Fundamentalism As Discourse
Oct. 22nd, 2005 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ziasudraThe Book of Jerry Falwell
Susan Friend Harding, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Definitions:
fundamentalism (small "f"): subset of self-declared fundamentalists.
Fundamentalism (big "F"): general; bible-believing Protestants, whether they self-identify as fundamentalists or not.
"For years, I stood at the crossroads that Campbell and others fashioned for me, in between being lost and being saved, listening.... This is... where I invite you to go as you read this book." (pp. xi-xii)
"I focus primarily on preacherly discourse because preachers command all the Bible-based poetic, rhetorical, and narrative skills which make their vernacular generative." (p. xii)
p. xi – “As a result, skeptics are blind, or deaf, to the Bible’s generativity. Falwell’s people read him, and the Bible, very differently—harmonizing contradictions and infelicities according to interpretive conventions that presume, and thus reveal, God’s design. Their Bible, their preacher, is thus constantly creating new truth.”
p. 4 – “mixed elements” from Christianity and the world, e.g., Scaremare. Not supposed to according to strict fundamentalism?
p. 10 – “The agenda [of Jerry Falwell and his ministries] was to convert his people from ‘fundamentalists,’ whose only mission in American society was evangelism, into ‘conservative Christians,’ who would fight worldly battles and who sought worldly power and influence in the name of ‘Christian values.’”
p. 12 – Shift in speech: “Indeed, individuals in communities bound by intense practices of speech mimesis may undergo in the space of a few years profound changes of collective speech that transform who they are, their social boundaries, and their worldly relations. Preachers, who are the nodes, the transformers, in the religious knowledge networks that articulate fundamentalist communities, are thus pivotal figures in moments of dramatic transformation.”
p. 18 – “Together, the 1980s movements rearranged the boundary between fundamentalism and postwar evangelism, fashioning a new constituency composed of newly engaged fundamentalists under leaders such as Falwell and conservative evangelicals who were discontented with their more irenic leaders.”
p. 20 – On the Moral Majority, during the 1980s: “In two short words, Falwell marked the majority status of theological conservatives among Protestants, elided it with majority status among all Americans, established himself as that majority’s apparent leader, aggressively ‘mixed’ religion and politics, and claimed the right to reintegrate culturally disenfranchised fundamentalists into national public life.”
p. 24 – “Jerry Falwell was no Martin Luther King, Jr., but he was the major cobbler and distributor of the hybrid religious and political rhetorics that enabled hitherto unallied and inactive white conservative Protestants to see themselves as a singular political and moral force.”
p. 27 – “Falwell’s speech is not like secular speech. He inhabits a world generated by Bible-based stories and, as a ‘man of God,’ his speech partakes of the generative quality of the Bible itself. He incessantly frames his life, if only lightly, in biblical terms, and his faithful followers read him as they read the Bible—not as already true, but as always coming true.”
~ What Harding is arguing for here is to read Falwell’s speeches and stories as its very own discourse. Scrutinizing only the (inconsistent?) facts of Falwell’s words is, to Harding, completely missing the point. Falwell’s words were received differently by those who listened to him. If we were to understand the fundamental discourse, we must tune ourselves to interpret Falwell’s words as his listeners interpret them, namely, as some sort of generative truth rather than factual accounts of history.
Overview of book:
Part I – Language of witnessing, language used in Scopes trial.
Part II – Language of local and national campaigns, speeches, and other forms of media in general.
The premise of this book is fascinating. It studies the fundamental discourse as a generative discourse, one that is simultaneously "truth" and interpretation-based. In short, it's an ethnography on fundamental Christians, a study on how speech, practice, and the Christian subculture are generated through an emergent teaching (from around the 1980s on) that invites such generative interpretations, just as Christians are invited to study the truth of the Bible and subsequently to interpret conclusions as applicable to their lives.The main text of this book seems to be personal narrative-heavy (from what I've read so far), not sure how diligent I will be with my notes, lol. Ok, ok, so I'm taking more notes... ;p
Part I
“The appropriate question the is: How does this supernatural order become real, known, experienced, and absolutely irrefutable?” (p. 36)
“Gospel talk is public and targets outsiders, nonbelievers; but, as in witchcraft, there is no such thing as a neutral position, no place for an ethnographer who seeks ‘information.’ Either you are lost, or you are saved.” (p. 39)
~ This begs the question, asked in the very beginning of my Intervention class: so what’s the point of Anthropology? Is there a point to the field? To studying different cultures and subjects? And if accurate representation is never possible, then is a “false representation” the second-best thing to strive for?
On specific formats of witnessing/the testimony:
“There are verse markers (‘and’ and ‘now’), special codes, figurative language, symbolic and metaphoric parallelism, and appeals to tradition. These features mark the text as an oral performance and indicate a special relationship between performer and listener.” (p. 42)
~ c.f. the formatted “outlines” of testimonies one could choose from to modify into personal narratives.
A characteristic of the witness narrative is to incorporate the listener into the story, to recreate the moment of conviction of the speaker into a possible moment of conviction for the listener. In doing so, a lot of assumptions are made to get speaker and listener “on the same page” with certain assumed starting premises.
“They [fundamental Baptists] attribute its transforming power to the workings of the Holy Spirit, that is, to supernatural agencies, but when they describe how those agencies work, they invariably refer to words, to speaking and hearing and reading.” (pp. 46-47)
The polarization:
“On a symbolic level, Campbell argued that it was Christ’s blood that made this transition possible. But narratively, that is, looking at the form his argument took on the surface of his whole juxtaposition of stories, Campbell emphasized the importance of spoken language, of dialogue, in making the passage from one world to the next.” (p. 50)
- The supernatural/symbolic
- The narrative/dialogue & textual
As a method of narrative/verbal witnessing, things such as BCC are literally “training courses” for the language of evangelization. Just as Campbell didn’t focus more in his narrative on his son, there’s a certain direction that narratives are “supposed” to go.
Connection between old and new, law and grace. (pp. 55-56 ff.)
~ Consider: this reinterpretation through Christian lens is frequently exercised, yet Christians seldom apply the same view when looking at Muslims, as they too use a reinterpretative lens to look at the other two major monotheistic faiths.
“A cynic, second-guessing Campbell’s motives, would say he was manipulative, that he used this painful story [of his son’s death] to ‘get to’ his listener. But from within the born-again culture, this telling was the ultimate evidence of belief, Campbell’s moment of maximum authenticity.” (p. 60)
~ This is the reason why there is a need to look at evangelism/witnessing from within the fundamentalist discourse.
Scope’s Trial: background information here.
“The public rhetorics that refashioned a heterogeneous array of conservative Protestants into an unitary cultural ‘other,’ into fundamentalism with a capital ‘F,’ were not invented in the Scopes trial. But they were unfurled in that court battle more vividly, more widely, more sensationally, and more disparagingly than ever before.” (p. 61)
“The modern point of view in America emerged in part from its caricature of conservative Protestants as Fundamentalists. They were the ‘them’ who enabled the modern ‘us.’” (p. 62)
Scopes trial (John T. Scopes challenging 1925 Tennessee law that forbade teaching of evolution, deeming it anti-biblical): who won the legal battle? Who won the cultural battle?
On Scopes trial’s cultural battle:
“The Scopes trial was thus a moment of narrative encapsulation, a moment in which the cultural story of one people was subordinated to and reframed by the terms of another. Narrative encapsulation marks cultural dominance, and it is in this sense that the Scopes trial constituted the beginning of a half century of liberal Protestant and secular dominion in America.” (p. 65)
The Scope’s trial cannot be seen as a modernist victory over Fundamentalism because William Jennings Bryan did not defend his side from the “acceptable” fundamentalist discourse. It was a victory over a “betrayer,” not of fundamentalists: “In each respect, Bryan broke the pose of absolute biblical literalism, and that amounted to his publicly betraying fundamentalism as well as the Bible, Christianity, and God.” (p. 73)
“In effect, under the sign ‘Fundamentalist,’ Protestants who believed the Bible was true were ‘othered,’ they were rendered cultural outsiders, not simply in the numerous accounts of the trial that poured out for years afterwards but in the event itself.” (p. 74)
~ This is the beginning of another phenomenon: the hegemony of modernists as the American majority. As a result (simplified history here…), Fundamentalism was marginalized and perceived as being on the fringe, which continued to be the perception until the “Moral Majority” reclaimed fundamental dominance in the 1980s.
Christian vs. secular humanism conspiracy theory?
“It is easy enough to counter this theory. For one thing, there is no evidence for a secular humanist conspiracy, sinister or otherwise. For another, the theory erases the ways in which conservative Protestants, especially and most aggressively fundamentalists, collaborated in their own cultural and political exile. It also suggests that their absence makes America secular, as if there were no other faiths present.” (p. 75)
“Both the charismatic and evangelical movements laid the ground for the dramatic reenfranchisement of Bible-believing Protestanism in the 1980s, but neither constituted a break with the regime of secular modernity.” (p. 77)
~ These movements still presuppose a sacred-secular split, i.e., that the public arena was “off limits” to the religious discourse. But this doesn’t mean that there were no Protestants active in politics and activism.
“…during the 1980s we were witnessing instead a major realignment of public religiosity in America. The realignment was not a changing of the guard—conservative Protestants did not come to dominate public life—but they reentered public life.” (p. 79)
Born-again Christianity: (p. 81)
- Unstable: “composed of theologically discrete parts and that its parts were internally riven.”
- Stable: “generated an enduring organizational and oratorical public presence, one sufficiently permanent and persuasive to constitute a break with the story, indeed, the history, of modernity in America, a storied history that posited increasing secularization as a major theme of the twentieth century.”
For Part II of her book, Harding will trace the effect of this rise of born-again Christianity and its reentrance into the public space and narrative—“my focus is on the oratory, on the rhetorics and narratives, on the internal cultural work…” (p. 81)
Susan Friend Harding, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Definitions:
fundamentalism (small "f"): subset of self-declared fundamentalists.
Fundamentalism (big "F"): general; bible-believing Protestants, whether they self-identify as fundamentalists or not.
"For years, I stood at the crossroads that Campbell and others fashioned for me, in between being lost and being saved, listening.... This is... where I invite you to go as you read this book." (pp. xi-xii)
"I focus primarily on preacherly discourse because preachers command all the Bible-based poetic, rhetorical, and narrative skills which make their vernacular generative." (p. xii)
p. xi – “As a result, skeptics are blind, or deaf, to the Bible’s generativity. Falwell’s people read him, and the Bible, very differently—harmonizing contradictions and infelicities according to interpretive conventions that presume, and thus reveal, God’s design. Their Bible, their preacher, is thus constantly creating new truth.”
p. 4 – “mixed elements” from Christianity and the world, e.g., Scaremare. Not supposed to according to strict fundamentalism?
p. 10 – “The agenda [of Jerry Falwell and his ministries] was to convert his people from ‘fundamentalists,’ whose only mission in American society was evangelism, into ‘conservative Christians,’ who would fight worldly battles and who sought worldly power and influence in the name of ‘Christian values.’”
p. 12 – Shift in speech: “Indeed, individuals in communities bound by intense practices of speech mimesis may undergo in the space of a few years profound changes of collective speech that transform who they are, their social boundaries, and their worldly relations. Preachers, who are the nodes, the transformers, in the religious knowledge networks that articulate fundamentalist communities, are thus pivotal figures in moments of dramatic transformation.”
p. 18 – “Together, the 1980s movements rearranged the boundary between fundamentalism and postwar evangelism, fashioning a new constituency composed of newly engaged fundamentalists under leaders such as Falwell and conservative evangelicals who were discontented with their more irenic leaders.”
p. 20 – On the Moral Majority, during the 1980s: “In two short words, Falwell marked the majority status of theological conservatives among Protestants, elided it with majority status among all Americans, established himself as that majority’s apparent leader, aggressively ‘mixed’ religion and politics, and claimed the right to reintegrate culturally disenfranchised fundamentalists into national public life.”
p. 24 – “Jerry Falwell was no Martin Luther King, Jr., but he was the major cobbler and distributor of the hybrid religious and political rhetorics that enabled hitherto unallied and inactive white conservative Protestants to see themselves as a singular political and moral force.”
p. 27 – “Falwell’s speech is not like secular speech. He inhabits a world generated by Bible-based stories and, as a ‘man of God,’ his speech partakes of the generative quality of the Bible itself. He incessantly frames his life, if only lightly, in biblical terms, and his faithful followers read him as they read the Bible—not as already true, but as always coming true.”
~ What Harding is arguing for here is to read Falwell’s speeches and stories as its very own discourse. Scrutinizing only the (inconsistent?) facts of Falwell’s words is, to Harding, completely missing the point. Falwell’s words were received differently by those who listened to him. If we were to understand the fundamental discourse, we must tune ourselves to interpret Falwell’s words as his listeners interpret them, namely, as some sort of generative truth rather than factual accounts of history.
Overview of book:
Part I – Language of witnessing, language used in Scopes trial.
Part II – Language of local and national campaigns, speeches, and other forms of media in general.
The premise of this book is fascinating. It studies the fundamental discourse as a generative discourse, one that is simultaneously "truth" and interpretation-based. In short, it's an ethnography on fundamental Christians, a study on how speech, practice, and the Christian subculture are generated through an emergent teaching (from around the 1980s on) that invites such generative interpretations, just as Christians are invited to study the truth of the Bible and subsequently to interpret conclusions as applicable to their lives.
Part I
“The appropriate question the is: How does this supernatural order become real, known, experienced, and absolutely irrefutable?” (p. 36)
“Gospel talk is public and targets outsiders, nonbelievers; but, as in witchcraft, there is no such thing as a neutral position, no place for an ethnographer who seeks ‘information.’ Either you are lost, or you are saved.” (p. 39)
~ This begs the question, asked in the very beginning of my Intervention class: so what’s the point of Anthropology? Is there a point to the field? To studying different cultures and subjects? And if accurate representation is never possible, then is a “false representation” the second-best thing to strive for?
On specific formats of witnessing/the testimony:
“There are verse markers (‘and’ and ‘now’), special codes, figurative language, symbolic and metaphoric parallelism, and appeals to tradition. These features mark the text as an oral performance and indicate a special relationship between performer and listener.” (p. 42)
~ c.f. the formatted “outlines” of testimonies one could choose from to modify into personal narratives.
A characteristic of the witness narrative is to incorporate the listener into the story, to recreate the moment of conviction of the speaker into a possible moment of conviction for the listener. In doing so, a lot of assumptions are made to get speaker and listener “on the same page” with certain assumed starting premises.
“They [fundamental Baptists] attribute its transforming power to the workings of the Holy Spirit, that is, to supernatural agencies, but when they describe how those agencies work, they invariably refer to words, to speaking and hearing and reading.” (pp. 46-47)
The polarization:
“On a symbolic level, Campbell argued that it was Christ’s blood that made this transition possible. But narratively, that is, looking at the form his argument took on the surface of his whole juxtaposition of stories, Campbell emphasized the importance of spoken language, of dialogue, in making the passage from one world to the next.” (p. 50)
- The supernatural/symbolic
- The narrative/dialogue & textual
As a method of narrative/verbal witnessing, things such as BCC are literally “training courses” for the language of evangelization. Just as Campbell didn’t focus more in his narrative on his son, there’s a certain direction that narratives are “supposed” to go.
Connection between old and new, law and grace. (pp. 55-56 ff.)
~ Consider: this reinterpretation through Christian lens is frequently exercised, yet Christians seldom apply the same view when looking at Muslims, as they too use a reinterpretative lens to look at the other two major monotheistic faiths.
“A cynic, second-guessing Campbell’s motives, would say he was manipulative, that he used this painful story [of his son’s death] to ‘get to’ his listener. But from within the born-again culture, this telling was the ultimate evidence of belief, Campbell’s moment of maximum authenticity.” (p. 60)
~ This is the reason why there is a need to look at evangelism/witnessing from within the fundamentalist discourse.
Scope’s Trial: background information here.
“The public rhetorics that refashioned a heterogeneous array of conservative Protestants into an unitary cultural ‘other,’ into fundamentalism with a capital ‘F,’ were not invented in the Scopes trial. But they were unfurled in that court battle more vividly, more widely, more sensationally, and more disparagingly than ever before.” (p. 61)
“The modern point of view in America emerged in part from its caricature of conservative Protestants as Fundamentalists. They were the ‘them’ who enabled the modern ‘us.’” (p. 62)
Scopes trial (John T. Scopes challenging 1925 Tennessee law that forbade teaching of evolution, deeming it anti-biblical): who won the legal battle? Who won the cultural battle?
On Scopes trial’s cultural battle:
“The Scopes trial was thus a moment of narrative encapsulation, a moment in which the cultural story of one people was subordinated to and reframed by the terms of another. Narrative encapsulation marks cultural dominance, and it is in this sense that the Scopes trial constituted the beginning of a half century of liberal Protestant and secular dominion in America.” (p. 65)
The Scope’s trial cannot be seen as a modernist victory over Fundamentalism because William Jennings Bryan did not defend his side from the “acceptable” fundamentalist discourse. It was a victory over a “betrayer,” not of fundamentalists: “In each respect, Bryan broke the pose of absolute biblical literalism, and that amounted to his publicly betraying fundamentalism as well as the Bible, Christianity, and God.” (p. 73)
“In effect, under the sign ‘Fundamentalist,’ Protestants who believed the Bible was true were ‘othered,’ they were rendered cultural outsiders, not simply in the numerous accounts of the trial that poured out for years afterwards but in the event itself.” (p. 74)
~ This is the beginning of another phenomenon: the hegemony of modernists as the American majority. As a result (simplified history here…), Fundamentalism was marginalized and perceived as being on the fringe, which continued to be the perception until the “Moral Majority” reclaimed fundamental dominance in the 1980s.
Christian vs. secular humanism conspiracy theory?
“It is easy enough to counter this theory. For one thing, there is no evidence for a secular humanist conspiracy, sinister or otherwise. For another, the theory erases the ways in which conservative Protestants, especially and most aggressively fundamentalists, collaborated in their own cultural and political exile. It also suggests that their absence makes America secular, as if there were no other faiths present.” (p. 75)
“Both the charismatic and evangelical movements laid the ground for the dramatic reenfranchisement of Bible-believing Protestanism in the 1980s, but neither constituted a break with the regime of secular modernity.” (p. 77)
~ These movements still presuppose a sacred-secular split, i.e., that the public arena was “off limits” to the religious discourse. But this doesn’t mean that there were no Protestants active in politics and activism.
“…during the 1980s we were witnessing instead a major realignment of public religiosity in America. The realignment was not a changing of the guard—conservative Protestants did not come to dominate public life—but they reentered public life.” (p. 79)
Born-again Christianity: (p. 81)
- Unstable: “composed of theologically discrete parts and that its parts were internally riven.”
- Stable: “generated an enduring organizational and oratorical public presence, one sufficiently permanent and persuasive to constitute a break with the story, indeed, the history, of modernity in America, a storied history that posited increasing secularization as a major theme of the twentieth century.”
For Part II of her book, Harding will trace the effect of this rise of born-again Christianity and its reentrance into the public space and narrative—“my focus is on the oratory, on the rhetorics and narratives, on the internal cultural work…” (p. 81)
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zOMG! I totally read that (I forget if we finished it, though?)
Date: 2005-12-18 08:18 pm (UTC)That was a great class, and she, a great teacher. Especially cuz she didn't force us to write hugely long papers, lol. I still remember the story of being "under conviction" or whatever. (for anyone else reading this, basically, she had been talking with these Fundie guys and her car almost crashed, and she actually thought, "what is god trying to tell me?" ...trippy, huh?)
Anyhow, cool to see it being read, and kinda outside of a purely Anthro context.
[I came over and started reading from Nenya's lj, btw]
Re: zOMG! I totally read that (I forget if we finished it, though?)
Date: 2005-12-18 08:36 pm (UTC)I have those moments too when I hear other people referring to my undergrad professors' work and I wanted to shout: "Professor ____ is the best teacher ever!" *g*
I took this course called Journalism Faces Faith this semester, taught by Jeff Sharlet, a Religion and Media professor at NYU. The readings for the class revolved around reporting and thinking critically about issues of faith. It was a very challenging class -- intensive in both the reading and the reporting (which felt more like doing short-term ethnographical field work). But we get to read cool stuff like Harding's book and some of my other favorites such as Tomas Eloy Martinez's Santa Evita, Barbara Myerhoff's Number Our Days, and Daniel Bergner's God of the Rodeo.
You can definitely let Susan Harding know that her book is being read!
And welcome :) It's always great to meet new people on LJ.
oh, sweet! We read Myerhoff's book in Intro to Cultural Anthro...
Date: 2005-12-18 09:14 pm (UTC)Then later, in Anthro of Religion, we read her book from her grad school research, Peyote Hunt. It is a neat book. She actually documents her peyote trip by thinking of the different happenings as booths at a carnival!
I need to go fangirl some of my former profs. Many great ones! I thought about going that route, was planning on it in fact, but then realized that I wasn't ready to devote my life to academia, and the average cult.anthro Ph.D is 7 years [including the two of fieldwork]. Yikes? Yikes. So...for now I'm just working and enjoying san francisco, and having good times enjoying the last of my twenties: the big 2-9 in just under four weeks, now! ;P
and, Thanks for the welcome! I've definitely been enjoying learning about new people and invigorating my intellect through simple blog-reading. ;D
Re: oh, sweet! We read Myerhoff's book in Intro to Cultural Anthro...
Date: 2005-12-18 09:48 pm (UTC)I'm only doing a Masters for now. I know what you mean, I don't think I can sign my life away for 7 years of academic work either. Some of my classmates are applying to PhD programs -- much respect to them!