THE RIGHT BOOKS

According to Pastor Richard John Neuhaus, active Fundamentalists, as “typical Americans,” hate to be feared and want badly to be loved. It occurs to me that these people, hoping to strike warmth in their listeners’ hearts, might have invented some other means than resorting to the self-ascriptive tag “moral,” which places them in the imprudent (and unlovable) category of self-described “beauties” and “geniuses.” On the other hand, the Fundamentalists’ and Evangelicals’ styles, while not (to my mind anyway) appealing, are distinctively their own, and probably no more susceptible of alteration than George Bush’s grin or Jack Kemp’s hair-do. As to the fear they inspire: Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1030 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005; $23.95 cloth; $12.95 paper), edited by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, is implicitly devoted to assuaging that response.

Not only, we are convincingly shown, are these latter-day pietistic movements nothing new in American history (being instead the inheritors of the Evangelical Protestantism that was this country’s mainstream religion for most of the nineteenth century), they do not portend the formation of a theocratic state, or even mass conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity —though they almost certainly represent, as Martin Marty has put it, the emergence of a cognitive minority as a sociocultural majority. “On the map of American religion,” Neuhaus writes, “politicized Fundamentalism is a minority phenomenon. This minority, however, has kicked a tripwire alerting us to the much larger reality of unsecular America. As in 1962 Michael Harrington alerted public opinion to . . . ‘the Other America,’ so the Religious Right has thrown open the closet door to expose the beliefs, fears, and aspirations shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans of almost every description.”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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According to Pastor Richard John Neuhaus, active Fundamentalists, as “typical Americans,” hate to be feared and want badly to be loved. It occurs to me that these people, hoping to strike warmth in their listeners’ hearts, might have invented some other means than resorting to the self-ascriptive tag “moral,” which places them in the imprudent (and unlovable) category of self-described “beauties” and “geniuses.” On the other hand, the Fundamentalists’ and Evangelicals’ styles, while not (to my mind anyway) appealing, are distinctively their own, and probably no more susceptible of alteration than George Bush’s grin or Jack Kemp’s hair-do. As to the fear they inspire: Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1030 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005; $23.95 cloth; $12.95 paper), edited by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, is implicitly devoted to assuaging that response.

Not only, we are convincingly shown, are these latter-day pietistic movements nothing new in American history (being instead the inheritors of the Evangelical Protestantism that was this country’s mainstream religion for most of the nineteenth century), they do not portend the formation of a theocratic state, or even mass conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity —though they almost certainly represent, as Martin Marty has put it, the emergence of a cognitive minority as a sociocultural majority. “On the map of American religion,” Neuhaus writes, “politicized Fundamentalism is a minority phenomenon. This minority, however, has kicked a tripwire alerting us to the much larger reality of unsecular America. As in 1962 Michael Harrington alerted public opinion to . . . ‘the Other America,’ so the Religious Right has thrown open the closet door to expose the beliefs, fears, and aspirations shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans of almost every description.”