National polls show that approximately 50 million adult
Americans are born-again Christians. Yet most Americans see their
culture as secular, and the United States is viewed around the
world as a secular nation. Further, intellectuals and journalists
often portray born-again Christians, despite their numbers, as
outsiders who endanger public life. But is American culture really
so neatly split between the religious and the secular? Is America
as "modern" and is born-again Christian religious belief as
"pre-modern" as many think?
In the 1980s, born-again Christians burst into the political
arena with stunning force. Gone was the image of "old-fashioned"
fundamentalism and its anti-worldly, separatist philosophy. Under
the leadership of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and allied preachers,
millions broke taboos in place since the Scopes trial constraining
their interaction with the public world. They claimed new cultural
territory and refashioned themselves in the public arena. Here was
a dynamic body of activists with an evangelical vision of social
justice, organized under the rubric of the "Moral Majority."
Susan Harding, a cultural anthropologist, set out in the 1980s
to understand the significance of this new cultural movement. The
result, this long-awaited book, presents the most original and
thorough examination of Christian fundamentalism to date. Falwell
and his co-pastors were the pivotal figures in the movement. It is
on them that Harding focuses, and, in particular, their use of the
Bible's language. She argues that this language is the medium
through which born-again Christians, individual and collective,
come to understand themselves as Christians. And it is inside this
language that much of the born-again movement took place. Preachers
like Falwell command a Bible-based poetics of great complexity,
variety, creativity, and force, and, with it, attempt to mold their
churches into living testaments of the Bible. Harding focuses on
the words--sermons, speeches, books, audiotapes, and television
broadcasts--of individual preachers, particularly Falwell, as they
rewrote their Bible-based tradition to include, rather than
exclude, intense worldly engagement. As a result of these efforts,
born-again Christians recast themselves as a people not separated
from but engaged in making history. "The Book of Jerry Falwell" is
a fascinating work of cultural analysis, a rare account that takes
fundamentalist Christianity on its own terms and deepens our
understanding of both religion and the modern world.
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