Antifundamentalism in Modern America

In the third line of Antifundamentalism in Modern America, David Harrington Watt asks, “what can we do to keep fundamentalists from obstructing human progress?” (ix). Not a lot, it turns out, because as Watt masterfully demonstrates, we don’t really know what fundamentalism is, and even if we did, it may not be impeding human progress at all. Watt has written a brilliant book that moves across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first to show how the term fundamentalism came be used, first among a distinct set of Protestants in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and then by scholars and critics ever since. Watt’s goal is not to tell the history of fundamentalism proper, but to track how the term evolved and developed such negative connotations. In the process, he shows how scholars and journalists appropriated the term and then began applying it to a broad variety of religious movements, not only within Christianity, but within Islam and Buddhism as well. “The story of how fundamentalism came to be seen as a global menace,” Watt explains, “rather than simply an American one—is at the heart of this book” (xv). Watt opens Antifundamentalism by laying out four arguments. First, he wants readers to understand that the most influential analyses of fundamentalism over the last fifty years were created by people who had done little actual research on fundamentalists or their beliefs and practices. Second, he explains, the term fundamentalism is often used pejoratively by writers to make moral claims, and especially to argue that right-thinking humans accept “universal truths” revealed in the European Enlightenment, while fundamentalists reject those truths. Third, Watt continues, using the term fundamentalist makes good sense when discussing the self-identified fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s. But that’s it. “It does not make much sense at all,” he continues, to use the concept of fundamentalism “to analyze the beliefs and practices of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.” Finally, he notes, not all the men and women organizing and writing against the “fundamentalist threat” are good, and not all those who get labeled fundamentalists are “thoroughly evil” (xvii).

Christianity · Environmental ethics · Fundamentalism · Islam · Islamic fundamentalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Theology · Variety (cybernetics) · Watt · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

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