Antifundamentalism in Modern America by David Harrington Watt (review)

In his most recent book, David Harrington Watt argues that academics in the United States have often used the term fundamentalism to separate modern, enlightened people from others deemed backward, reactionary, and at least potentially dangerous. In his view, the term usually operates as a self-serving binary for those who wield it. This problem becomes most pernicious when American liberals use "global fundamentalism" to fuse together conservative religious movements around the world that are actually very different from one another. Watt also makes the important point that the term fundamentalism is either rejected by, or makes little sense to, most of the people to whom it is ascribed. He maintains that the only justifiable use of the term is as a name for Americans in the 1920s and 30s who explicitly called for a return to Christian "fundamentals," and for the tiny minority of conservative Protestants today who embrace the term "fundamentalist" to link their Christianity to the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century.

In explaining how global fundamentalism came to be accepted as factual reality, Watt lays a good deal of blame on the "Fundamentalism Project," co-directed by the renowned historian of American religion, Martin Marty, and his accomplished student R. Scott Appleby. As a result of numerous, often lengthy publications produced by the Project in the early 1990s, global fundamentalism became a fixture, not only in the academic study of religion, but also in US foreign policy and in American journalism. Scholars with expertise in various religious movements swept up under this rubric pushed back against this trend, warning against the inaccuracy and polemical implications of the term global fundamentalism. Watt compares the arguments of scholars who continue to defend the term against the arguments of skeptics. He finds the skeptics far more convincing.

In his narration of the history of the term fundamentalism, Watts begins with conservative Protestants who resisted the encroachment of liberalizing trends in biblical interpretation in the 1920s. In their efforts to wrest control of Protestant denominations and to put a stop to the teaching of evolution in public schools, some of these conservatives embraced the term as a way to separate themselves from others. Their fundamentalist movement enjoyed some growth during the 1930s, but that growth was overshadowed by the far more powerful influence of what Watt calls anti-fundamentalism. In some of the most interesting and original sections of the book, Watt looks at the definition of fundamentalism advanced by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1940s, and traces the reception of Parsons's understanding of fundamentalism as a fearful reaction against modern rationality. Eventually, Watt argues, Parsons's definition found a disciple in Martin Marty.

In the interim between Parsons and Marty, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Hofstadter added fuel to the anti-fundamentalist fire when he associated fundamentalism with the crude politics of McCarthyism. Building on Hofstader after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, Marty and others saw parallels between the Ayatollah Khomeini and Protestant fundamentalists at home. The drumbeat of anti-fundamentalism became louder in the period between 1989 and 1995, which Watt characterizes as "a sort of golden age for the scholarly study of fundamentalism" (143). In his discussion of this study more recently, Watt traces the growing awareness among scholars of religion that the term fundamentalism is a defective category. He concludes with a final assessment, "the category of global fundamentalism is rotten to its core" (171).

Watt is methodical and fair-minded in laying out the problems involved in usage of the word fundamentalism and the history of its usage. But his argument is not entirely convincing. Though his book is instructive and important as a caution against oversimplified categories of interpretation, his primary focus on a particular word, or in the case of global fundamentalism, on two words, limits its significance. Surely, it would not be out of bounds to observe that resistance to civil rights for women and minorities flourishes in many parts of...