Introduction

Like Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, American Protestants also felt that their backs were to the wall and that they would have to fight in order to survive.
Just as Sayyid Qutb’s description of a modern jahili city was difficult for liberal Muslims to recognize, the vision of America that Protestant fundamentalists were evolving was radically different from that of the liberal mainstream. Fundamentalists were convinced that the United States was God’s own country, but did not seem to share the values that were so prized and lauded by other Americans. When they wrote about American history, nearly all looked back nostalgically to the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers, but praised those traits in them that were least attractive to liberals. What kind of society had the Puritans tried to establish in New England? asked Rus Walton, founder of the Plymouth Rock Foundation.
“A democracy? Not on your life! The early Americans brought no such idea to this new world,” he noted approvingly. Nor had the Puritans had any time for liberty; they were more interested in “right government in church and state” which would “compel other men to walk in the right way.” Similarly, the Revolution was not regarded as “democratic.” American Protestant fundamentalists could regard democracy with as much suspicion as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, and for the same reason. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic, according to Pat Robertson, were inspired by Calvinist, biblical ideals. This saved the American Revolution from going the same way as the French and Russian revolutions. The American revolutionaries had wanted nothing to do with mass rule; they wanted to establish a republic in which the will of the majority and all egalitarian tendencies would be controlled by biblical law. The Founding Fathers certainly did not want a “pure, direct democracy in which the majority can do as it pleases.” They were as appalled as any Muslim fundamentalist by the idea of a government implementing its own laws: the Constitution was “not endowed with ability to create laws apart from the higher law [of God] but only to administer fundamental law as man is able to grasp and approximate it.”
This version of the American past is very different from that of the liberal establishment. Fundamentalist history was the creation of a counter-culture determined to put the United States back onto the right path. All saw a falling-off and a decline from America’s godly beginnings: the Supreme Court rulings, the social innovations, and legalization of abortion had promoted secularization in the name of “freedom.” But by the end of the 1970s, fundamentalists were beginning to realize that they themselves must accept some of the blame. They had retreated and isolated themselves after the Scopes trial and allowed the secular humanists to have it all their own way.
Now they began to move toward a commitment to political activism. At the beginning of the 1970S, Tim LaHaye had never suggested that fundamentalists should become politically involved, but by the end of the decade, he had come to believe that the humanists would “destroy America” within a few years, “unless Christians are willing to become much more assertive in defense of morality and decency than they have been in the last three decades.”
One of the factors that had made fundamentalists hold aloof from politics had been their premillennialism: since the world was doomed, there was no point attempting to reform it. But even here there was a change. In 1970, Hal Lindsey published his extremely successful book The Late Great Planet Earth, which had sold 28 million copies by 1990.
It rehashed the old premillennial ideas in racy, trendy prose. Lindsey saw no special role for America in the Last Days, and implied that Christians should content themselves with spotting “signs” of the approaching End in current events. But by the end of the 1970s, he, like Tim LaHaye, had changed his mind. In The 1980s, Countdown to Armageddon, he argued that, if America came to its senses, it could remain a world power right through the millennium. But that means that we must actively take on the responsibility of being a citizen and a member of God’s family. We need to get active, electing officials who will not only reflect the Bible’s morality in government, but will shape domestic and foreign policies to protect our country and our way of life.

Fundamentalists were ready. They had an enemy to fight, a vision of what America should be that was very different from that of the liberal mainstream, and they now believed, despite all their fears, that they were powerful enough to succeed in their crusade.

By the late 1970S, Protestant fundamentalists in the United States had achieved a much higher profile and a greater self-confidence. This was the third reason for their mobilization in the early 1980s. They were no longer the impoverished backwoodsmen who had scuttled away from the Scopes trial. The affluence that had made the permissive society a possibility had affected them too. The new prominence of the South and the rise of fundamentalism there made many feel that it was now possible for them to challenge the establishment. They knew that membership in the liberal mainstream denominations had dropped during the 1960s whereas the evangelical churches had increased at an average five-year rate of 8 percent. Televangelism had also become more adept at packaging and marketing Christianity. It seemed to make the God who was being banished from so much of the public sphere a dramatic and tangible presence. When they watched the Pentecostalist preacher Oral Roberts apparently healing sick and disabled people on the air, they could see the divine power at work.
When they heard the hugely powerful televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who claimed to save 100,000 souls a week, hurling vitriolic abuse at Roman Catholics, homosexuals, and the Supreme Court, they felt that somebody was giving public voice to their own views. When they heard of the vast sums of money that Pat Robertson or the Bakkers could rake in their programs each week in donations, fundamentalists became convinced that God was the answer to the problems of the economy. Christians, they insisted, must give in order to get. In the Kingdom of God, according to Robertson, “there is no economic recession, no shortage.”
It was a truth that seemed borne out by the immense success of the top ten Christian television empires, which took in over a billion dollars each year, employed over a thousand people, and turned out a highly professional product.
The man of the hour, however, was Jerry Falwell. It has been estimated that during the 1960s and 1970S four out of every ten households in the United States tuned in to his station in Lynchburg, Virginia. He had begun his ministry there in 1956 with only a handful of members in a disused soda plant. Three years later, the congregation had grown to three times its original size, and by 1988 the Thomas Road Baptist Church had 18,000 members and sixty associate pastors. The total income of the church was over sixty million dollars per annum, and services were broadcast on 392 television channels and 600 radio stations. A typical fundamentalist, Falwell wanted to build a separate, self-sufficient world. At Lynchburg, he created a school run on biblical lines; by 1976, Liberty Baptist College had 1,500 students.
Falwell also established philanthropic al ventures: a home for alcoholics, a nursing home, and an adoption agency to offer an alternative to abortion. By 1976, Falwell regarded himself as the leading born-again broadcaster.
Falwell was creating an alternative society to undercut secular humanism.
From the start, he wanted Liberty College to become a world-class university;
it was to be what Notre Dame was to the Roman Catholics, or Brigham Young to the Mormons. Fundamentalism had changed since Bob Jones had founded his university in the 1920S. Separation from society was no longer enough. Like other fundamentalist educators, Falwell was creating a cadre for the future, “a spiritual army of young people who are pro-life, pro moral and pro-America.” Where Bob Jones had turned away from the secular world to prepare teachers for Christian schools, Falwell wanted to take on the secularist establishment. Liberty would train students for all walks of life and the major professions. They would “save” society. But that meant that they had to submit to the fundamentalist ethos: the faculty must subscribe to the articles of faith; all students had to complete a “Christian service assignment” in the parish each semester; there was to be no drinking or smoking;
students must wear Sunday-best clothes at all times, and attend services at Thomas Road thrice weekly. Unlike Bob Jones, Falwell sought academic accreditation and was thus able to attract non fundamentalist students, whose parents approved of the sobriety of the campus and its good academic standards. Falwell had charted a middle course. Liberty provided an alternative to the permissive liberal arts colleges of the sixties and seventies, on the one hand, and to the mediocre standard of some of the old Bible colleges on the other.
Despite its doctrinal emphasis, the campus was open to serious debate of intellectual and social issues; this would enable students to engage with the secular world on its own terms, and initiate its reconquista.
Falwell was planning an offensive, and was doing so in modern terms.
His industrious regime in the college, church, and radio station was an attempt to reach out to a lost and dying world. There were no gimmicks and no wild antics on his station; the Old Time Gospel Hour eschewed the extravagances of Roberts, Swaggart, and the Bakkers. A literalist as a broadcaster as in theology, he had his services screened and recorded exactly as performed, with no concessions to the camera and its love of spectacle. Lynchburg stood for restraint, capitalism, and the Calvinist work ethic. Falwell modeled his empire on the new shopping malls, which offered a combination of services.
As Elmer Towns, his chief theological adviser, explained, Falwell believed that he could win souls with similar entrepreneurial expertise. Business, Falwell judged, was at the cutting edge of innovation, and “the Thomas Road Baptist Church believed that the combined ministeries of several agencies in one church can not only attract the masses to the Gospel, but can better minister to each individual who comes.” During the 1960s and 1970S, Thomas Road seemed to prove the Godly viability of capitalism, adding one ministry after another, with continued growth and expansion. When secular power brokers were looking around for somebody to lead a right-wing resurgence in the 1980s, Falwell was their man. He clearly understood the dynamic of modern capitalist society and would be able to engage with it as an equal.
Yet for all Falwell’s apparently hardheaded approach, the fundamentalists who responded to him were filled with fear. It was no use arguing with Falwell, LaHaye, or Robertson in the hope of convincing them that there was no secular humanist conspiracy. This paranoid fear of annihilation and destruction, which they shared with Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, would add urgency and conviction to their campaign.
Modern society had achieved a great deal, materially and morally. It had reason to believe in its righteousness. In Europe and the United States, at least, democracy, freedom, and toleration were liberating.
But fundamentalists could not see this, not because they were perverse, but because they had experienced modernity as an assault that threatened their most sacred values and seemed to put their very existence in jeopardy. By the end of the 1970S, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditionalists were poised to fight back. 9. The Offensive
(1974-1979)
The fundamentalist assault took many secularists by surprise. They had assumed that religion would never again be a major player in politics, but during the late 1970s there was a militant explosion of faith. In 1978--79, the world watched in astonishment as an obscure Iranian ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, which had seemed to be one of the most progressive and stable states in the Middle East. At the same time as governments applauded the peace initiative of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, his recognition of the State of Israel, and his overtures to the West, observers noted that the young Egyptians appeared to be turning to religion. They were donning Islamic dress, casting aside the freedoms of modernity, and many were engaged in an aggressive takeover of the university campuses.
In the United States, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics and to challenge state and federal legislation that pushed a “secular humanist” agenda.
This sudden eruption of religion seemed shocking and perverse to the secularist establishment. Instead of embracing one of the modern ideologies, which had proved so effective, these radical traditionalists quoted scripture and cited archaic laws and principles that were quite alien to twentieth-century political discourse. Their initial success seemed inexplicable;
it was (surely?) impossible to run a modern state along these lines.
The fundamentalists seemed engaged in an atavistic return to the past.
Further, the enthusiasm and the support that these policies inspired were an affront.
Those Americans and Europeans who had imagined that religion had had its day were now forced to see that not only could the old faiths still inspire a passionate allegiance, but that millions of committed Jews, Christians, and Muslims loathed the secular, liberal culture of which they were so proud. In fact, as we have seen, the fundamentalist resurgence was neither sudden nor surprising. For decades, the more conservative religious people who felt, for different reasons, slighted, oppressed, and even persecuted by their secular governments, had been seething with resentment. Many had withdrawn from modern society to create a sacred reservation of pure faith.
Convinced that they were in danger of being wiped out by regimes committed to their destruction, they felt embattled and defensive. They had evolved ideologies to mobilize the faithful in a struggle for survival. Surrounded by social forces that were either indifferent to religion or hostile to it, they had developed a siege mentality that could easily tip over into aggression. By the mid-1970s, the time was ripe. All had become aware of their strength, and were convinced that a crisis was at hand and that they were facing a unique moment in their history. All were determined to change the world before it changed them. In their view, history had taken a fatal turn; everything was awry. They now lived in societies which had either marginalized or excluded God, and they were ready to re-sacralize the world.
Secularists must abandon their proud self-reliance, which made man the measure of all things, and acknowledge the sovereignty of the divine.
Secularist observers had, for the most part, been unaware of this religious reaction. The various societies had become so polarized that liberals in the United States or Westernized secularists in a country such as Iran tended to underestimate the religious counterculture that had been developing over the years. They were wrong to imagine that this aggressive piety belonged to the old world; these were modern forms of faith that were often highly innovative, ready to jettison centuries of tradition. At the same time as the fundamentalists, in all three religions, had rejected modernity, they had also been influenced by modern ideas and enthusiasms. But they had a lot to learn. These early offensives represented the glory days of the fundamentalist era, but, as we shall see in the following chapter, it is very difficult for a religiously inspired movement to retain its integrity once it has entered the plural, rational, and pragmatic world of modern politics. A revolution against tyranny could become tyrannical in its turn; a campaign to abolish the separations of modernity in order to achieve an integrated, holistic state could become totalitarian; the translation of the mythical, messianic, or mystical visions of the fundamentalists into political logoi was dangerous.
But at first, fundamentalists felt that after decades of humiliation and oppression they carried all before them and that they would indeed reconquer the world for God.
The Iranian Revolution was the event that first drew the attention of the world to the fundamentalist potential, but it was not the first movement to make a successful venture into the world of politics. We have seen that after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Kookists in Israel had been convinced that the Jewish people were engaged in a war against the forces of evil. The war had been a warning; redemption was under way, but if the government was determined to promote policies that would impede the messianic process, they themselves must take the initiative. Somewhat to their surprise, they had found secularist allies, who did not share the vision of Rabbi Kook, but who were equally determined to hold on to every inch of occupied territory.
People who were neither Kookists nor observant Jews, such as the army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, or the nuclear physicist and ultra nationalist Yuval Ne’eman, were willing to work with the religious Zionists to secure the occupied territories for Israel. In February 1974, a group of rabbis, hawkish young secularists, Kookists and other religious Zionists who had served in the IDF and fought in Israel’s wars formed a group which they called Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.”
Shortly afterward, they put together a position paper outlining their objectives. The Gush would not be a political party, competing for seats in the Knesset, but a pressure group, working to bring about “a great awakening of the Jewish people towards full implementation of the Zionist vision, realizing that this vision originates in Israel’s Jewish heritage, and that its objective is the full redemption of Israel and the entire world.” Where the early Zionists had cast religion aside, the Gush insisted on rooting their movement in Judaism.
Where secular members of the Gush could interpret the word “redemption” in a looser, more political sense, the religious activists who had adopted Rabbi Kook’s holistic vision were convinced that messianic redemption had already begun, and that unless the Jewish people were settled in the whole of Eretz Israel there would be no peace for the rest of the world.
From the start, Gush Emunim posed a challenge to secular Israel. The position paper emphasized the failure of the old Zionism. Even though Jews were engaged in a fierce struggle for survival in their land,
we are witnessing a process of decline and retreat from the realization of the Zionist ideal, in word and deed. Four related factors are responsible for this crisis: mental weariness and frustration induced by the extended conflict; the lack of challenge;
preference for selfish goals; the attenuation of Jewish faith.
It was the last cause--the weakening of religion--which, in the view of the religious members of the Gush, was crucial. Divorced from Judaism, Zionism, they believed, could make no sense. At the same time as the Kookists sought to conquer the occupied territories from the Arabs, they were also engaged in a war against secular Israel. They were determined to replace the old socialist and nationalist discourse with the language of the Bible. Where Labor Zionists had sought to normalize Jewish life and make Jews “like all the other nations,” the Gush Emunim emphasized the “uniqueness” of the people of Israel; because Jews had been chosen by God, they were essentially different from all other nations and were not bound by the same rules.
The Bible made it clear that as a “holy” people, Israel was set apart, in a category of its own. Where Labor Zionism had tried to incorporate the liberal humanism of the modern West, Gush Emunim believed that Judaism and Western culture were antithetical. There was, therefore, for Kookists, no way that secular Zionism could ever have worked. Their task was to reclaim Zionism for religion, correct the mistakes of the past, and make history right again.
The near-disaster of the Yom Kippur War had shown that it was essential to act immediately in order to hasten the redemptive process, which the policies of the “false” secular Zionism had retarded. It would take over a year for the Gush Emunim to develop fully, but eventually it provided its members with a total way of life. There would be a Gush style of dress, music, decor, books, and choice of children’s names, and even a particular style of speech. Over the years, the Gush created a counterculture that enabled members to withdraw, in time-honored fundamentalist style, from secular Israel. There was a certain aggression, however, in the way religious members of the Gush flaunted their piety and Torah observance. In the early years of the state, secular Israelis had ridiculed Jews who wore traditional skullcaps; now these pious activists sported the knitted kipa, which became an item of radical religious chic. The cadres of the Gush saw themselves as more authentically Jewish and Zionist than the Laborites, linking themselves not only with such holy warriors of ancient times as Joshua, David, and the Maccabees, but also with such Zionist heroes as Theodor Herzl, BenGurion, and the early pioneers, who were also possessed by a mystical vision of sorts, and had sometimes been regarded as madmen in their own day.
While the secular and religious members of the Gush had been occupied in the establishment of their organization, a group of Kookists, with the help of the veteran settler Moshe Levinger, attempted to create agarin (a “seed,” or nucleus, for a small settlement) in a railway depot near the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank. This was a sacred area for Jews: Nablus occupied the site of the biblical city of Shechem, associated with Jacob and Joshua.
The settlers were attempting to re-sacralize land which, in their view, was profaned by the Palestinians. They called their settlement Elon Moreh, one of the city’s other biblical names, and tried to turn their railway depot into a yeshiva for the study of sacred texts. They also agreed to join Gush Emunim.
The government tried to dislodge the settlers, since the ga ring was illegal, but the Gush felt no need to comply with the declarations of the United Nations that demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, since Jews were not bound by the laws of other peoples.
The settlers won considerable support in Israel, while the government seemed feeble and hesitant. In April 1975, Moshe Levinger led a msrch of twenty thousand Jews into the West Bank. From his tent in Elon Moreh, which he called his “war situation room,” he negotiated with Israeli defense minister Shimon Peres. There was a battle with soldiers of the IDF: no shots were fired, but rocks were hurled and rifle butts used. Eventually, Peres was flown in by helicopter, confronted Levinger in his tent, and after the meeting, the rabbi stormed out, tearing his white shirt in the traditional sign of mourning. As elections were looming and Peres feared to lose the religious vote, he finally caved in and in December 1975, he agreed to accommodate thirty of the Elon Moreh settlers in a nearby army camp.
Levinger was carried in a triumphal procession on the shoulders of cheering youths. A thin, balding man, with a straggling beard, thick glasses, and a gun perpetually slung over his shoulder, Levinger had become a new kind of Jewish hero. For some, the Settler was beginning to rank alongside the Zaddik, the Torah scholar, and the Hasid. He also won the support of secularists.
“Levinger symbolizes the return of Zionism,” maintained the veteran and self-confessed terrorist Geula Cohen.
“He is standing like a candle in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical names for the West Bank]. He is the leader of the Zionist revolution.