In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement. By Michael Lienesch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xii, 338 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3096-3.)

Abstract

Michael Lienesch's fine study of American fundamentalism is arranged around theoretical structures supplied by the social scientific study of social movements: identity, mobilization, framing, alignment, opportunities, and staging, among others. Lienesch tries to balance “an attempt to apply some of the best theoretical tools that scholars have devised in order to understand political movements” with “a book about the practice of politics, complete with colorful characters and detailed descriptions of events” (p. 7). Social scientists looking for an extension of their theoretical approach to social movements might be disappointed as Lienesch does not seem interested in challenging or changing the standard structures of social movement theory. By contrast, historians will be pleased that Lienesch uses social movement theory to recast our understanding of the fundamentalist movement in the twentieth-century United States. Indeed, this book could be a case study of how social theory can be fruitfully applied to historical work to uncover what might otherwise be hidden.