How the Religious Right Won: Birth of the Fundamentalists, In Our Modern Times

Last updated on: January 5, 2014 at 1:23 pm by Guest Contributor

How the Religious Right Won: Birth of the Fundamentalists, In Our Modern Times 2014-01-05T13:23:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Fundamentalism is a paradox. Its partisans—of any faith—call for the return to an imagined arcadia in which God’s voice boomed plainly from scripture. Yet as a historical phenomenon, fundamentalism is wholly modern. It is a set of reactions against the aftershocks of the Enlightenment and the evolution of global capitalism: the breach between faith and reason, the rise of the secular public square, and the collapse of traditional social hierarchies and ways of life. Creatures of modernity, fundamentalists have happily availed themselves of modern technology. Fundamentalists ranging from separatist Baptist preachers to Al Qaeda propagandists have demonstrated a genius for employing the latest media and political (or military) weaponry to spread their message and accomplish their aims. To fundamentalists, history, too, is a technology: a trove of data to be strategically deployed.

Nowhere have the uses of history been clearer than in the clashes between conservative and progressive evangelicals for control of their denominations throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the Southern Baptist Convention, many conservatives would have objected to the “fundamentalist” label as a Yankee epithet, a synonym for a barefoot bumpkin sorely lacking in southern grace. But if their self-perception was not fundamentalist, many of their goals and tactics were. The decisive battles over the meaning and role of the Bible in modern society did not, primarily, unfold in the form of dueling proof texts or Sunday pulpit ripostes, but in skirmishes for control of the machinery of intellectual authority: seminaries, missions boards, denominational presses, and authorized church history. The personal magnetism of gurus was not sufficient to stanch the secularist tide. Just as thousands of volunteers at Billy Graham’s crusades worked to settle new converts into local churches before their enthusiasm could evaporate, conservative activists knew that the fervor wandering sages left in their wake would fizzle unless channeled into institutions and sustained by an infrastructure built to teach and train future generations.

Southern Baptist conservatives considered themselves the “silent majority” in their denomination. They were confident in a groundswell of support if they could mobilize laypeople for the cause. In 1969 Paul Pressler, a seventh-generation Texas Baptist, graduate of Princeton, and prominent Houston lawyer, complained to an ally, M. O. Owens: “We are in the majority but losing because we have not spent the time necessary to organize and assert ourselves. . . . With cohesive action by trained individuals who are committed to Biblical truth, we could move into influencing the Sunday School Board in the publication of their materials, in helping select editors for our state Baptist papers, and generally provide the type of sound Christian leadership which we should have in every phase of the Southern Baptist Convention and in our state and local conventions and associations.” While Pressler mobilized Baptists in Houston around the cause of Christian education, Owens was organizing the Fellowship of Conservative Baptists in his home state of North Carolina.

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