Word: fundamentalist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...turned 75 this week, an occasion for some reckoning of a life and career full of blessings and contradictions. Everyone has a preferred ; description. George Bush called him "America's pastor." Harry Truman called him a "counterfeit" and publicity seeker. Pat Boone considers him "the greatest person since Jesus." Fundamentalist leader Bob Jones III says Graham "has done more harm to the cause of Christ than any other living man." Biographer William Martin calls him "an icon not just of American Christianity but of America itself...
...Biblical purity, however, did not protect him from conservative attacks. Over the years, strict Fundamentalists came to see Graham as a traitor for his willingness to work with everyone -- Catholics, Anglicans, even liberal modernists -- to bring the unchurched into the tent. "Fundamentalist is a grand and wonderful word," Graham says now, "but it got off track and into so many extreme positions." Their hostility pained him far more than the sneers of liberals. "I felt," Graham admits, "like my own brothers had turned against...
...recent years, there has come a curious reversal. Fundamentalist leaders who once shunned the political realm began to move forcefully into it, bearing a moral agenda for family values and school prayer, against abortion and gay rights. And Graham, in a sense, returned to the pure power of the pulpit, preaching as forcefully as ever of the need for moral renewal but without allying himself with the political activism of the religious right. "I can identify with them on theology, probably, in many areas," he says, "but in the political emphases they have, I don't, because...
...every now and then, you come across a situation where these revered principles come into conflict. For instance, should skinheads be allowed to distribute racist propaganda in the streets? Should reactionary fundamentalist groups like AALARM be allowed to post homophobic posters? Should prominent Harvard professors be chastised for chauvinist commentary...
Americans are still dealing in misconceptions about theologically conservative Christianity. Consider the critical success of Walter Kirn's She Needed Me, a novel about a love affair between a fundamentalist Christian anti-abortion rights protester and the pregnant woman he stops from entering a clinic. Everyone from Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal has praised the book; even Sassy raves that the novel should be recommended "to anyone who is serious about understanding all possible perspectives of our current abortion issue...