SCIY.Org Archives

Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Mon 15 Jun 2009 01:46 PM PDT  

 

Summary for the April 2-7, 2006
Christian Fundamentalism Conference
Hosted by Esalen's Center for Theory and Research (CTR)

Written by Jacob Sherman

Introduction

No sensitive observer of contemporary events will deny the crucial role that religion plays in shaping our postmodern world both for better and for worse. The once popular notion that, as far as the public arena goes, the major religious traditions are on their last legs—an idea sometimes called the secularization hypothesis—no longer seems credible. Instead of waning, the religious influence in the public is growing, both at home and abroad, presenting us with a new series of opportunities and a new spate of challenges.

In order to deal with one of the most powerful of these new challenges, the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, in partnership with TRACK TWO: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy, has embarked upon a series of conferences convened by Joseph Montville and dealing with the issues of global fundamentalism. Having first considered modern Hindu fundamentalism in December, 2004, and Islamic fundamentalism in September, 2005, CTR turned its attention closer to home when it convened a groundbreaking conference on Christian fundamentalism, April 2-7, 2006.

This invitational conference brought together a unique gathering of scholars, ministers, activists, psychologists, and diplomats. The participants were religiously diverse representing a variety of Christian traditions (including evangelicals, Catholics, and liberal Protestants) and including participants from non-Christian and non-religious backgrounds, as well. The presenters assembled for the week included:

• Pamela M. Creed, M.Ed., who has over ten years experience teaching both history and English as a Second Language in the US and abroad. Creed is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her research interests include exploring the dynamics between dominant and alternative discourses, focusing on group narratives that sustain humiliation and resentment as well as apology narratives for evidence of shifts in discourse.
• Patricia de Jong,Senior Minister at First Congregational Church of Berkely (1994-present). She is a graduate of Western Michigan University and Pacific School of Religion. Before coming to Berkeley, Rev. de Jong served as Minister of Education for Christian Discipleship at The Riverside Church in New York City (1984-88) and as Senior Minister of the Urbandale United Church of Christ in Des Moines, Iowa (1988-94). Pat de Jong's special interests include reading, old movies, Native American art, international travel, theater and the arts. She is currently enrolled in the Doctor of Ministry Program at United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minnesota.
• Barry Hankins, who is in his tenth year on the faculty at Baylor University, presently serving as professor of history and graduate program director in the history department. He also works in conjunction with Baylor's J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies. Hankins holds the B.A. in religion and the M.A. in church-state studies from Baylor and the Ph.D. in history from Kansas State University. His historical interests are primarily in religion and American culture and church-state relations, especially as these relate to twentieth-century fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Hankins has authored three books: God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (1996); Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (2002); and The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists (2004). He has just completed a biography of Francis Schaeffer that should appear either late 2006 or early 2007. Hankins is also co-editor with Derek Davis of two other books. Hankins's articles have appeared in the journals Church History, Religion and American Culture, Journal of Church and State, Fides et Historia, and others.
• Susan F. Harding, Professor Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Harding has done extensive fieldwork on evangelical Christianity. Her research, long referenced by a range of authors working in the field, culminated in the The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2000), which won the 2001 AAR award for excellence in Analytical-Descriptive Studies.
• Douglas M. Johnston, president and founder of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. Dr. Johnston is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. He has served in senior positions in government, business, academia, and the military. Among his government assignments, he has been deputy assistant secretary of the navy (manpower); director of policy planning and management in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and planning officer with the President's Office of Emergency Preparedness. He has taught courses in international affairs and security at Harvard and was the founder and director of the university's Executive Program in National and International Security.  Dr. Johnston served for ten years in the submarine service and, at the age of 27, was the youngest officer in the navy to qualify for command of a nuclear submarine.Prior to his current position, Dr. Johnston served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  In addition to other duties, he chaired the Center's Preventive Diplomacy Program and directed the CSIS project on Religion and Conflict Resolution. In this latter capacity, he was co-editor and principal author of Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 1994), a path-breaking work now in its twelfth printing and second foreign language translation. He also edited and was principal author of Foreign Policy into the 21^st Century: the U.S. Leadership Challenge (CSIS, 1996) and Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Sam Keen, who describes himself as having been overeducated at Harvard and Princeton, and subsequently a professor of philosophy and religion at various legitimate institutions and a contributing editor of Psychology Today for 20 years before becoming a freelance thinker, lecturer, seminar leader and consultant. Keen is the author of a "baker's dozen" books, and co-producer of the award winning PBS documentary: Faces of the Enemy. Keen's work was the subject of a 60 minute PBS special Bill Moyers: Your Mythic Journey with Sam Keen.
• Anisa Mehdi, an Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist specializing in religion and the arts. She has produced and directed critically acclaimed documentary films on Islam and Muslims, writes commentary for NPR's "All Things Considered, " and is an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University. Anisa Mehdi is founder and president of Whetstone Productions, a New Jersey-based production and consulting company. In the course of more than 20 years in news and documentaries, Anisa Mehdi has had unprecedented access to people and places around the world. In 2003 she produced and directed the highly acclaimed National Geographic documentary special "Inside Mecca." Previous reporting on the hajj made her the first American woman to have covered the pilgrimage for broadcast in America.Anisa Mehdi is an on-air correspondent, program anchor, producer/director and writer. She has worked for CBS News, ABC News "Nightline," the PBS documentary series "Frontline," the BBC, and National Geographic Television and Film. For a several years she was a correspondent on the nationally broadcast PBS "Religion and Ethics News Weekly;" for a dozen years she was arts and culture correspondent for the New Jersey Network News, a PBS affiliate. Both on-camera and behind-the-scenes, she uses dynamic visual and reportorial techniques, to bring inspiring personal stories of faith, culture and courage to a wide range of audiences. Currently she teaches in the communications department at Seton Hall University and is a commentator for National Public Radio's award-winning newscast "All Things Considered." Ms. Mehdi lectures frequently on the portrayal of Muslims in the media and interfaith issues. She is developing two new films: 1) on Catholic-Muslim relations in Algeria, and 2) on Muslim women. Anisa Mehdi is also preparing the biography of her father, the late Dr. Mohammad T. Mehdi, a pioneer in American-Arab and American-Muslim self-awareness. Anisa Mehdi is an avid flutist and community volunteer. She is a Trustee of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (www.shakespearenj.org), sits on the Board of Directors of Music for All Seasons (www.musicforallseasons.org), and is an advisor to the Spirit of Fez Festival International. She plays in the Livingston Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Mehdi has an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in Spanish from Wellesley College. She spent her junior year of college at the University of Seville, Spain, and attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two daughters

• Joseph Montville,Diplomat in Residence at American University, Senior Fellow at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University, and Senior Associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies Expertise: Conflict resolution: East Central Europe, the Baltics, the Middle East, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Russia, Canada, and Latin America. Joseph Montville founded the preventive diplomacy program at CSIS in 1994 and directed it until 2003. Before that he spent 23 years as a diplomat with posts in the Middle East and North Africa. He also worked in the State Department's Bureaus of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and Intelligence and Research, where he was chief of the Near East Division and director of the Office of Global Issues. Montville has held faculty appointments at Harvard and the University of Virginia Medical Schools for his work in political psychology. He defined the concept of Track II, nonofficial diplomacy. Educated at Lehigh, Columbia, and Harvard Universities, Montville is the editor of Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington Books, 1990) and editor (with Vamik Volkan and Demetrios Julius) of The Psychodynamics of International Relationships (Lexington Books, 1990 [vol. I], 1991 [vol. II]).
• Michael Murphy, the co-founder and Chairman of Esalen Institute and the author of both fiction and non-fiction books that explore evidence for metanormal capacities in human beings, including Golf in the Kingdom and The Future of the Body. During his forty-year involvement in the human potential movement, he and his work have been profiled in the New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide. A graduate of Stanford University, he was one of the first Americans to live at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India in the early 1950s. In the1980s, he began a successful Soviet-American Exchange Program, which was the premiere diplomacy vehicle for citizen-to-citizen Russian-American relations. In 1990, Boris Yeltsin's first visit to America was initiated by Esalen. His other books include God and the Evolving Universe (co-authored with James Redfield),The Life We Are Given (co-authored with George Leonard), The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, An End to Ordinary History, In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (co-authored with Rhea White), and The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation.
• Dulce W. Murphy, founder and director emeritus of the Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program that began in 1980. Murphy then became the president and executive director of The Russian-American Center (TRAC) in San Francisco, a continuation of the same program. For the past twenty-five years she has been on the cutting edge of non-governmental Russian-American relations. In the spring of 2004, The Russian-American Center changed its name to TRACK TWO: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy, that expands our mandate as a non-profit organization to include other countries, teaming up with our Russian colleagues to that end. Track-two diplomacy involves non-governmental individuals and groups that aim to fill the moral and intellectual voids of official peacemaking leadership. Track Two's major goal is to re-humanize relations that are dysfunctional. It works to make relationships better.
• Rev. Dr. George F. Regas, Rector Emeritus, All Saints Church, Pasadena, CA, and Executive Director, The Regas Institute, Pasadena, CA. Rev. Regas's education includes a BA from the University of Tennessee, a Masters of Divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School, two years as a research student with John A. T. Robinson at Cambridge University and a Doctorate from Claremont School of Theology. The predominant focus of his long tenure at All Saints Church was seeking world peace with Justice. When he retired as Rector of All Saints Church, Pasadena, CA in 1995, he established the Regas Institute.  Rev. Regas's focus is the study and advocacy of progressive religion as a strong counter point to the growing menace and distortion of the religious right.
• Jacob Holsinger Sherman,a staff member and conference coordinator at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, and adjunct faculty in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. A graduate of Pepperdine University and Regent College, Sherman is currently a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he also teaches classes on the history of philosophy, romanticism, and Christian Spirituality. Jacob has written on Owen Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin, and is co-editor (with Jorge Ferrer) of The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, and Religious Studies (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2007). He is currently completing his dissertation, Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation, Participation, and the Philosophy of Religion.
• Donald W. Shriver, Jr., Emeritus President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He served as president in the years 1975-91 and as fulltime teacher of ethics there until 1996. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, he is a graduate of Davidson College, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, Yale University Divinity School, and Harvard University. From the last he holds a Ph.D. in the field of Religion and Society. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1955 and was pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Gastonia, North Carolina, 1956-59. He was Presbyterian University Minister and faculty member at North Carolina State University, 1962-72, and then Professor of Ethics and Society at Candler School of Theology in Emory University, 1972-75. He was president of the Society of Christian Ethics in 1980, was a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin (1999) and Visiting Senior Scholar of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa (2002). He has lectured in England, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, South Africa, India, China, Taiwan, and South Korea. He holds six honorary degrees and has traveled in some fifty countries, with longest residences in Germany, South Korea, and South Africa. He is a member of the American Theological Society. His thirteen books have treated Christian ethics as related to race relations, youth culture, economics, medicine, urban affairs, business management and political conflict. He has taught or co-taught graduate courses in ethics in various neighboring university professional schools, including the Jewish Theological Seminary and four Columbia University schools—business, law, international affairs, and journalism. His most recent work has been in human rights and issues of restorative justice. In addition to some hundred articles, his major authored or co-authored books include: The Unsilent South: Prophetic Preaching in Racial Crisis; Spindles and Spires: A Re-Study of Religion and Social Change in Gastonia; The Lord's Prayer: A Way of Life; Beyond Success: Corporations and Their Critics;and, most recently, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford 1995 and 1997), and Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds (Oxford, 2005).
• Peggy Ann Leu Shriver an author, Iowa-born Presbyterian, mother of three children, workshop leader and lecturer. She has served in various offices for the Presbyterian church, on the boards of numerous social justice organizations. She was on the Staff for Professional Church Leadership, National Council of Churches USA, 1989-99 and was national evaluator for the AmeriCorps Ecumenical Program for Rural/Urban Service (1994-99). She is the author of numerous books and articles including "The Waiting World Parish" from The Nature and Role of Ministry in the 21^st Century;, For the Peace of the World : A Christian Curriculum in International Relations, (NCCCUSA publication, 2005); The Bible Vote; Religion and the New Right; Having Gifts That Differ;and The Divided Church: Moving Liberals and Conservatives from Diatribe to Dialogue(Co-authored with Richard G. Hutcheson, 1999). She has also published two volumes of poetry, Pinches of salt and The Dancers of Riverside Park. In 2001 she and her husband served as joint theologian practitioners for Riverside Church. They received Union Theological Seminary's Union Medal at the conclusion of Don's presidency. Her Doctor of Humanities degree was conferred by Central College, Pella, Iowa. Their commitments involve them in many countries, including South Africa, Germany, Korea, and Ireland.

Mention should be made of three participants who, at the very last minute, were unable to join us due to sudden medical emergencies within their families.

• Gordon Bigelow, associate professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, where he teaches British and Irish literature. His research is on evolving and competing views of market capitalism in nineteenth-century literature. His first book, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (2003) challenged received ideas of Victorian British literature as simplistically hostile to industrial capitalism, and showed how fiction from the period considers ideas that would become central to modern, neoclassical economic theory. His current research is on religious and supernatural discourse in the nineteenth century, again in its relationship to the rise of the neoclassical theory of a self-regulating marketplace. An essay based in his research, called "Let there be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics" recently appeared in Harper's Magazine.
• Glenn W. Shuck, visiting assistant professor of religion at Williams College and an expert on fundamentalism in the modern American imagination. In addition to a number of published essays, he is the author of the acclaimed Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (NYU Press, 2004), and coeditor, with Jeffrey J. Kripal, of On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture (Indiana University Press, 2005).
• Ronald J. Sider (Ph.D., Yale), Professor of Theology, Holistic Ministry and Public Policy and Director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and President of Evangelicals for Social Action. A widely known evangelical speaker and writer, Sider has spoken on six continents, published twenty-seven books and scores of articles. His Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was recognized by Christianity Today as one of the one hundred most influential religious books of the twentieth century. A fifth edition was just released in April. His most recent books are The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World, Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America and Churches That Make a Difference: Reaching Your Community with Good News and Good Works (with Phil Olson and Heidi Unruh). Sider is the publisher of PRISM magazine and a contributing editor of Christianity Today and Sojourners. He has lectured at scores of colleges and universities around the world, including Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford.

More than just an academic exercise, the aim of the week was to identify constructive ways to help mitigate the violence that so often accompanies fundamentalistic forms of religion, including Christianity. To that end, three identifiable goals pervaded the week's activities. First, it was necessary to understand what Christian fundamentalism really is. Second, a diagnosis had to be made regarding where and why this movement becomes unhealthy. Third, because the conference aimed at making a real difference, it ended by laying out strategies for engaging Christian fundamentalism in healing dialogues that can help move it from violence to greater wholeness.

Conference Summary

What Is Fundamentalism?

Most of us think we know what fundamentalism is. The term gets thrown about freely in the media and in popular culture, but as often as not, this popular use of the term is very imprecise. Frequently, it is simply a pejorative—to call something fundamentalist, in this sense, is to label some religious expression or community as being more conservative, extreme, dangerous or irrational than we would like. While Scott Appleby and others have done a great service by laying out a cross-cultural and interreligious phenomenology of fundamentalism, our conference was specifically concerned with Christian fundamentalism, which is a quite specific (and politically powerful) movement within Christianity itself. ^[1]

Barry Hankins, an expert on Christian fundamentalism and church-state relations, began the conference by laying out a detailed historical account of Christian fundamentalism and its impact on the Southern Baptist Convention. A second presentation by Jacob Sherman dovetailed in important ways with Hankins' own account and so, in order to give as clear a definition and history of fundamentalism as possible, I will weave the two presentations together in what follows.

Hankins began by emphasizing the need to differentiate (in a way popular culture often fails to) evangelicals and fundamentalists. He joked that an evangelical is anyone who really likes Billy Graham, and a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something. More seriously, although there is a fair amount of truth in the joke, Hankins described fundamentalism as a late 19^th and 20^th century Christian reaction to the threat of theological modernism. Throughout the 19^th century, as George Marsden has shown, most Anglophone Protestant Christians simply called themselves evangelicals, and this self-identification included the mainline denominations as well as new (holiness and premillennialist) revivalist groups. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, American evangelicalism had begun to polarize sharply between theological liberals and conservatives. Conservative Christians in this period found themselves increasingly troubled by two cultural phenomena. On the one hand, higher criticism imported from Germany had begun to question the integrity of the Scriptures by calling attention to literary techniques that suggested that many of the books of the Old and New Testaments were written far later than tradition had claimed, or by calling into question the presumed authorship of various books within the Bible (so, for example, the higher criticism denied that Moses authored Genesis through Deuteronomy, or more scandalously that a number of the New Testament letters attributed to Paul, such as 1 Timothy, were written by someone else). On the other hand, conservatives were troubled by some of the claims of modern science, particularly Darwin's claims that some saw as threatening or contradicting the Christian belief in God as Creator.^[2] The central issue in both of these challenges was the question of authority: where does authority reside for the Christian church? Theological modernists reacted to higher criticism and the challenge of Darwinism by saying that authority ultimately resided in experience. Conservatives, however, felt that the authority of the church resided pre-eminently in her scriptures. As the 19^th century drew to a close, the difference between the modernists and their emphasis on experience and the conservatives with their belief in the authority of scripture continued to widen and threatened to break.

The pre-history of the fundamentalist movement really gets underway with the extravagant publishing venture of Milton and Lyman Stewart, the millionaire brothers behind Union Oil Company of California (today known as UNOCAL). Between 1910 and 1915, the Stewarts commissioned and published 12 volumes known as The Fundamentals, which defended such positions as the virgin birth and the literal resurrection of Jesus, and attacked the assumptions of higher criticism. The Stewarts financed the project extravagantly so that the volumes could be distributed without charge to every pastor, missionary, theologian, Sunday school superintendent, college professor, and so on, throughout the English speaking world. Three million volumes were distributed in all. This bold and aggressive publishing campaign not only gave its name, but also bequeathed its character to the Fundamentalist movement that arose in its wake, which is why George Marsden describes Fundamentalism as the "militant defense of traditionalist Protestantism."^[3]

Hankins explained how World War I exasperated the divide within Christianity between theological modernists and the emerging Fundamentalist movement. Though it is not often remembered today, it was theological liberals and progressive Christians who championed the United States' involvement in World War I, while conservative (especially, pre-millennialist) Christians called for restraint. The horrors of the war however, radicalized the positions of everyone involved, and conservatives soon felt that they saw something far more insidious than a merely political conflict. They began to feel that Germany, which had once been the land of Luther, had degenerated under the influence of modernism, into an overly militaristic and Nietzschean nation. Traditionalists argued that even though the United States might win the land war, it was in danger of losing the battle with German culture and so they connected the triumph of theological liberalism (which had its roots in German higher criticism) with the cultural annihilation of America itself.

Seven years after the end of the War, in 1925, the divisions within American Christianity finally came to a dramatic head when the Fundamentalists suffered two humiliating public defeats. Over the previous decades, Fundamentalists had chiefly targeted Darwinism and theological modernism. In 1925 they all but lost both of these battles. First, the highly publicized Scopes trial so thoroughly succeeded in caricaturing conservative critics of Darwinism that it continues to exert a powerful hold on the American imagination even today. Second, beyond losing the battle against Darwinian science, Fundamentalists also lost the denominations to theological modernism. Modernists and inclusivists managed a series of strategic elections in major denominations (such as the Presbyterian Church USA) that succeeded in wresting control of institutional structures away from Fundamentalist factions. Thus the defeats of 1925 marked the visible end of a Fundamentalist campaign for American culture, and over the next three decades the movement turned inward and sectarian.

Hankins related how one colorful exception to this sectarianism is found in J. Frank Norris (d. 1952), a prominent Fundamentalist pastor who waged an early (but unsuccessful) war for control of the Southern Baptist denomination. Initially, the Fundamentalist movement spread slowly in the South, chiefly because theological modernism was scarcer beneath the Mason-Dixon line and so there wasn't much need for a militant defense of traditional faith. Norris however, whose fiery bravado earned him the nickname "God's rascal", felt that such militancy was a good strategy whether it seemed necessary to others or not. Norris was pastor of two early mega-churches—one in Ft. Worth, TX, the other in Michigan—each numbering about 12,000 parishioners. In his zeal, Norris sought out enemies even when they were scarce or non-existent, and thereby tried to win the Southern Baptists to Fundamentalism. He preached scandalous sermons, for example, against the Catholic mayor of Ft. Worth, making false accusations regularly and publishing them in Norris's own newspaper. His ability to ignite controversy knew no bounds, even to the point of embroiling him in the shooting death (supposedly in self-defense) of D. E. Chipps, a local lumberman who wanted to stop Norris's vilification of the mayor. Norris put four shots from a revolver into Chipps, earning himself a new nickname: "the pistol-packing pastor from Ft. Worth."

Hankins recounted these vignettes because Norris was, perhaps oddly, ahead of his time and now appears a stereotypical (if overblown) Fundamentalist in many ways. Norris tried to make Southern Baptist preachers look like they were theological modernists—a divide and conquer straw-man technique that contemporary fundamentalistic authors still employ against other believers—and he saw his job as drawing a solid-border at the Mason-Dixon line that would keep theological modernism out of the South for good. Despite his efforts and his rhetoric, Norris could never succeed in winning the Southern Baptist Convention. The reason he failed is because the Convention, in the first half of the twentieth century, couldn't see the need for Norris's brand of Christianity. There really were not that many modernists around and so the Southern church felt itself comfortably 'at ease in Zion' and let Norris's radicalism fall by the wayside.

By the 1970s and 1980s however, Southern culture had changed visibly (ominously, if you will) and fundamentalistic Southern Baptists made another attempt at gaining control of the denomination. This time they succeeded in delivering America's largest Protestant denomination into fundamentalist hands. The charismatic preacher Adriane Rogers, the theologian Page Patterson, and the political strategist Paul Pressler rallied Southern Baptists behind the cause of Biblical inerrancy and sought to wrest control of the denomination's presidency. At stake in this contest was more than a mere title, but a wealth of denominational infrastructure (including six seminaries, the largest missionary structure in the world, etc.). Pressler understood that if fundamentalistic believers could gain control of the presidency for ten years straight then they could control all of the committees that appoint the boards of trustees for their institutions. They succeeded amazingly and since then, there has never been another moderate president of the Convention. Hankins emphasized that while this was certainly about politics and power, we need to understand that it was also equally about theology and religion.

This takeover of the Southern Baptists was part of a larger cultural movement that George Marsden calls 'fundamentalistic evangelicalism'. Sherman recounted the way that, in contrast to 19^th century evangelicalism, modern (or "New") Evangelicals trace the beginning of their movement to the 1940s when certain Fundamentalists sought to move beyond their sectarianism in order creatively re-engage culture. A group of visionary leaders including Harold Ockenga, Charles Fuller, Bernard Ramm, Carl F. Henry and Billy Graham called for a broad coalition of theological conservatives—a coalition that extended beyond classical Fundamentalism to include groups as diverse as the Pentecostals and the Mennonites, as well as conservatives from the mainline denominations (such the Anglicans John Stott and J. I. Packer). Despite its diversity, this coalition united around an ideal of positive evangelism (as seen in Billy Graham, for example). In 1942 the National Association of Evangelicals was founded, followed by Fuller Theological Seminary and the flagship publication Christianity Today. Initially, Fundamentalists and Evangelicals enjoyed close relations, but gradually the willingness of Evangelicals to cooperate with mainline denominations became too great for Fundamentalists to abide. When Billy Graham appealed to such mainline denominations for help in promoting his 1957 New York crusade, strict Fundamantalists broke all ties with Graham and the NAE. These ecclesiastical separatists believed that doctrinal purity alone guaranteed true fellowship, and so they needed to separate both from modernists and those who fellowshipped with modernists . After 1957, the term "Fundamentalist" is almost exclusively employed by those who felt the need to break fellowship with Evangelicals.

A new era began in the 1970s. This era, 'fundamentalistic evangelicalism,' continues today, and saw the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention as well as the rise of self-conscious fundamentalist influence on the American political landscape. Fundamentalistic evangelicalism marks a shift in fundamentalist strategies towards the kind of cultural engagement that Evangelicals embraced in the middle of the century. However, unlike their Evangelical predecessors, fundamentalistic evangelicals tend to build coalitions for political purposes rather than for the sake of fellowship or a kind of positive evangelistic motivation. This political motive accounts for the sense of cynicism one finds in fundamentalistic literature, since these alliances are political marriages of convenience and often little besides (for instance, in all seriousness, fundamentalists are likely to believe that their Catholic and Mormon allies in the 'religious right' are destined for eternal perdition). Nevertheless, such opportune alliances have met with stunning success at the ballot box, and together fundamentalistic evangelicals constitute what may be today's single largest voting block. As Barry Hankins noted, fundamentalistic evangelicals are to today's Republican party what labor was to Democrats in the middle in the 1950s.

Two later presentations profiled particular movements within late-twentieth century fundamentalistic evangelicalism. Susan Harding recounted her significant anthropological work with Jerry Falwell's community in Lynchburg, VA. Harding lived for about a year with Falwell's community in the 1980s. By this time, Falwell, one of the most prominent figures in fundamentalistic evangelicalism, was senior pastor of the mega-church Thomas Road Baptist Church, had already begun his media ministry The Old Time Gospel Hour,and had founded the Moral Majority movement, his own seminary and Liberty University. In the early 1980s, fundamentalistic evangelicals were beginning to suture together a born-again version of Christianity with certain political commitments and litmus tests. They ceased calling themselves fundamentalists in order to present a less sectarian face to the world but, as Harding notes, these accommodations to political efficacy were also changing what it meant to belong to the fundamentalist community. They were beginning to see themselves less as sectarians and more as cultural guardians with the power to actively shape history. Harding described the way the fundamentalist vision moved from one of separation to one of assimilation—they began to develop a 'voracious' appetite for every kind of cultural encounter and believed that they could meet, assimilate and reproduce a Christian version of every cultural artifact. Thus, fundamentalists developed Christian versions of even the most secular cultural phenomena, including Christian heavy-metal bands, beauty pageants, a creation-science version of a natural history museum, and even Christian sex manuals.

Harding found Falwell himself personally unimpressive and too polished to be interesting, but her encounters with others in Falwell's movement proved fascinating. For example, Harding described one encounter with Melvin Campbell, a pastor in Falwell's church. Harding went to interview him and asked Campbell how he became a pastor. Campbell began to 'witness' to Harding for the next hour and a half, sharing his testimony and explaining to Harding how she could be 'saved'. When she left the office, Harding found herself barely escaping an accident at a red light and heard a voice say inside her head, "What's God trying to tell me?" It wasn't however, an alien voice, but Harding's own voice that said those words. Harding was neither a Christian nor a fundamentalist, and found the experience disquieting. Had she turned her car around and gone back to pastor Campbell's office to pray, she would have found herself a member of the community. Rather than following this typical conversion narrative, however, Harding reflected on the experience as an anthropologist, neither dismissing it, nor embracing it, but preferring instead to remain in a liminal space of open but critical assessment. The historian Timothy Webber later explained to her that she had "come under conviction," a recognizable step in fundamentalist conversion stories. Harding described this experience as her entry in the language-world of her fundamentalist hosts. Reflecting on this experience, she noted how the boundary between belief and unbelief is much more permeable than we would like to suppose. By coming under conviction, Harding developed an unconscious belief—what she calls 'narrative belief'—though she refused to move to the next stage and embrace this narrative consciously.

This initiation into their language-world allowed Harding to understand that when a fundamentalist says, "God spoke to me," this is a true statement. Religion does not only function on a doctrinal level, or the level of practice and ritual, but especially on the level of language. What fundamentalistic evangelicals have discovered in recent decades is the power of their language to re-constitute the modern world along different lines, and thus they find themselves capable of assimilating and reproducing rock music, fashion, television game-shows and so forth along wholly fundamentalistic lines. She suggested that this tells us something about the world outside of the churches, as well. We can no longer presume that secularity is either self-evident or necessary. We seem to be moving quickly into a post-secular world, one in which religious narratives again play structuring roles in society. The still unanswered question is whether and what kind of religious narratives will achieve cultural dominance.

One narrative actively seeking to structure American society can be found in the Left Behind novels. This series of books, written by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, is one of the most notable events in the world of fundamentalistic evangelicalism over the last decade. Because Glenn Shuck, an expert in the Left Behind series, was unable to attend the conference due to an emergency, Jacob Sherman presented on LaHaye and Jenkins's novels and led a discussion of Shuck's work in this area. The Left Behind books present themselves as a kind of apocalyptic melding of conspiracy and science-fiction genres. They acknowledge that their stories are fiction but claim that they present highly plausible readings of the way that the certainties of biblical prophecy (so LaHaye and Jenkins believe) might unfold. The first novel, Left Behind, opens just after midnight on a transcontinental passenger airline half-way over the Atlantic. Suddenly, chaos erupts on the flight as passengers begin to notice empty seats where their companions once sat. It starts, for example, when an elderly woman in first class complains that she cannot find her husband; someone says he must be in the lavatory; but the reader knows what the passengers gradually realize: the other passengers are gone for good and a sudden sense of despair takes hold of those who are left behind.

What has happened, of course, is the rapture whereby, according to many fundamentalistic Christians, God will catch Christian believers up to be with the Lord, in order that they might avoid the coming seven years of tribulation during which the Anti-Christ will ascend to earthly power and God's judgments will be meted out upon the rebellious planet. Christian prophecy belief of this particular sort dates back to the 19^th century and the rise of dispensationalism, a form of prophecy belief pioneered by John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren and all but canonized later through Clarence Larkin's charts and the copious notes in the Scofield Reference Bible (one of the best-selling Bible versions in the English speaking world). This remarkably complex system of prophecy belief—technically known as pre-millennial, pre-tribulation dispensationalism—seeks to explain the way that God acts in history, especially the way the God will act in the end of history. In contrast to more optimistic versions of Christian eschatology, pre-millennial dispensationalism is a pessimistic system that believes that the world will continue to deteriorate throughout history until it reaches its nadir at the Last Day when Christ will finally return in judgment and history will be no more. In the aftermath of the Civil War, this system of prophecy belief became popular in the United States, especially in the South, and it institutionalized itself in centers such as Dallas Theological Seminary. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth was based on this system of belief and, by speculating about the relationship between dispensationalist theology and newspaper headlines, shot to the top of bestseller lists throughout the 1970s.

The genius of the Left Behind novels is to take the popularization of the dispensationalist intricacies one step further by clothing it in a page-turning narrative accessible even to those who find Hal Lindsey too complex. After the opening events of the rapture, the novels follow the adventures of a group of characters who find themselves left behind and must cope with life in the tribulation. A number of the story's main characters are on board transatlantic flight mentioned above, including Capt. Rayford Steele, pilot of the aforementioned airline , Hattie Durham, an attendant on the flight and the novel's requistite femme fatale, and Buck Williams, an Ivy League educated journalist. The plot basically unfolds as follows: after Buck succeeds in subduing a frightened passenger, the flight is rerouted to Chicago, which happens to be Rayfords's home. Back in Chicago, Rayford discovers that his wife and son disappeared but that his "free-thinking" daughter, Chloe, an undergrad at Stanford who has been delving into feminism, is still around. The Steeles retreat to New Hope Village Church where Rayford's raptured-wife had been spending a lot of time previous to the disappearances. Most of the members and staff at New Hope have vanished, but the characters do find associate pastor Bruce Barnes (whose faith was not as secure as he made it seem in sermons). Pastor Barnes, Rayford, Chloe and Buck Williams find a video at the church explaining that all of these events were foretold in Bible prophecy and laying out the way that they can still be saved. Through this video, they come to realize the error of their ways and accept Jesus into their hearts. Led initially by Pastor Barnes (then later by Rayford and in subsequent novels by the Messianic Jewish teacher, Tsion Ben Judah) they form the Tribulation Force and set about to save as many souls as possible before it's too late.

The antagonist of the novels is the Romanian businessman Nicolae Carpathia, a charismatic leader who rises to international power by promising to rebuild chaos stricken nations. Carpathia's strategy of unity and cooperation succeeds wildly and allows him to assume certain emergency powers granted by the United Nations. Having taken such unprecedented global power, Carpathia sets about unifying governments, religions, and markets based on a strange plan to create 10 regional kingdoms (all answerable to Carpathia himself), a single global currency, and a unified world religion (the Enigma Babylon One World Faith) led by Pontifex Maximus Peter II, formerly Archbishop Peter Matthews of Cincinnati. Moreover, Carpathia manages to reduce the world's weaponry by 90% and assembles the rest under the control of the Global Community (the re-named United Nations). Carpathia, the Anti-Christ, also consolidates all media outlets and officially begins the seven year tribulation period of God's judgment when he signs a seven year peace treaty with Israel (which he breaks after three and a half years). Needless to say, all of these developments correspond to dispensationalist interpretations of Bible prophecy and so both the Tribulation Force and the readers feel as if they have some sort of inside knowledge about the strange and frightening way in which history is unfolding (or rather, culminating).

Later novels in the series follow the spreading influence of the Tribulation Force as they set-up cell churches, make converts everywhere, and attempt to counter the Anti-Christ's increasingly nefarious designs. The Tribulation Force members, despite being locked in spiritual combat with the world-system, manage to secure some of the most influential jobs within the Anti-Christ's new world order; Buck Williams, for example, is hired as the editor-in-chief of Carpathia's flagship publication, The Global Community, while Rayford Steele becomes the pilot of Carpathia's exquisite 757 (the global equivalent of Air Force One). Central characters, such as pastor Barnes and nearly every techie in the book, regularly get killed off and replaced by other characters who are usually able to do their jobs more effectively than their unfortunate predecessors and thereby further the struggle for fate of souls left behind. In addition to their high-profile jobs, the members of the Tribulation Force display a staggering level of expertise especially in communications and weapons equipment, constantly foiling the Enemy's plans through "the miracle of technology."

That, in brief, is the novels' storyline. They are easy to read, and fast paced though hardly as compelling as some of the other popular thrillers on the market. Nevertheless, the novels have sold a staggering 50+ million copies, and while the series finished after twelve books, they are now at work on prequels. Spin-offs also abound, including a children's version of the series, comic books, an unauthorized movie (starring Kirk Cameron) and now an unauthorized, exceedingly violent Left Behind video game. The popularity of the novels is so great, and their spiritual benefits are believed to be so profound, that many fundamentalistic churches have begun giving non-Christians copies of Left Behind alongside the Bible as an evangelistic tool.

Glenn Shuck argues that the novels can read as fundamentally about two related concepts: rhetoric and power. By rhetoric, Shuck means persuasive speech and not just empty words. LaHaye and Jenkins employ a relatively sophisticated and occasionally subtle participative strategy to inform readers about what it means to be a fundamentalistic evangelical prophecy believer. The narrative allows the authors to either reinforce or introduce a particular worldview (fundamentalistic prophecy belief) to their readers in a holistic and gradual manner. By following the narrative and identifying with the characters, the reader is invited into the imaginal structures that constitute fundamentalistic prophecy belief, into what Susan Harding might call the language-world of dispensationalism. In order to make this initiation more powerful, the authors seek to induce a sense of existential and spiritual crisis in their readership—a crisis designed to strengthen or inaugurate belief in the fundamentalist prophetic worldview. All of this intends to show the reader that while cultural elites believe they have progressed beyond fundamentalism and so have left the fundamentalists behind, the truth to the contrary is that it is the cultured elites—the progressives, the liberal academics, and the so-called cultural architects—who will find themselves genuinely left behind. The reader is invited to join the fundamentalist community of prophecy believers and so identify with the community that is the true (if not yet recognized) center of history.

Beyond rhetoric, the novels are also about power. At the most obvious level, the novels' political concerns dovetail nicely with the concerns of the Religious Right, but there is more going on in these fictions than just conservative propaganda. The authors carefully navigate two somewhat competing political agendas. On the one hand, they have to do justice to the dispensationalist God's inscrutable concern for public policy and international affairs. Dispensationalist prophecy belief's notoriously complex system evolved in the 19^th century and has been regularly updated in accordance with international developments throughout the twentieth. Conforming to its strictures requires that the authors faithfully include various doctrines about the return of Israel to the Holy Land, the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, a series of international conflicts between the ominous nations Gog and Magog, monetary systems connected with the mark of the Beast, and so forth. These seemingly arbitrary political events are neither clearly nor closely linked to traditional Christian concerns regarding evangelism, Christ's resurrection victory over sin and death, or the call to love one's neighbor. On the other hand, the authors also advance a political agenda that attempts to make the world safe for evangelism and Christian discipleship. Shuck notes that the tension between these two agendas runs throughout the series and, in fact, grows more extreme as the series progresses to the point that the final books seemingly sacrifice evangelism in favor of sheer determinism. This, he says, reflects a tension within dispensationalism itself, a tension between genuine Christian responsibility, and a kind of nihilistic despair over the world's inevitably pessimistic final state. Fundamentalistic engagements in the political realm are often frightening because one suspects that Christian principles, which can at least be subject to a political and democratic process, are always in danger of yielding to this irrational determinism that chooses policies for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Indeed, Shuck notes, there have been occasions in our country when a certain political agenda arbitrarily coincided with irrational prophecy beliefs and so found a groundswell of popular support for otherwise indefensible political programs (e.g., today, such a prophetic groundswell underwrites a number of our policies with regard to states in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

The tensions between prophecy belief and political action can tell us a lot about the place of contemporary fundamentalism in American society. LaHaye and Jenkins wrestle with two agendas throughout the novels, moving back and forth from a justification of why prophecy believing evangelicals ought to worry about the here and now when the rapture is imminent, to a more thoroughgoing attempt to remake the world as they believe it ought to be. The novels, says Shuck, are not so much about a future world, as they are re-presentations of contemporary concerns that help believers adjust to the rapidly changing world around them. The fictions pretend to be about the tribulation but they are really narratives about how fundamentalistic evangelicals ought to behave here and now in the period that Tim LaHaye elsewhere calls "the tribulation before the tribulation." While such political activism on the part of fundamentalists often causes others a fair amount of concern, Shuck argues that this turn towards social, cultural and political engagement is precisely what will help conservative evangelicalism ultimately move beyond fundamentalism. Engagement requires compromise, dialogue, and working with the needs of others, and serves over time to temper extremism and pacify violence.

Towards a Diagnosis of Fundamentalism

Throughout the conference, participants attempted to formulate creative strategies to encourage fundamentalistic movements away from rhetorically violent and politically oppressive stances towards a more healing and beneficent engagement with the culture. For the most part, these strategies were conceived of as ways to recall fundamentalists to the heritage of Jesus, whom Montville regularly held up as the friend of the widows and the orphans. There is a basic stance of compassion within Christianity and this needs to resume a place of centrality within the church. But how did Christianity lose this basic gospel commitment not only to the salvation of individuals but also to social justice (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for widows and orphans, etc.)? In the same way that knowing symptoms is one thing, and knowing the reason behinds those symptoms is another, it is not enough simply to know what fundamentalism is, because we also need to know what causes it. In order to get at some of the causes, a number of presentations delved back to the 19^th century where they discovered the roots of certain wounds and behaviors that continue today.

Joe Montville found one significant clue to fundamentalist social policies in the groundbreaking work of Gordon Bigelow. Bigelow, who himself wanted to attend the conference but was unable to be with us due to a sudden emergency, has argued in Harpers Magazine and elsewhere that conservative evangelicals provided intellectual justification and populist support for the dismantling of social programs and charities (in particular, the dismantling of an effective parish-based system of poverty relief) during the end of the 18^th and into the 19^th century. In so doing, evangelicals provided a defense for (i.e., an apologetics of) a radically amoral vision of the free-market. It is therefore, no anomaly that evangelicals provided significant support for Thatcherite and Reaganesque economic endeavors in the 1980s, nor again that it is evangelicals who secured the elections of George W. Bush.

Bigelow tells the story of political-economy (the study of wealth) during the early decades of industrialization. Early political-economy theorists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo sought to explain the unprecedented changes taking place to both landscape and the market due to the breakneck pace of industrialization, especially in Britain. Neither Smith nor Ricardo however, justified the market as a good end in and of itself. Adam Smith, for example, believed that acquisitiveness was not a virtue, but that it accidentally enriched the whole of society by distributing wealth that might otherwise simply have been hoarded (thus the pursuit of "baubles and trinkets" by the rich benefited their servants, goldsmiths, merchants, etc.). Ricardo, for his part, believed that market necessarily increased class conflict and therefore spelled the demise of pastoral harmony. Evangelical merchants, enjoying the benefits of market-driven wealth, chaffed against the pessimism in Smith and Ricardo's political-economies. These believers proposed a radically different account of the market, one that became an apology for the market itself and the present economic order. These evangelicals argued that the free market was a state of nature (or, rather, creation), perfectly designed by God to both produce wealth and to form the human soul. The market, they argued, rewarded righteous endeavors with wealth and brought about poverty in order to prick the conscience of sinners. Poverty thus became the means by which God converted unrepentant souls and so the alleviation of poverty—far from being a Christian duty—would only serve to undermine the efforts of God himself! The squalor and toil of industrial England (think here of your preferred Dickens novel) was not something to be rectified but a punishment for sin and a spur towards conversion. In distorted Calvinist fashion, an omnipotent God bestowed wealth, like salvation, upon those whom he favored. Greed thus began to look like virtue, and the stockbroker, whom Adam Smith regarded with suspicion, was envisioned as a spiritual hero.

There is far more to Bigelow's analysis than Montville had time to recount, but even so Montville succeeded in showing one of the ways that Christians managed to lose the Jesus of conscience, the Jesus who was always the friend of the poor and (in Montville's words) "the original bleeding heart liberal." ^[5] Bigelow's work also suggests the way that fundamentalism continues to influence our national policies and the global economy. When we identify the market with the will of God, and imagine that is somehow a benevolent force for the alleviation of suffering, we are borrowing from 19^th century evangelical theologies. Bigelow writes:

[When] Tom DeLay or Michael Powell mentions "the market," he is referring to this imagined place, where equilibrium rules, consumers get what they want, and the fairest outcomes occur spontaneously. U.S. policy debate, both in Congress and in the press, proceeds today as if the neoclassical theory of the free market were incontrovertible, endorsed by science and ordained by God. But markets are not spontaneous features of nature; they are creations of human civilization.

Ever since the 2004 exit polls, the media has become acutely aware of what it only tangentially recognized before: the key role fundamentalistic Christians and evangelicals play in shaping America's political landscape. Bigelow's work however, goes beyond recognizing the power of this conservative voting block, and asks us to pay attention to a more subtle but also more pervasive fundamentalist influence: the influence of fundamentalism not on any single election but on the very way we imagine the state, the economy, and society itself.

Another theory of what accounts for especially Southern evangelical and fundamentalist militancy draws our attention to the anger at three hundred years of Northern (especially New Englander) insult and disdain toward everything Southern. Recall Georgia Senator Zell Miller's sulfurous tirade against the Democratic Party's Northern elites at the 2004 Republican Convention. Pamela Creed and Joseph Montville argued persuasively that a good deal of Southern fundamentalist militancy is not theological at all but rather stems from a secular, living memory of narcissistic insult and the tragic, unmourned losses of the Civil War.

Creed began by reminding the conference of the basic conflict-resolution principle that living with dignity and respect is an essential human need. Wounds form when groups are denied this dignity and respect and such wounds persist across generations. Although the dominant issues and hate-objects may change over time, long-standing estrangements are often the manifestation of a hidden but persistent pattern of humiliation. Creed explained that if we can learn why such hatreds exist then we have a chance of healing them and alleviating the wounds. With such principles in mind, Creed directed participants to consider the role that North-South conflicts have played in aggravating fundamentalist militancy.

There is, she stated, a long history of white-Southern alienation t

Attachment: