Introduction

But Hebron also evoked darker memories. On August 24, 1929, during a period of great tension between Arabs and Zionists in Palestine, fifty-nine Jewish men, women, and children had been massacred in Hebron. Levinger and his party checked into the Park Hotel, pretending to be Swiss tourists, but when Passover was over they refused to leave and stayed on as squatters. This was embarrassing for the Israeli government, since the Geneva conventions forbade any settlement in territory occupied during hostilities, and the United Nations was demanding that Israel withdraw from the land they had conquered. But the chutzpa of the Kookists reminded Laborites of their own pioneers in their Golden Age, and the government was, therefore, reluctant to evict them.
Levinger’s group immediately went on the offensive in the Cave of the Patriarchs. After the Six Day War, the Israeli military government had opened the shrine, which had been closed during the hostilities, for worship once again, making special arrangements for Jews to pray there without disturbing the Arabs. This was not good enough for the Jewish settlers, who began to press for more space and time in the Cave. They would refuse to leave on Fridays in time to let the Muslims in for their weekly communal prayer; sometimes they would leave the halls, but block the main entrance, so that the Muslim worshippers could not get in; they would hold a kiddush in the Cave, drinking wine, which they knew the Muslims would find offensive, and, on Independence Day 1968, they flew the Israeli flag at the shrine, in defiance of government regulations. Tension escalated and--inevitably, perhaps--a hand grenade was thrown at some Jewish visitors by a Palestinian outside the mosque. Reluctantly, the Israeli government established an enclave for the settlers outside Hebron; the new settlement was protected by the I.D.F.. Levinger called it Kiryat Arba (the biblical name for Hebron) and it has remained a bastion for the most extreme, violent, and provocative Zionist fundamentalists. By 1972, Kiryat Arba had grown to a small town with a population of about five thousand settlers. For the Kookists, it represented a victory in a holy war that pushed against the frontiers of the “Other Side” and liberated an important area of the Holy Land for God.
Otherwise, however, Kookists made little progress. To their exasperation, redemption seemed to have stalled. The Labor government did not annex the occupied territories, and, though they built military settlements there, there was still talk of exchanging land for peace.
The victory of 1967 had led to an Israeli complacency, which was shattered when, in October 1973 on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the most solemn day in the Jewish year, Egypt and Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights, taking the Israelis completely by surprise. This time the Arab armies made a much better showing and were only pushed back by the IDF with great difficulty.
Israelis were shocked, and a mood of depression and doubt settled on the country. Israel had been caught off-guard, and this near-defeat seemed the result of ideological decline. Kookists agreed. In 1967, God had made his will clear, but instead of capitalizing on this victory and taking over the territories, the Israeli government had temporized and worried about antagonizing the goyim, especially in the United States. The Yom Kippur War was God’s punishment and a reminder.
Now religious Jews must come to the nation’s rescue. One Kookist rabbi compared secular Israel to a soldier falling in the desert after fighting an heroic war. Faithful Jews, who had never abandoned religion, would take over and carry on his mission.?
The Six Day War had confirmed the Kookists in their vision and led to a couple of settlement ventures, but their movement did not really take wing until after the shock of the war of Yom Kippur. An article by the Kookist rabbi Yehuda Amital expressed the new militancy. In “The Meaning of the Yom Kippur War,” Amital demonstrated that deep fear of annihilation that lies at the heart of so many fundamentalist movements. The October assault had reminded all Israelis of their isolation in the Middle East and shown that they were encircled by enemies who seemed dedicated to the destruction of their state. This raised the specter of the Holocaust. Now Amital declared that the old Zionist policy had been discredited. The secular state had not solved the Jewish problem; anti-Semitism was worse than ever.
“The State of Israel is the only state in the world which faces destruction,” he argued.
There was no way that Jews could be “normalized,” becoming like all the other nations, as the secular Zionists had hoped. But there was another Zionism, that preached by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, which declared that the redemptive process was now far advanced. Instead of seeing the war as yet another Jewish catastrophe, it should be regarded as an act of purification.
The secular Jews, whose Zionism had been so lamentably inadequate that it had brought the nation to the brink of catastrophe, had tried to fuse Judaism with the empirical rationalism and democratic culture of the modern West.
This foreign influence must be eliminated.
Amital was articulating a theory which had much in common with the fundamentalism that was then emerging in Egypt and Iran. God had permitted the Yom Kippur War to warn the Jews to return to themselves.
It had been a reminder of true values to “West-toxicated” Israel. As such, it was part of the messianic process, a holy war against Western civilization. But the tide had turned. The war also revealed that it was not just the Jews who were struggling to survive. In this life-or-death conflict, Amital believed, the gentiles were also fighting their final battle. The revival and expansion of the Jewish state had shown them that God was in control, that there was no room for Satan, and that Israel had succeeded in turning back the forces of iniquity. Israel had conquered the Land; all that remained to be done before the Redemption was to purge the last relics of the Western secular spirit from the souls of Jews, who must return to their religion. The war had sounded the death knell of secularism. The Kookists were now ready to mobilize and become more politically active in the struggle--a struggle against the West which sought to restrain Israeli expansionism, against the Arabs, and against the secularism which the West had spawned in Israel.
There was a similar readiness among Protestant fundamentalists in the United States. The chaos of the 1960s with its permissive youth culture, sexual revolution, and the promotion of equal rights for homosexuals, blacks, and women, seemed to shake the very foundations of society. Many were convinced that this cataclysm, plus the tumult in the Middle East, could only mean that Rapture was nigh. Ever since the Revolution, American Protestantism had been divided into two warring camps, and for some forty years, the fundamentalists had been creating their own separate world, which rejected the modern ethos of secularists and liberal Christians alike.
They saw themselves as outsiders, but in fact they represented a large constituency of Americans who resented the cultural hegemony of the eastern, secularist establishment, and who felt more at home with the conservative religion of the fundamentalists. They had not yet mobilized to form a political movement to redeem American society, but by the end of the 1970s, the potential was there, and fundamentalists were becoming conscious of their power. In 1979, the year that fundamentalists staged their comeback, George Gallup’s national poll showed that one out of every three of the American adults questioned had experienced a religious (“born-again”) conversion; nearly 50 percent believed that the Bible was inerrant, and over 80 percent saw Jesus as a divine figure. The poll also revealed that there were about 1300 evangelical Christian radio and television stations, which had an audience of about 130 million and made profits estimated from $500 million to “billions” of dollars. As a leading fundamentalist, Pat Robertson, proclaimed during the 1980 election: “We have enough votes to run this country!”
There were three factors that contributed to this new growth and confidence during the 19603 and 19703. First was the development of the South.
Hitherto, fundamentalism had been a product of the big northern cities.
The South was still predominantly agrarian. Liberal Christianity had made little progress in the churches, and there had, therefore, been no need for “fundamentalists” to fight against the new ideas and the Social Gospel. But during the 1960s the South began to modernize.
There was an influx of people from the North. They were looking for employment in the oil industry and the new technical and aerospace projects located there. The South had begun to experience the same kind of rapid industrialization and urbanization as the North had a century earlier. During the 19303, two-thirds of southerners had lived in the country. By 1960, less than half lived there. The South was beginning to acquire a higher national profile. In 1976, Jimmy Carter became the first southerner since the Civil War to be elected to the presidency; he was succeeded in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, the governor of California. But though southerners welcomed their new preeminence, they found their world completely changed. The immigrants from the North brought modern and liberal ideas with them. Not all were Protestants or even Christians. Values and beliefs that had hitherto been taken for granted now had to be defended. In the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations especially, conservative Protestants were as ripe for a fundamentalist movement as their northern co-religionists had been at the turn of the century, and for all the same reasons.
The people of the new South, who felt uprooted and alienated from the society in which they lived, were often newcomers from the rural districts to the rapidly expanding cities. Many country people started to send their children to college and on the campus they had to encounter the new sixties liberalism.
They also witnessed the loss of faith suffered by many of their fellow students. Parents felt alienated and alarmed by children who were adopting apparently Godless ideas. In the churches, they encountered even more shocking notions, brought from the North by the new arrivals.
Increasingly, people turned to the fundamentalist churches, and especially to the “electric” churches of the airwaves. Powerful new televangelists built empires during this period. The potential converts to fundamentalism lived along the southern rim, starting in Virginia Beach, where Pat Robertson had established his Christian Broadcasting Network and the immensely popular “700 Club.” Next came Lynchburg, Virginia, where Jerry Falwell had begun his television ministry in 1956; in Charlotte, North Carolina, was the ministry of the exuberant Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and the “Bible-Belt” ended in southern California, an area with a long tradition of political and religious conservatism.
The second factor that led many traditionalists to become fundamentalists was the rapid expansion of state power in the United States after the Second World War. Americans had been mistrustful of centralized government since the Revolution, and had often used religion to voice their distaste for the secularist establishment.
Fundamentalists were particularly outraged by the Supreme Court decisions banning obligatory worship in public schools on the grounds that this violated the “wall of separation” that Jefferson had decreed should divide religion and politics. Secularist judges had come to the conclusion that it was unconstitutional for the state to sponsor a program of prayer in its schools, even if this did not involve funds derived from taxes, and even if the worship was voluntary and nondenominational. Rulings to this effect were passed in 1948, 1952, and 1962. In 1963, the Supreme Court also banned Bible readings in public schools, quoting the religion clause of the First Amendment.
During the 1970S, the Court passed a series of judgments declaring that any law would be struck down (i) if it intended to promote the cause of religion, (2) if its consequence, regardless of its intention, was the advancement of religion, and finally (3) if it entangled government in religious affairs. The Court was responding to the increasing pluralism of American culture; it declared that it had nothing against religion, but insisted that it be confined to the private domain.
These rulings were secularizing but could not be compared to the aggressive attempts of either Nasser or the shah to marginalize religious faith.
Nevertheless, fundamentalists and evangelical Christians alike were outraged by what they regarded as a Godless crusade. They did not believe that religion could be legitimately cordoned off and limited in this way, because Christianity’s demands were total and should be sovereign. They were offended that the Court was willing to extend the principle of the “free exercise” of faith (demanded by the First Amendment) to religions that were not even Christian, and incensed by the judges’ principled determination to put all faiths on the same level. This seemed tantamount to saying that their religion was false.
The ruling that religion be confined to private life seemed even more outrageous to fundamentalists, when it was combined with what seemed an excessive and unprecedented intrusion of the Court into the private sphere. When the Internal Revenue Service threatened to withdraw charitable tax-exempt status from certain fundamentalist colleges on the grounds that their rules contravened public policy, it seemed an act of war on the part of liberal society. Only fundamentalists, it appeared, were not allowed “free exercise” of the principles of their faith. In the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court endorsed IRS rulings against Goldsborough Christian Schools in North Carolina, which did not admit Afro-Americans, and Bob Jones University, which was not segregationist but which banned interracial dating on campus, claiming that it was forbidden by the Bible.
It was another clash between two value systems, similar to the Scopes trial of 1925. Both sides believed that they were absolutely in the right. A deep rift ran through the nation. Increasingly, during the late 1960s and 1970s, as the state expanded its notion of what constituted the public arena, very conservative Christians on the margins of modern society experienced these interventions as a secularist offensive. They felt “colonized” by the world of Manhattan, Washington, and Harvard. Their experience was not entirely dissimilar to that of the Middle Eastern countries who had so bitterly resented being taken over by an alien power. The government seemed to have invaded the inner sanctum of the family: a Constitutional amendment giving women equal rights of employment seemed to fly in the face of biblical injunctions that a woman’s place was in the home. Legislation limited the physical chastisement of children, even though the Bible made it clear that a father had a duty to discipline his children in this way. Civil rights and freedom of expression were granted to homosexuals, and abortion was legalized. Reforms that seemed just and moral to liberals in San Francisco, Boston, or Yale seemed sinful to religious conservatives in Arkansas and Alabama, who believed that the inspired word of God must be interpreted and obeyed to the letter. They did not feel liberated by the permissive society. When they reflected that in the 1920s, two-thirds of the states had voted for the prohibition of liquor, but that now throughout North America people were openly campaigning for the legalization of marijuana, they could only conclude that America was falling under the influence of Satan.
There was a new urgency. People felt that true religion was being destroyed. If Christians did not fight back, there might not be another generation of believers. During the 1970s, more parents than ever before removed their children from the public schools to Christian establishments, where they could be instructed in Christian values and were given Christian role models, and where all learning was conducted within a biblical context. Between 1965 and 1983, enrollment in these evangelical schools increased six-fold, and about 100,000 fundamentalist children were taught at home. The Independent Christian School movement began to mobilize.
Hitherto, fundamentalist schools had been scattered and isolated, but during the 1970s they began to form associations to monitor legislation on educational matters, create insurance packages, organize teacher placement, and act as lobbying groups at the state and federal levels.
These have continued to grow. By the 1990S, the American Association of Christian Schools had 1,360 member schools, while the Association of Christian Schools International had 1,930. Like many of the other schools, colleges, and educational establishments we have considered, there was a desire for a “holistic” education, where everything--patriotism, history, morality, politics, and economics--could be seen from a Christian perspective. Spiritual and moral training were considered to be as important as academic achievement (though this, in general, compared well to education in the public sector). It was a “hothouse” atmosphere to form committed and, if need be, militant Christians prepared to fight the secularization of life in the United States. They studied the Christian history of America, for example, and examined the religious credentials of such figures as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, read only that literature and philosophy that “pretty much” agreed with the Bible, and stressed biblical “family values.”
As we have seen, in order to mobilize effectively, a group needs an ideology with a clearly defined enemy. During the 1960s and 1970S, Protestant fundamentalist ideologues defined the enemy as “secular humanism.”
Unlike the Islamists and the Kookists, who could decry the secular culture of “the West,” the American Protestants, who were fiercely patriotic, had no such easy target. They had to fight “the enemy within.” Over the years, “secular humanism” became a portmanteau term into which fundamentalists threw any value or belief that they did not like. Here, for example, is the definition of secular humanism given by the fundamentalist “Pro-Family Forum” (nd.). It:
Denies the deity of God, the inspiration of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Denies the existence of the soul, life after death, salvation and heaven, damnation and hell.
Denies the Biblical account of Creation.
Believes that there are no absolutes, no right, no wrong--that moral values are self-determined and situational. Do your own thing, “as long as it does not harm anyone else.”
Believes in the removal of distinctive roles of male and female.
Believes in sexual freedom between consenting individuals, regardless of age, including premarital sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, and incest.
Believes in the right to abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. Believes in the equal distribution of America’s wealth to reduce poverty and bring about equality.
Believes in control of the environment, control of energy, and its limitation.
Believes in the removal of American patriotism, and the free enterprise system, disarmament, and the creation of a one world socialistic government.
This list, which seems to have been compiled from the first and second Manifestos of the American Humanist Society (1933 and 1973), an organization of little influence, could, nevertheless, be described as a reasonably accurate description of the liberal mind-set that evolved during the sixties.
But in the way of most ideologies, it was, of course, also a caricature and an oversimplification of liberalism. Not all liberals who desire sexual equality or the equal distribution of wealth are atheists.
Liberals who believe in gay rights would never sanction incest. No liberal would agree that there is “no right, no wrong”; instead they believe that there needs to be some revision of the moral strictures of the past. A desire to achieve a coming together of previously hostile nation-states, in such organizations as the European Union or the United Nations, by no means implies a desire for “one-world socialistic government.” But the list is useful in showing how values which many liberal Christians and secularists alike would regard as self-evidently good (such as concern for the poor or for the environment) were regarded by fundamentalists as manifestly evil. It would appear that there were “two nations” in the United States at this time in rather the same way as in Iran or Israel. Modern society seemed to have become polarized in such a way that it was increasingly difficult for people in the different camps to understand one another. Because the subcultures were so isolated and separatist, many may not even have realized that there was a problem.
But Protestant fundamentalists did not regard this definition of secular humanism as a caricature. They saw secular humanism as a rival religion, which had its own creed, its own objectives, and a distinctive organization.
They drew support for this belief from a footnote to the Supreme Court judgment Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), which explicitly listed “secular humanism” among those world religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God,” such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Ethical Culture. Fundamentalists would use this later to argue that the beliefs and values of the “secular humanism” practiced by the government and the legislators should be outlawed from public life as firmly as conservative Protestantism.
It would, however, be a mistake to regard this fundamentalist preoccupation with secular humanism as a ploy, or as an ingeniously concocted distortion designed to discredit the liberal attitude. The term “secular humanism” and all that it stands for filled fundamentalists with visceral dread. They saw it as a conspiracy of evil forces that, in the words of Tim LaHaye, one of the chief and most prolific fundamentalist ideologues, was “anti-God, anti moral anti-self-restraint, and anti-American.” Secular humanism was run by a small cadre which controlled the government, the public schools, and the television networks, in order to “destroy Christianity and the American family. “ There were 600 humanist senators, congressmen, and cabinet ministers, some 275,000 in the American Civil Liberties Union.
The National Organization for Women, trade unions, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, and all colleges and universities were also “humanist.”
Fifty percent of the legislators were committed to the religion of secular humanism. America, which had been founded as a Bible-based republic, had now become a secular state, a catastrophe, John Whitehead (president of the conservative Rutherford Institute) attributed to a gross misreading of the First Amendment. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was designed, Whitehead believed, to protect religion from the state, not vice versa. But now the humanist judges had made the state an object of worship:
“The state is seen as secular,” he argued, but “the state is religious, because its ‘ultimate concern’ is the perpetuation of the state itself.” Secular humanism, therefore, amounted to a rebellion against God’s sovereignty, and its worship of the state was idolatrous.”
Not only had the conspiracy completely infiltrated American society, but it had also conquered the world. For the fundamentalist writer Pat Brooks, the secular humanists formed “a huge conspiratorial network” which was “fast approaching its goal of bringing in a ‘new world order,” a vast world government that would reduce the world to slavery.” Like other fundamentalists, Brooks saw the enemy as omnipresent, and pursuing its objective relentlessly over a long period. He saw it at work in the Soviet Union, on Wall Street, in Zionism, in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve System. The cabal that was masterminding this international conspiracy included the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Kissinger, Brzezinski, the shah, and Omar Torrijos, the former Panamanian dictator. This terror of secular humanism was as irrational and as ungovernable as any of the other paranoid fantasies we have considered, and sprang from the same fear of annihilation. The Protestant fundamentalists’ view of modern society in general and of America in particular was as demonic as that of any Islamist. For Franky Schaeffer, for example, the West was about to enter an electronic dark age, in which the new pagan hordes, with all the power of technology at their command, are on the verge of obliterating the last strongholds of civilized humanity. A vision of darkness lies before us. As we leave the shores of Christian western man behind, only a dark and turbulent sea of despair stretches endlessly ahead ... unless we fight.