1 of 12
The most striking feature of the fundamentalism since the 1970s that distinguishes it from its forebears is its deep involvement in mainstream national politics. This point must be stated carefully. Fundamentalism has always had political implications. One of the several dynamics shaping early fundamentalists was a sense of alarm over the demise of a Christian culture. National revival, they urged, was the only adequate response. Salvation of souls, they affirmed, would restore righteousness to the culture. Born-again people, they at least implied, would choose upright leaders who honored God's laws.
Occasionally the movement did have some explicitly political components, best exemplified in the crusades against godless evolutionism and godless Bolshevism, but its political interests were haphazard. Prior to World War I, most of fundamentalists' immediate precursors stayed away from most direct political involvement. The premillennial revivalist movement that revered Dwight L. Moody was invigorated by a militant sense of cultural crisis, but the primary response was to mobilize an army of evangelists. The major exception was Prohibition, but that had its roots in the old post-millennialism evangelicalism of the 19th century and was as much a mainline Protestant and Progressive cause as a revivalist concern. In the era that followed the 1920s, in the mid-decades of the century, fundamentalism was even less involved in direct political action. After World War II anti-communism became a conspicuous theme but its major function was as a prelude to the old call for national revival, as it was for Billy Graham, as a way urging individual conversions and enlisting support for evangelism and missions. Some evangelists, such as Fred Schwartz, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis, specialized in anti-communism, and paved the way for the Religious Right. Yet their efforts did not result in large-scale political mobilization and they seemed marginal to the national scene. Through the 1960s the endlessly repeated mainline Protestant critique of fundamentalism was that its "otherworldliness" and emphasis on personal conversion as the only real answer to life's problems had turned Christianity into a "private" and socially irresponsible religion.
This remarkable transformation provides the intriguing question that shapes the present essay: how did a soul-saving revivalistic movement that mostly steered clear of direct political involvement emerge at the end of the 20th century as known especially for its political stances and influences? That is not to say that political involvement has become the controlling feature of most self-styled fundamentalists or related fundamentalistic evangelicals (here I am using "fundamentalistic" in the broad sense—much as "fundamentalism" was used in the 1920s—of any militantly conservative evangelical, rather than just for strict ecclesiastical separatists.) Concerns for evangelism, missions, and personal spirituality still are the central features of these many-faceted movements. Many churches that are strongly conservative in theology do not emphasize politics. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that in the past generation political activism has risen dramatically in prominence in these movements. Fundamentalists and fundamentalistic evangelicals have become leading part of a solid "Religious Right" bloc in the Republican Party and a considerable influence in mainstream politics. How did these outsiders and sectarian protesters get to be part of the political establishment?
share this page
RSS Feed
