofstadter as well as the popular stereotype of fundamentalists as rural, southern, and uneducated. Marsden and Sandeen’s subjects were, to a large degree, biblical scholars and theologians, not ignoramuses on the margins but the brainy offspring of Princeton Presbyterians and Scottish philosophers. It would take some time for the theoretical tools of social history to begin to revise that picture. (The four theological principles of the so-called “Bebbington Quadrilateral” are still the go-to definition of an evangelical.) Even now, though scholars have analyzed Protestant fundamentalism in terms of gender and, to an extent, social class, they have only begun to understand it as a racial category.
But Watt is not really taking sides here. He is simply asking all scholars to take their subjects seriously, to hold off on grand generalities before talking to the people in question. If not, actual damage can result. Antifundamentalism is in that sense a cautionary tale for anyone studying religion, a parable demonstrating the destructive speed and power of an idea unhindered by scholarly self-awareness. It is also a general reminder that humanizing the other is never a bad idea—hard words to hear today when the middle ground has become a radioactive wasteland.
The obvious question about Watt’s critique what it means now. As he freely admits, though loose talk about fundamentalists is still with us, much of the sting has gone out of the label. Scholars have moved on from simply binaries of “sacred/secular” or “irrational/rational,” and world events have too. Few members of the American public could track, let alone understand all of the alliances, coalitions, and betrayals they have recently witnessed in Syria, just to cite one example.
Still, scholarly work on fundamentalism has shaped the world Americans now inhabit their foreign policy as well as basic perceptions of the people who live outside their borders—and within them. Paranoia about a violent, irrational “other” is a recurring theme in American history, everyone from the French to the Masons to Roman Catholics and Germans invading through Mexico. Now perhaps, it is becoming the “new normal,” fueling a blanket “ban” on Muslims entering the United States and a campaign to literally wall off the United States from its neighbors.
The fundamentalist label has also blurred and confused Americans’ perceptions of themselves. If any group had effectively relegated fundamentalists to the dustbin of history, it was the coalition that rose around Billy Graham after the 1970s. “Neo-evangelicals,” as they styled themselves, were educated, tolerant, even urbane, out to transform American culture for the better, and not to run away and hide from it. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the word turned full circle, arcing back onto the moral conservatives who flooded into Washington during the Reagan years. Ironies abounded. Jerry Falwell and his followers were not fundamentalists in the historical sense: instead of separating from an immoral society, they set out to transform it into their image, mapping out electoral districts and lobbying Congressmen. Old ingrained suspicions of worldly powers and principalities faded into the background as leaders of the Christian Right rode chauffeured limousines to the White House. In terms of their political optimism and embrace of Washington, DC, they resembled most closely the liberal mainline Protestants they had long excoriated. But in the 1980s, fundamentalism seemed, to outsiders at least, the best word available to describe those newly politicized moralistic evangelicals. The regular use of a term that now linked American Protestants with terrorists muddied the waters even further, providing a galling reminder even to non-politicized evangelicals how badly the secular world misunderstood them.
Or had it? Ultimately, Antifundamentalism’s most uncomfortable questions are for American evangelicals. Despite their well-documented march toward the mainstream, the fundamentalist strain lived on, quietly stoking the cultural resentments that now openly drive evangelical politics, fostering lurking suspicions of smart women and uppity minorities. Some highly informed and passionate debates are taking place now, calling into question whether or not there is such a thing as “evangelicalism.” It seems a little early to start jettisoning though. The more truthful and more difficult move is recovery, recognizing that in its neo-evangelical guise, fundamentalism may have more power and reach than ever before.