Word: fundamentalistism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Missouri Bible college as an ordained Baptist minister, he started the Thomas Road Church in Lynchburg and began to broadcast his services on radio. Within a year his membership jumped from 35 to nearly a thousand. Falwell was a smooth storyteller and his blunt, biting tongue gave his Fundamentalist listeners a new sense of confidence. He thundered against adultery, drinking and premarital sex. He built his church audience with a series of stunts, importing Christian karate experts to smash blocks of ice in front of the congregation and exhibiting the "world's tallest Christian," a 7-ft. 8-in. wrestler...
Another aspect of Falwell's crusade has received less attention but is at least as important in its implications. He is mobilizing and altering the consciousness of that once insular component of American religion known as Fundamentalism. Before Falwell, Fundamentalist preachers denounced evil in "the world" in order to compel their flocks into strict isolation from it. Nowadays those same jeremiads are a stern call to social action. "When I was growing up," recalls Fundamentalist Pastor Keith Gephart of Alameda, Calif., "I always heard that churches should stay out of politics. Now it seems almost...
...clear, as critics have claimed, that this sort of theology is tied to other Fundamentalist ideas on geopolitics. However, the Fundamentalists are fiercely anti-Communist and, for that reason, support a strong military and favor U.S. involvement in the affairs of other nations if it can be justified as opposition to Communist encroachment. Fear of pro-Soviet radicals is the basic reason Falwell would risk opprobrium to support South Africa's present regime. Unlike many other American religious groups, Fundamentalists typically favor an extensive U.S. nuclear arsenal...
Nonetheless, this single-minded force is waging its campaign for social retrenchment at what may be a propitious time. Fundamentalists detect a widespread feeling in America of spiritual bafflement and dissatisfaction. Many commentators outside the movement agree. Sociologist Rodney Stark of the University of Washington, no Fundamentalist himself, thinks that the religious right makes quite accurate assessments. Antireligion and amorality have in fact been spreading in the public schools, he asserts, and "a majority of Americans are scandalized" by the apparent flouting of traditional values on television and in the press. Similarly, Michael Novak, the neoconservative Roman Catholic, says that...
Preachers of this conservative message have long sought to disseminate it to millions by means of radio and television. About 1,000 of the 9,642 U.S. radio stations have a religious format, and the vast majority of their programming is Evangelical or Fundamentalist in tone. The same is true of television. A 1984 survey estimated that regular viewers of religious TV shows number more than 13 million. When politics comes up on these broadcasts, as it increasingly does, the message is resolutely "pro-family" and conservative. The TV empires greatly increase the public clout of conservative preachers, who have...