Toto

The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics by Susan Friend Harding

This is a book by an academic anthropologist who studied Evangelicals the same way anthropologists have studied Voudun trance dancers or Siberan shamans - by immersing herself nonjudgmentally in the alien culture and observing the rituals from the inside. It will not change anyone's opinion of Evangelicals or the Religious Right, but it will provide more insight into the political and social structure behind their recent successes.

The author appears very simpathetic to Evangelicals on a human level - one of the Evanglical reviewers on Amazon praises the book, and compares the prejudice against Evangelicals to anti-Semitism before World War II (although I wonder if he got all of the meaning.) She does, however, slip out of that mode long enough to let us know that she has not been taken in completely.

Harding uses postmodern ideas and language without sounding like a bizarre academic. She also describes the history of Falwell's enterprizes, starting with his family background "steeped in a fundamentalist culture that privileged only two types of Christian masculinity: the preacher and the businessman." It was Falwell's action in adapting modern business techniques to his evangelican enterprizes that has made him so formidable politically.

Harding describes in detail how Falwell took the primarily southern culture of Fundamentalism, which had withdrawn from modernity, and persuaded his church members to adapt to the modern world without completely adopting modern values.

I recommend this book highly, and may post more about it later.

Edited to fix URL