On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Chuck0 wrote:
> I've been told that modern American fundamentalism got its start during
> the West Virginia textbook wars of the early 1970s.
I've always been told things like that too -- that it was something recent in the 60s and 70s: reaction against the sixties, abortion, etc. That's what was so interesting about this history. It shows clearly that that's not true. The Scopes trial set it back, and other more recent events have increased its influence. But the entire imaginaire that defines present day protestant fundamentalism has been remarkably stable for almost a century. (Contra Carroll, I'm using the term "fundamentalism" to refer to this current of politicized religion that maps end times onto world politics and which coined that term in the US in the 1920s. There are of course a hundred other ways it could be used.)
Identified thus, the core beliefs of US Protestant fundamentalism have not changed for a century. What has changed periodically is the creation of a secular fundamentalist complement and the relation between the two. The first secular fundamentalist complement was the anti-communism of the cold war, aka "The Liberal Faith" (which was the title of one of its founding tracts, by Arthur Schlessinger).
Secular fundamentalists conceive of international politics as a war against a Totfiend. Secular fundamentalists aren't apocalpytic -- they don't think the end of the world would be a good thing. They simply think think world dominance is good, is necessary, is attainable, and can be reached by force. Secular and Protestant fundamentalism are thus very different worldviews. But the two prop each other up.
What they left needs is an alternative internationalist worldview that isn't fundamentalist in the sense that it isn't based on the concept of the Enemy. But internationalism of that sort hasn't been the dominant left world view since before WWII. The League of Nations and the UN so completely betrayed our faith that we lost it. But without a muscular new vision in that direction, we've completely ceded the debate.
And by a muscular new vision I don't mean the cruise missile liberalism that paved the way for the neocons. I mean a way of thinking that seeks to avoid demonization -- the creation of Enemies w/ whom by definition you cannot negotiate -- on principle. For which you need an alternative set of principles. And an alternative far reaching view of how the international order ought to be fundamentally changed and how we ought to get there.
Michael