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?

The South Rises Again

One of the most important cultural developments between the 1930s and the 1970s was the rise of the South from being a self-consciously separate region to becoming more of an integral part of the national culture. That transformation was not possible until the turmoil of the civil rights movement receded and the South formally joined the rest of the nation in accepting racial integration, at least in principle. During the era of the triumph of civil rights legislation and enforcement of school desegregation in the 1960s, opposition to these causes served as a major force in separating many white southerners from the Democratic Party, as was most evident in George Wallace's 1968 campaign. Despite religious dimensions in that opposition, piety was probably no more conspicuous there than it was in most other aspects of southern public life, whether conservative or progressive, white or black. In any case, only after white southerners were no longer automatically voting Democratic was it possible to organize a truly national movement of political conservatives. Furthermore, once civil rights receded as the defining political issue so that not everything that southern conservatives did was dismissed by their critics as motivated by veiled racism, the door was open to marshal southern conservative political energies and resentments elsewhere. So it is no accident that almost as soon as the divisive issue of civil rights formally receded, the Religious Right emerged as a national movement with conspicuous southern leadership, best exemplified by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Robison.1

It may seem odd that the American Protestant fundamentalism that, as I and others have argued, appears to be primarily northern in its origins, should now seem to have its most solid base in the South. Yet it is not new that many fundamentalists should speak with a southern accent. A number of the most influential leaders of the movement in the 1920s, including William B. Riley. A. C. Dixon, Curtis Lee Laws, John Roach Straton, J. C. Massee, J. Gresham Machen, and J. Frank Norris, were from the South. Fundamentalist militancy typically arises when proponents of a once-dominant religious culture feel threatened by trends in the larger surrounding culture. In other words, to use a non-fundamentalist analogy, it takes two to tango. If organized fundamentalism is to arise not only does there have to be a conservative religious community but also the more liberal-secular culture has to be strong enough to be impinging on the once-dominant religious culture and seem to be threatening to replace it. Accordingly, although transplanted southerners were prominent in northern fundamentalism, for a long time there was very little organized fundamentalism in the Deep South. Special fundamentalist organization there would have been redundant. Though people might be aroused against an alien teaching such as evolution, on the whole southern evangelical culture seemed secure. When evangelical white southerners were directly confronted with seemingly inexorable national secularizing trends, some of them, such as the early fundamentalist leaders who had been transplanted to the north, were ready to fight.

During the first half of the 20th century in much of the South, white evangelical Protestants typically exercised, as Grant Wacker has so nicely put it, "custodial" control over the local culture. So long as their cultural dominance was secure, they could afford to be champions of separation of church and state and of "the spirituality of the church," a popular code phrase for the doctrine, sacred since the days of slavery, that churches should not meddle in political causes. Even though "the spirituality of the church" was transparently a way of protecting the segregated social order and churches did exercise their influence when it came to approved political causes such as prohibition, Sabbath observance, or anti-evolution, most of that influence was informal or taken for granted and did not require special political organization. Jerry Falwell's famous 1965 sermon "Ministers and Marchers," in which he proclaimed that the duty of the church was simply to "preach the Word" and not to "reform the externals" was an expression of this classic southern and fundamentalist stance.

One of the earlier sources of the transition to political fundamentalism was the massive migration from the South during the 1930 through the 1950s. Transplanted white southerners could be found in fundamentalist churches in every northern city. J. Frank Norris, for instance, established in 1932 a second headquarters in Detroit. By 1970, some 7.5 million white southerners were living outside the South. Many settled in the Midwest. Perhaps the most dramatic impact of the migration, however, was in southern California. Southern migrants, particularly from the Arkansas/ Oklahoma region, were especially prominent making southern California a center for the old-time religion. Billy Graham's much heralded success in his 1949 Los Angeles crusade, which vaulted him into national prominence, was built on this demographic trend. Other lesser known southern evangelists, such as "Fighting" Bob Shuler, John Brown, J. Vernon McGee, and Bill Bright, all from Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Tennessee, had already laid the groundwork for revivalist Christianity in California.

The real story, however, was at the local level. White southerners, used to a friendly custodial environment, were confronting a more diverse and secular American culture. Often the initial confrontations involved what was being taught in the public schools, leading to local political mobilization. By the 1960s such grassroots organizations, often growing out of local churches, had become considerable sources in support for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and then, more significantly, for Ronald Reagan's successful run for governor in 1966. From that time on it would be difficult to find an aspect of renewed religious and cultural militancy of the emerging Religious Right that did not have a major southern component. By the early 1970s people were talking of the Americanization of the South, and the "southernization" of America, and the "Californization" of Texas.2

The early Moral Majority emerged from the upper South, but eventually similar attitudes could be found throughout the region, as the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention best exemplifies. Characteristic fundamentalist theological concerns, often encapsulated under the rubric of "the inerrancy of Scripture," were major elements in defining Southern Baptist conservatism, yet after the mid-1970s cultural-political issues became increasingly important in enlisting popular support. Conservative attitudes were now strong throughout the Sunbelt. That is not to say that latter-twentieth-century fundamentalism was a southern invention or a purely southern product. To the contrary, it roots were firmly entwined with and grafted on to traditions and attitudes traceable to the fundamentalism of the 1920s and its mid-century northern heirs. Nonetheless, the new even more resistant hybrid that emerged after the mid-1970s flourished especially well in the southland sun.

The Counterculture, Patriotism, and the Family

As in Reagan's California, the countercultural revolution of the 1960s vastly accelerated a sense of cultural alarm not only for transplanted white southerners but also for many other sorts of Americans. Two sorts of issues energized the backlash that in 1969 was still enough beneath media radar as to be tagged by Richard Nixon as "the silent majority." First was patriotism and the Vietnam War. Ever since the Russian Revolution, anti-communism had been a leading theme for evangelists who were evoking a sense of world crisis. Such religious anti-communism supported and sometimes amplified the political anti-communism, but evangelists usually left actual political organization to others. In the 1940s and 1950s communism stood not only for atheism, totalitarianism, and a nuclear threat from abroad, but also at least intimated the menace of atheistic secularism promoted by big government at home.

During the early Cold War, American patriotism was at a peak and not surprisingly often took on a Manichean quality. On the "good" side of this dichotomy was "The American Way of Life," often associated with family values and a "Christian," or increasingly "Judeo-Christian" heritage. Fundamentalists, as such, were seldom taken seriously in the cultural mainstream, although everyone knew they were plentiful on the fringes. The immense popularity of Billy Graham, even in his early fundamentalist phase, might have suggested how deeply that religious style, once again with a southern accent, could resonate with a wide segment of Americans. Another significant area where explicitly evangelical influence was growing was in the American military. Here again the rise of the South and the prominence of southerners in the military contributed to this trend that by the 1960s was running counter to the growing secularism of public life. More broadly, when opponents of the Vietnam War seemed to question patriotic anti-Communism and to undermine the military, the backlash, whether North, South, or West, had one of its strongest bases in conversionist Christianity.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially the assaults on traditional standards of family and sexuality, had an even larger impact in reshaping fundamentalism. Dramatic changes in standards for public decency, aggressive second-wave feminism, gay activism, and challenges to conventional family structures all generated alarm. These changes were not simply countercultural but in most cases the movements were co-opted by the commercial culture and promoted in its media.

The issues of family and sexuality proved the key to unlocking evangelical potential to become overtly political, but remarkably (in the light of past antagonisms) several of those who had the most to do with turning that key were Roman Catholics. For conservative Catholics, of course, issues regarding sexuality had long been seen as preeminently political. Phyllis Schlafly was one of the first Catholics to effectively reach across the long-standing divide as she enlisted support against the Equal Rights Amendment, supposed to end discrimination against women, which had been easily passed by the U. S. Senate in 1972. Aided by direct mail expert Richard Viguerie, Schlafly's Eagle Forum waged an eventually successful campaign throughout the decade. Schlafly and her allies convinced a large constituency that the amendment was not essentially about legal equality but rather an effort by aggressive feminists to impose their individualistic anti-family agenda on the whole culture. The white South, where the traditional family and sexual purity had long been sensitive issues, was especially susceptible to mobilization in this national campaign.

As late as 1976 it was not at all clear what the evangelical vote might mean. It could not be assumed that conservative evangelicalism would translate overwhelmingly into political conservatism, let alone support for the Republican Party. When Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter announced that he was "born again" many conservative evangelicals were delighted. Meanwhile, reporters on the coasts were scurrying to find out what this ominous phrase from the heartland might mean. Carter's election, thanks in part to evangelical support, was the first occasion in which the political potential of evangelicalism gained national attention.

Disillusionment with the Carter White House soon set in as it became clear that the president would not forsake core Democratic constituencies to take up the Religious Right agenda on issues of family, sexuality, or religion in public life. Opposition to gay rights emerged as a grass-roots political issue as singer and evangelical activist Anita Bryant led a campaign that helped turn over an anti-discrimination law in Florida's Miami-Dade County. An IRS threat to deny tax-exempt status to Christian schools, on the basis that they were de facto segregationist, helped provoke widespread and effective mobilization of evangelical, Catholic, and other counterforces in 1978. By 1979 alarm about the nation's perceived continuing drift toward secularism and promiscuity made it an auspicious time for the founding of the Moral Majority. Jerry Falwell soon became its leading spokesperson. Once again, however, two Catholics, Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, were instrumental in creating the new movement. Supporters of Republican conservatism, especially as embodied in the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, were recognizing the potential usefulness of the Religious Right. The feelings were mutual. Falwell brought with him a large television ministry and soon turned the Moral Majority into a major political lobby. Among charismatics and pentecostals his efforts were soon paralleled by Pat Robertson who had an even larger television ministry.

Remarkably, it was not until the end of the 1970s that abortion emerged as a leading evangelical concern. Prior to the 1970s strict opposition to abortion had been viewed primarily as a Roman Catholic position. Earlier fundamentalists and their mid-century heirs viewed abortion with disfavor, largely because it was a manifestation of sexual permissiveness, but it was not unthinkable to discuss exceptions to the general rule. As late as 1968, Christianity Today sponsored a colloquy on abortion at which Carl F. H. Henry, evangelicalism's best-known ethicist, spoke equivocally on the topic—something that would have been almost impossible for a card-carrying evangelical to do with impunity fifteen years later. The United States Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973 did not at first lead to a major evangelical or fundamentalist reaction. As late as 1976 most regarded it as just one more sad sign of declining public moral standards, but only a few saw it as an issue around which cultural militants should rally and it was not thought of as a major factor affecting grass-roots born-again support for Jimmy Carter. By the early 1980s, by way of contrast, strict anti-abortion had become the centerpiece of new Catholic-Protestant political alliance and a virtual test of faith in militant evangelical circles.

Secular Humanism or a Return to Christian Roots?

While, with the major exception of Southern Baptist conservatives, alarm over doctrinal erosion in major denominations played a relatively smaller role in the new fundamentalism as compared to that of the 1920s, opposition to the expansion of the powers of civil government played a far greater role. That in turn related to the times. The decades after 1945 were a time of expansion of government, especially the federal government, in a way the 1920s were not. Alarm over secularizing trends accordingly focused on governmental intrusion on people's lives, as the national trends were toward creating a more pluralistic and inclusive, and hence more secular, society. For many, opposition to racial integration and continuing bitterness over matters like affirmative action and school busing fueled anti-government resentment. Related concerns focused on the welfare state of "the Great Society."

Some of the foundations had been laid behind the scenes in the previous decades by strongly anti-communist and free enterprise conservatives, such as Sun Oil Company's J. Howard Pew, who financed conversionist religious groups to be bastions for preserving older ideas of a Christian society. By the 1960s the courts were taking more aggressive positions in declaring that the First Amendment entailed a "wall of separation" between church and state, most notoriously in the ban on Bible-reading and prayer in public schools. In the same era courts became far more permissive regarding what had previously been regarded as pornographic in publications, film, and other public entertainment. Fundamentalistic fundraisers could easily point with alarm to courts that removed the Bible from public life but made Playboy available at ever corner convenience store. Conservative evangelical alarm over Roe v. Wade could be generated initially in part because it fit this permissive pattern. Their fierce and often effective opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment for women in the later 1970s grew naturally out of well-established resentments against governmental attempts to alter essential basic patterns of American life.

"Secular humanism" came to be the shorthand framework for understanding the convergence of these cultural and political trends. Francis Schaeffer was the key person in articulating this new comprehensive yet simple paradigm. Schaeffer was an effective popularizer of the Reformed idea that Christianity had powerful implications as a cultural critique. In 1976 he brought these ideas to fundamentalist and evangelical churches all over American though a film series, How Shall We Then Live? Schaeffer's overview of Western culture and civilization emphasized that the great Christian synthesis that culminated in the Protestant era had been replaced by secular humanism, which had proved empty and destructive in the fragmentation and moral relativism of the twentieth century. Schaeffer was also instrumental in raising Roe v. Wade to a position of preeminence as an example of the secular takeover of government to promote an anti-Christian and licentious agenda. In 1979, working with Dr. C. Everett Koop (soon to be Surgeon General under Reagan), Schaeffer came out with a follow-up film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? which focused on abortion-on-demand as the culmination of the secular humanist creed of freedom and self-indulgence that had led to the wholesale murder of the weakest of the human race.

Tim LaHaye took up this critique and popularized it further in The Battle for the Mind (1980), dedicated to Schaeffer. LaHaye, along with his wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America in 1979, were among the most effective of fundamentalist promoters of the new political consciousness. According to Tim LaHaye, secular humanism was not so much a cultural trend as an organized conspiracy. Hard-core humanists numbered only about 275,000 but they controlled much of American media, entertainment and education. The estimated sixty million born-again Christians, if properly organized, should be able to defeat the secular humanists, who were supported by naïve moralists and religious liberals.

The times were propitious for mobilizing an army of militants around such rhetoric. At the grassroots level American schools and textbooks had long been a volatile issues, sparking various local controversies over teachings of moral relativism, sex education, or biological evolution. Campaigns to counter the teaching of biological evolution in the public schools, boosted by the "creation-science" movement that claimed a scientific basis for a young earth, reached levels comparable to those of the 1920s. At the local level, anti-evolution was one of the most effective means of enlisting grass-roots political support. Now, however, in contrast to the 1920s, it was only one part of a larger anti-humanist political package. In the meantime, since 1960s and 1970s the Christian School movement had gained immensely in popularity as a practical sort of cultural separatism and as an alternative to government controlled secular education. Especially in the South, one motive was to avoid racial integration, but resistance to other cultural trends soon became more basic to the national movement. The rationale Christian schools offered an alternative to the threat of government-supported secular humanism provided a way of clearly articulating the positive religious justification for what these schools were already doing.

The larger framework was America's original Christian heritage that needed to be restored. That the United States was founded as a Christian nation and had abandoned that heritage had long been part of fundamentalist outlook. Even during the mid-century separatist era fundamentalist rhetoric invoked political and social threats, such as communism or declining morals, as urgent concerns. But the solution was essentially the old standard of personal and national religious revival. The implication was that righteous individuals and leaders would turn the nation back to God. But how that would happen usually remained vague.

The dramatic transformation of cultural fundamentalism (as opposed to strictly theological or ecclesiastical fundamentalism) from a movement whose political influence was mostly potential into a major national political power involved more than resourceful evangelical leaders rallying their people around an alternate vision for America. It was also the result of the shrewd leadership of non-evangelicals who were building the new conservative coalition that reshaped the Republican Party in the late twentieth century. In a sense the professional politicians "used" the Religious Right, as became apparent in some of the latter's frustration with the Reagan administration's reluctance to move on the politics of sexuality. Yet the relationship was two-sided. Evangelical leaders "used" the Republican Party and the national perception of their own political power to build their religious movements and spread their cultural ideologies. Being market driven, the greater there was a perception of potential political power, the more the message of some ministries brought out longstanding cultural themes that readily resonated with their constituencies.

In terms of the longer fundamentalist heritage, the more explicitly politicized fundamentalism of the later 20th century brought into the center of the movement the older custodial side of the American evangelical impulse that went back to the Puritans and which had been best preserved in the South. That custodial side had been apparent in a good bit of the northern fundamentalism of the 1920s, but during the mid-20th century it had been overshadowed by the sectarian side as most fundamentalists emphasized separatism and apolitical premillennialism. In the new cultural-political fundamentalism the custodial side reemerged in full force. It also quickly spread to parts of the wider evangelical tradition that seemed to have little to do with the custodial heritage, emphasizing far more the personal sanctification rather than a national cultural program. Psychologist James Dobson, for instance, came from a Nazarene holiness heritage that in the mid-twentieth century was apolitical and sectarian. Known in the 1970s for books on childrearing, by the early 21st century Dobson had made the transition to becoming one of the most influential political figures of the Religious Right.

The Premillennial Paradox

As prominent political agendas spread among all sorts of evangelicals one of the central cultural paradox of fundamentalism and related fundamentalistic evangelicalism became even more dramatically pronounced than ever. Despite massive efforts to transform American politics and culture for the long run, ever more popular dispensational premillennial teachings suggested that for the United States there would be no long run. The Rapture and hence the beginning of the End Times, as countless preachers and writers proclaimed, were very likely to occur at least within the next few decades.

America was simultaneously Babylon and God's chosen nation. Countless sermons and fund-raising appeals described in lurid tones how America was under judgment. Doom was inevitable and imminent. Each new crisis in the Cold War, conflict in the Middle East, or development in the European Union proved that the Bible prophecies were fulfilled and the end was near. Yet the United States at the very same time also remained a moral beacon for the ideals of freedom and best hope for defending righteousness against the powers of darkness. The Cold War and opposition to atheistic Communism fueled the idea that America represented a virtuous alternative. "Love it or leave it" style patriotism remained a hallmark of the movement, as much in the era shaped by 9/11 as it had been in that shaped by Vietnam. America might deserve the wrath of God for its sins, but let an American protester desecrate the flag or criticize the military and it would be treated as though it were blasphemy.

In the 1970s, when such sentiments were building, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) was America's best-selling nonfiction book, reaching 28 million in print by 1990. Lindsey's tour de force provides an archetypical example of fundamentalism in its apolitical mode. Lindsey predicted that as the end approached, apparently within the generation, the United States moral decline would "so weaken law and order" that first the economy and then the military would collapse. Meanwhile institutional churches would be forming "religious conglomerates" and the Pope would become "even more involved in world politics" as the prophesied union of world church and world government moved into place. "Open persecution" was likely "to break out for 'real Christians.'" For America the only hopes were for individuals to convert and possibly "a widespread spiritual awakening." In an interview in 1977 Lindsey declared, "God didn't send me to clean the fishbowl, he sent me to fish."

The most striking contrast to such apolitical premillennialism was the influence of the militantly political postmillennialism of the Christian Reconstructionist movements among fundamentalistic Christians after about 1980. Christian Reconstructionism in its pure form is a radical movement that has never had a wide following. Founded by Rousas J. Rushdoony, an ultra-conservative Presbyterian, Reconstructionism, Theonomy, or Dominion Theology, as it is variously called, advocates ultra-conservative economic theory and calls for a theocracy that would include a reinstitution of Old Testament civil law.

The positive proposals of Reconstructionists are so far out of line with American evangelical commitments to American republican ideals such as religious freedom that the number of true believers in the movement is small. Nevertheless, Reconstructionism helped formulate the early critiques of secular humanism, and its call for a biblically based alternative had considerable influence on the rhetoric of the Christian Right. What might be tagged "Soft Reconstructionism," calling for a Bible-based civilization but not in a literal or thoroughgoing way, thus became a common motif within the Christian Right, so that avowed premillennialists often spoke as though they were postmillennialists. The best-known case was Pat Robertson who emerged as the leading political figure in the Christian Right with his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 and formation of the Christian Coalition in 1989. Robertson's books, such as The Secret Kingdom (1983) and The New Millennium (1990) included seemingly postmillennial themes involving restoration of explicitly Christian influences American government. The paradox itself is not new. Already in the 1920s mixes of premillennial doctrine and postmillennial rhetoric reflected a longstanding cultural ambivalence in the American evangelical heritage.

The continuing popularity of these themes at the same time that many of their most ardent fundamentalistic proponents are deeply involved in politics and in establishing, for instance, educational institutions with buildings designed to last for generations, also confirms what appears to be a longstanding pattern. Premillennial end-time views, while important for confirming biblical authority and for promoting evangelism and missions, have not usually been prime determinants of fundamentalist views on other matters (support of the State of Israel is the momentous exception). While sincerely held, they do not appear to be the sort of core belief (such as the necessity of trusting in Christ's sacrifice for salvation) that is so much at the center of a movement's web of beliefs that it cannot be easily ignored when in conflict with other concerns that are considered legitimate. Less central to the whole system, they are operative in some areas of concern, but not controlling factors for the whole.

American Fundamentalism and the World Phenomenon

Since around 1980, with the convergence of the rise of political fundamentalism and the Iran Hostage Crisis, it has been popular to compare American fundamentalists to militant conservatives in other religions, especially radical Islamists. Recognizing that there are generic similarities in their militancy against aspects of modernity, it is illuminating also to reflect on their differences. Although each of these groups is militant, fundamentalistic American Protestants are distinguished from radical Islamists and some other armed conservatives in world religions in that the warfare in which their group is to engage is almost always metaphorical, rather than literal. Fundamentalistic American Protestants stress those biblical passages that emphasize the warfare between the forces of good and evil. Nonetheless, it has been unusual for them to recommend that church groups or individuals should take it on themselves to engage in physical violence against God's enemies. Occasionally fundamentalistic Christians have physically attacked abortionists or their clinics, but such have been rare.

One overarching difference between fundamentalistic American Protestants and radical militant movements in most other world religions is that American Protestants are shaped not only by their religious heritage but also by the American Enlightenment. Most fundamentalistic Americans are, after all, Baptists who have a heritage that affirms separation of church and state that antedates the Enlightenment. And as Mark Noll has shown most definitively, because they joined forces with champions of more Deistic or liberal Christian Enlightenment outlooks in the American Revolution, most American evangelical Christians were far more open to republican ideology than were their European Christian counterparts. Thus the Common Sense philosophy, with its confidence in the rational judgments of ordinary people first became fused with the American evangelical heritage.

Despite evangelicals' and fundamentalists' sectarian tendencies and concerns for purity versus cultural corruption, they have usually remained remarkably comfortable with what they see as the ideals of the American Revolution. Even if they romanticize the American founders as working from an essentially Christian worldview, one result of that use of history is that they view many of the early ideals of the American political heritage as sacred. One of their most deeply held beliefs is that individual freedom of choice as central to the American Christian heritage. Although they believe legislation should reflect God's moral law on selected issues such as abortion or gay marriage, their general instinct on most matters is to advocate voluntary persuasion rather than governmental coercion. Above all—and most important in making the comparisons to militant religious movements elsewhere more misleading than clarifying—is that, as sociologist Christian Smith has shown, when American evangelicals speak of a "Christian America," the first thing they are likely to speak of is religious freedom as being at the heart of the American experiment.

Given this republican and nationalistic heritage, which is still part of American fundamentalism, the comparison with radical militants in other world religions with respect to types of militancy takes on a more complex form. While fundamentalistic American Protestant militancy much more rarely involves direct physical violence in the name of Christ or the church, it nonetheless often strongly supports literal warfare on the part of the nation. And although the American nation is certainly distinguished from the church and is in principle seen as much less than Christian, in practice it is often treated with a reverence as though it were Christian and as an agency used by God in literal warfare against the forces of evil.

Thus, while the reliance on lawfully constituted authorities for wielding the sword has something to be said for it morally, both in terms of the Christian tradition and modern Western standards, it is not that fundamentalistic American Protestants are remarkably more pacific than other militant religionists with respect to the use of physical violence. Rather, as compared to other Americans they are more likely to sanction state-sponsored warfare. Perhaps most important, despite their sharp critiques of some aspects of modernity and their deep suspicions of many of the pretensions of governments, they often appear almost wholly uncritical of the immensely powerful modern ideology of nationalism when it is manifested in their own nation. So they seem more than willing to endorse raising the United States to sacred status.

Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism for Real People

Concentrating on the remarkable rise of militant fundamentalistic viewpoints in mainstream American politics is likely to distort the overall picture of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism today. These movements are still built around the Gospel message of Christ's saving work, sharing that message with others, and living sanctified lives of service guided by God's Word. Most people in churches, even in those with strong political agendas, are not political activists and have been attracted to these churches for reasons other than political. Many thriving ministries and trends—such as the revolution in worship in the past generation—amplify other aspects of these traditions. Nevertheless, the rise of fundamentalistic evangelicalism as a force in mainstream national politics is one of the major stories of the past twenty-five years.

Evangelicalism is a many-sided conglomeration of related religious movements that are shaped both by the market and by a commitment to the Bible as interpreted according to a variety of Protestant traditions. The market-driven character of these movements makes them prone to the temptations of the powers of whatever is popular in the culture. Their historical development might be thought of as a sort of collective Pilgrim's Progress in which various groups of pilgrims who intend to be led by Scripture are constantly being enticed by more worldly ideals. Ministries of self-fulfillment are well-known examples. The temptations of political power and influence are particularly seductive, especially since they involve the promotion of some good causes and can be presented as though they were unambiguous moral obligations.

Sometimes such temptations cause pilgrims to lose their critical sensibilities—as, for instance, in failing to see the inevitably compromised and largely self-interested quality of large political party coalitions. Nevertheless, the wonder of evangelical history is that its myriad varieties and deep commitments to various interpretive traditions deeply rooted in Scripture make it, by the grace of God, also to some degree self-correcting. So it may be with the rise of political fundamentalism and evangelicalism of recent decades. To serve God through the institutions of one's culture can be a Gospel imperative and politics can be a power for good, especially if we recognize the realities of self-interest and the tendency for power to corrupt. Placing the recent politicization of fundamentalistic evangelicalism in historical perspectives—and recognizing that even some of our immediate predecessors might have seen what is happening today as a mixed blessing—is one step toward finding the critical sensibilities to return to the road to the heavenly city, whenever that is needed, as it is sure often to be.

George M. Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His essay in this issue is excerpted from the just-published second edition of Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George M. Marsden, © 1982, 2005 by Oxford University Press. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

1. Since drafting this I have seen Paul Harvey's, Freedom's Coming: Religion Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005), which provides the best account of this transition. The fact that Harvey's has a sentence almost identical to the above provides reassuring confirmation. Harvey writes (p. 248): "It was no accident that religious conservative came to national prominence following the demise of race as the central issue of southern life. Underlying their political movements were philosophical positions that updated venerable defense of social order as necessary for a properly ordered society."

2. For these points I am indebted to Darren Dochuk, now of Purdue University, for his award-winning Ph. D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2005, "From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Southernization of Southern California, 1935-1969." See also Linda McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.