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The most important early victory of fundamentalist forces in the United States was the Scopes Trial of 1925. A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was put on trial in Tennessee because he used a text containing references to Darwin’s work on the evolution of species. This was a violation of state law, enacted by fundamentalists, which prohibited the teaching of any theory that denied the divine creation of man. It did not matter that Darwin himself recognized the role of the creator in his writings or that neither the teacher nor his lawyer denied the divine creation of man, only the details of the creation account. The fact that the law of the country was seen to protect their religious premises was a clear example of how the technology of the state could be seen to defeat a scientific world-view.

Although the rest of the country roundly ridiculed these notions, the fundamentalists won the courtroom battle and that was the whole point for them. The ridicule of the sophisticated intellectuals made the courtroom victory even sweeter. From the perspective of northern intellectuals, “The Monkey Trial” became another small example of what made the South outdated and decadent. But that was its very importance for the fundamentalists, who saw it as a huge victory of their values against their patronizing superiors in the north. In some ways, The Monkey Trial represents the revenge of the believers against modernists, even southerners against northerners, because it simply prevents modern notions from having legal standing. Like Islamic fundamentalism, it is riddled with willful denial. As well, there is more than a whiff of American Civil War animosity behind the battle. It is the use of modern methods to defeat the modern powerstructure which most connects American fundamentalism with the postcolonial Muslim phenomenon.

Fundamentalism represents those in Christianity who intepret Scripture literally and, by so doing, turn back the clock to an idealized Christian community of the past, based on Scripture. At the same time, it has a political agenda to reclaim and retain power for those like-minded religious brethren who object to liberal northern patronization and exploitation. Nancy Ammerman says that in the 1970s and 1980s no two words better captured its reemerged fundamentalist image and agenda than the “moral majority.”76 One did not need to be a fundamentalist Christian to be a member of the moral majority in 1979, but the converse was surely true: Fundamentalists universally identified themselves as members of the moral majority. This means that they rejected the democratic northern federal government but, unlike millenarian movements, relied on their political clout to change it. It was an early expression of what has come to be known as “the southern strategy,” the realization that the US population, hence political power, is shifting to the Sunbelt. But the demographics of power in the South are in the modern, urban, manufacturing and service sector, not in the farm belt. The genius of the “moral majority” is that it falsely suggests that these conservatives are moral, in the majority, and that they were heretofore silent. Actually statistics show that they are a very vocal minority and whether they are moral or not depends on one’s religious assumptions. The new power of the South is not now primarily expressed as religion but in ordinary political terms.

Christian fundamentalists are largely Protestant; the clergy is not often in possession of the kinds of seminary education characteristic of the normative and mainline churches and certainly not characteristic of the long schooling that Catholic priests receive. The authority of the fundamentalist clergy tends to flow from a charismatic source. Some clergy receive their authority on the basis of their ability to receive spiritual gifts themselves (speaking in tongues, singing, dancing, etc.) and inspire others to receive them. These are characteristic of the pentecostal and charismatic churches, who are like fundamentalists in some ways but often