Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Read Free Book Online Page B

passing away.
    Derided as fundamentalists, conservative Protestants were humiliated by the outcome of the Scopes trial, which marked the beginning of their exile from American public life. Leaving their denominations, they founded new organizations. They disavowed social reform, as they did all modern forms of sociability. The fundamentalist counterculture was typified by Bob Jones University, founded in 1927. The founder, Bob Jones, was no intellectual, but an evangelist who wanted a “safe” school, that taught liberal arts alongside “commonsense Christianity”—at least one Bible course a semester, compulsory chapel attendance, strict social rules that banned interracial dating on campus, and a code of conduct that defined disobedience and disloyalty as “unpardonable sins.” Bob Jones University decided not to seek academic accreditation, thereby retaining tighter control over admissions, curriculum, and library resources. By their actions, if not by admission, they seemed to accept the secular caricature of religious conservatives as fundamentalists stuck in time, as premodern people unfit for modern cultural and political life in a secular America.
    It took three decades for religious conservatives to return to public life, and that return happened in two separate but connected waves. The first wave followed the Second World War and was spearheaded by “evangelicals” who renounced the separatism championed by fundamentalists, arguing that “the duty of saving souls in this rotten civilization demanded some degree of cooperation with other Christians, whatever their beliefs.” The founding act of the evangelical movement was the formation in 1942 of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), a public lobby on apar with the National Council of Churches, which was affiliated with the Liberal World Council of Churches. With the arrival of television in the 1950s, young “televangelists” such as Billy Graham, Rex Humbard, and Oral Roberts replaced old traveling revivalist preachers and formed their own broadcasting empires and publishing houses. Televangelists started the national “prayer breakfast movement” that “rapidly gathered members of Congress and preachers, and evangelist Billy Graham became the spiritual counselor of choice for the post-war generation of U.S. presidents.”
    The second wave came on the heels of Roe v. Wade , the 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed abortion as a woman’s right, which religious conservatives saw as a historic defeat. Taking a cue from southern black churches, which had dramatically and successfully entered public life at the helm of the civil-rights movement, fundamentalists resolved to shed the mainstream moderation of evangelicals for an equally bold leadership. Speaking on the “Nebraska tragedy” at a 1982 conference, Jerry Falwell challenged the new Christian right to breach the line of separation between religion and politics and to muster the “kind of backbone to stand up for their freedom that Civil Rights people had.”
    Their quarantine had lasted nearly half a century. The return of “fundamentalism” to American public life was unabashedly political and was at first associated with mass mobilization of white Protestant Christians. The movement’s most visible leaders were national televangelists—Jerry Falwell, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker—who were also key in forming organizations with an explicitly political agenda: the Moral Majority, the Religious Round-table, and Christian Voice. When Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, he “rode piggyback on networks of fundamentalist Baptist churches.” He called on Christians to change history.The idea that “religion and politics don’t mix,” he said, “was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” As conservative Protestants rushed into the Moral Majority, they “tore up a tacit contract with modern America” not to mix Bible-believing