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By Root 1379 0

’s complaints are the complaints of Provence peasants against effete Parisian courtiers and modernizing Parisian Jacobins; they are the bitter remonstrances of Alabama farmers against the cultural elites in Hollywood and New York and the out-of-touch “pols” playing special-interest games “inside the beltway.” For the revolt against modernity is a rebellion against cosmopolitanism and its urban culture and urbane entertainments. Not without good reason, the anticosmopolitan animus that drives all fundamentalist reaction has come to distrust Enlightenment: for economic growth brings burgeoning worldly needs and an obsession with gratification while the arts and sciences undermine simplicity and the natural faith of simple women and men. Enlightenment breeds secularism and secularism destroys not just formal religion but the morals on which it is based and thus the social fabric that holds communities together.

Finally, al-Banna is not so far from Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and the Christian Right’s campaign for a return to nineteenth-century family values—family values understood as direct emanations of church going, school prayer, and a Protestant Christian America. As the Muslim Brotherhood saw in Christianity a crusading corruptor, Know-Nothing American Protestants back in the 1880s saw in Mediterranean Catholic immigrants a grave peril to the American Republic, just as nervous Californians today worry about illegal Latino immigrants as a burden not only on their pocketbooks but on the moral order of their unraveling communities. To Americans, Jihad is often taken to be a foreign phenomenon, a feature of Middle Eastern politics and the Holy War between Muslim diaspora and Zionist settlers mutually obsessed with holy turf. But we can today also speak of an American Jihad. Not the American Jihad promulgated by the media focused on the World Trade Center bombers or on Arab-American supporters of Hamas—the American Jihad about which Stephen Barboza wrote his recent book.16 The American Jihad that counts is rather the antiestablishmentarian fundamentalism of the Christian Right, the Jihad of profoundly antimodern fundamentalist Protestants who rebel against the culture of disbelief generated by the McWorld that is in their midst;17 the McWorld they unearth on their prime-time television programming and rebury on their talk-radio rants; and in the secular public square where despised “liberal” politicians undermine their belief systems with textbooks that preach evolution and schools that bar prayer.

Modernity has enemies other than Islamic Holy War, then, some of them on McWorld’s own American home turf. At least since the 1730s, when America experienced its first “Great Awakening” in Protestant fundamentalism, this country has periodically felt the zeal of reactive religion. Mainstream Christian Coalition leaders today offer what is relatively speaking a moderate version of Jihad. Jerry Falwell, the president of the Moral Majority, thus sermonizes against a Supreme Court that has “raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches” and implores followers to “fight against those radical minorities who are trying to remove God from our textbooks, Christ from our nation. We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”18 Pat Buchanan tells the Republican National Convention in 1992 that the country faces a cultural war for its very survival and victorious Republicans following the 1994 elections accuse President Clinton of countercultural and un-American attitudes. Less conventional warriors such as Randall Terry, the antiabortion crusader, are far more blunt: “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country.”19 These Christian soldiers bring to their ardent campaign against time and the modern world all the indignation, all the impatience with moral