‘You and Me Against the World’: Christian Fundamentalists and White Poverty in the USA

Abstract

One of the most surprising trends in postwar religion, particularly in the West, has been the growth in fundamentalism in nearly all of the world religions, most notably in Islam and Christianity. The emergence of a revitalized and often radicalized fundamentalism as a key political and social force caught most sociologists of religion napping. As Ammerman (1993: 2), Marsden (1983: 150) and Marty and Appleby (1991: vii) all note, fundamentalism did not fit the overly neat secularization model which has dominated sociological analyses of religion for nearly a century Theoretical approaches within the secularization thesis had promoted the view that institutional ‘conventional’ religion (Wollte, 1993: 309–10) was increasingly marginalized from its traditional bases of political, social and moral authority. What religiosity remained among populations was ‘privatized’ and so idiosyncratic that it bore no ‘social significance’ (Wallis and Bruce, 1992; Wilson, 1966). Secularization, along with shifts toward modernization, rationalization, and societalization (see Wallis and Bruce, 1992), have all supposedly moved religion in this direction. Leading secularization theorists, such as Wilson (1966), did anticipate modest fundamentalist growth as a consequence of secularization: they suggested that the fundamentalist would seek refuge from the unbearable forces of modernity within a ‘back to basics’ meaning system.