Antifundamentalism in Modern America by David Harrington Watt (review)

By 1985 the idea of "global fundamentalism" had become so prevalent that the Library of Congress gave it its own classification number, BL 238 (p. 141). Categories are useful analytical tools, but their extension into new areas different from what their inventors intended can raise problems. So it was, David Harrington Watt argues in this fine volume, with the category of fundamentalism. The term fundamentalist originally described certain early-twentieth-century American Protestant opponents of theological liberalism, but by the 1980s it was widely applied to extremists such as Islamic terrorists. Islam was not to blame for terrorism; its distortion by "Islamic fundamentalists" was (p. 3). Indeed, any major religion stood in danger of being skewed into violence by a fundamentalist attitude. But Watt finds this catchall notion of global fundamentalism, the embrace of which he labels antifundamentalism, to be conceptually flawed, disingenuous, and "tendentious" (p. 69). He traces the history of antifundamentalist thinking, familiarizing readers with a long list of influential writers and political moments that stretched the concept of fundamentalism to global dimensions and, in the process, explained away the religious particularity that fundamentalists themselves saw as, well, fundamental.

In the 1920s Protestant liberal polemicists like Harry Emerson Fosdick proposed a stark binary, "dividing the world into people who were backward, intolerant, regressive, and unenlightened (fundamentalists) and people who were modern, tolerant, progressive, and enlightened (nonfundamentalists)" (pp. xiii–xiv). In the next two decades, H. Richard Niebuhr and Talcott Parsons took up the binary "as though it were simply a straightforward description of social reality" (p. xiv). From that point forward, Watt finds antifundamentalists striking an objectivist pose while pushing their normative agenda of modernity and secularization. Antifundamentalism is often "polemic masquerading as something else" (p. 26). Watt turns the etic gaze on the antifundamentalists themselves, treating them as interesting specimens of their historical situation. He even labels some of them "Enlightenment rationalist fundamentalist[s]" because their view of the arrow of history (with themselves on the right side of history) rested on their belief in "a set of truths that are eternal, universal, and incontrovertibly true" (pp. 45, 29). Along these lines, Watt finds support in some non-Western critics of Enlightenment rationality, especially Edward W. Said. So while theorists of global fundamentalism find "certain 'family resemblances'" between so-called fundamentalists from various religions because all experience difficulties in "'adjusting to modernity,'" Watt and his anti-Orientalist allies find that "postmodernists and fundamentalists have far more in common than is generally recognized" (pp. 34, 45, 39).

The most pivotal figure in this history is Talcott Parsons, for whom "fundamentalism and Nazism were both examples of social pathology rooted in the inability of some human beings to accept the changes that rationalization brings" (p. 95). Sounding a political alarm against fundamentalism, Parsons emptied the concept of particular religious beliefs, yielding a globally applicable "general theory of fundamentalism" (p. 102). Parsons's work decisively influenced Martin E. Marty, who, with R. Scott Appleby, headed the massive and important Fundamentalism Project (1987–1995) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other players include Richard Hofstadter, whose work represents "the nadir of the historical profession's understanding of fundamentalism," and Stanley Kramer, whose film Inherit the Wind (1960) served as a "catechism" of antifundamentalism for the general public (pp. 118, 113). But Watt treats many, many more. Oddly, H. L. Mencken is largely absent; more or less sympathetic interpreters are present, like Ernest R. Sandeen, James Davison Hunter, and even Carl F. H. Henry, leader of midcentury neoevangelicals. Watt strives for even handedness even as he warns against the pitfalls in the notion of global fundamentalism. Antifundamentalism in Modern America is a careful and timely book that is worth thoughtfully reading.