Fundamentalists: Getting It Right

Reviewing the book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan, NYTimes columnist David Brooks takes on the elitist perception of America’s evangelicals (covered earlier here):

[I]f I hadn’t been reviewing this book, I wouldn’t have finished it. I have a rule, which has never failed me, that when a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

Conservative Christians are fully assimilated into commercial American life and, in a variety of different ways, critical of it. They get divorced as much as anybody else, if not more. They are as consumed by doubts and aware of their weaknesses as anybody else, if not more. They generally share — along with the pope — the belief that reason must be used to nurture faith.

And yet in his description of “fundamentalists,” Sullivan captures none of this complexity. His book would have benefited from more reporting — or any. He snips out egregious quotations of various conservative activists from The Nation, or from books critical of the religious right, and he leaves the impression that these quotes represent reality. He assumes that whatever is most offensive to the secular ear is most authentic to religious conservatism.

If he had spent more time with the people he describes as fundamentalists, he would have found that this category has no meaning. Many people disagree with him (and me) about gay marriage. Many people do believe that truth is revealed, and that one must work one’s way toward it. And yet to divide the world between fundamentalists and autonomous free thinkers is to create a dichotomy that distorts more than it reveals.

. . . the United States was. . . founded . . . by the assertion of a universal truth — that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed. In many cases, the people making those calls were religious leaders. From Jonathan Edwards to the abolitionists to the civil rights leaders to the people fighting AIDS and genocide in Africa today, religiously motivated people have been active in public life. They have been, in their certainty and their willingness to apply divine truths, fundamentalists — if we want to use Sullivan’s categories. You take those people out of American politics and you don’t have a country left.

. . . if American conservatives give up their optimism and their universal creed, they will once again be a small sect at the fringes of political life.