The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.

Watt, David Harrington

By Susan Friend Harding. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. xvi + 336 pp. $50.00 cloth. $18.95 paper.

The Book of Jerry Falwell, the distillation of two decades of work by one of this nation's more gifted anthropologist, is a brilliant exploration of an extremely important topic. It presents us with twelve closely-linked essays that examine Jerry Falwell, the men and women with whom he is closely associated, and the ministries and institutions that he has created. The essays generally examine matters connected with cultural politics; they focus especially on the way that rhetoric, oratory, and storytelling are deployed by Fundamentalists in contemporary North America. Indeed storytelling is, in Harding's estimation, at the very heart of the movement. She believes we cannot understand the power of Fundamentalism without paying careful attention to the narratives that Fundamentalists create, recite, hear, and live out.

Other students of Fundamentalism have seen its power as flowing from alliances with wealthy businessmen, from wizardly manipulation of the electoral process, from a knack for creating and utilizing quasi-ecclesiastical institutions, or from an ability to use radio and television to organize powerful new coalitions of Christians. Harding does not argue that any of those explanations are false; but she consistently portrays Fundamentalism's power as flowing primarily from Fundamentalists' skillful fashioning of narratives--narratives that appropriate, manipulate and refashion the language of the Bible--and from their ability to convince men and women that these Bible-based narratives are true and trustworthy. Harding believes that these narratives--which often end up inculcating what she calls "flexible absolutism"--empower Fundamentalists, and that they can, under certain circumstances, give them considerable power over non-Fundamentalists.

Harding is especially interested in exploring the ways that Fundamentalism's narratives give men power over women. She does not by any means argue that Fundamentalism is simply a patriarchal plot; indeed she goes out of her way to highlight the fact that Fundamentalists like Falwell now seem to have tacitly accepted the need for husbandly submission to wifely authority. But Harding also argues persuasively that that Falwellian Fundamentalism is, to a very large extent, a Christian men's movement whose leaders are committed to "protecting and cultivating male headship at home and in the church" (155). Harding's description and analysis of the way that a particular Fundamentalist man gained a measure of control over her own emotions and thoughts in the course of his efforts to convince her to accept Christ as her personal savior seems destined to become a minor classic in the ethnographic literature on religion in twentieth-century North America.

Throughout The Book of Jerry Falwell, Harding tries to highlight the ways in which Fundamentalism's recent history illustrates the limitations of the modernist project. She portrays Falwell's career as proof that modernists' hope of seeing each Fundamentalist "believer as a monolithic, single-minded creature, incapable of polyphony, double-coding, reflexivity, irony, parody, or self-parody" have been thoroughly dashed (226).

Harding sees Fundamentalism as a harbinger of a new world of zany amalgamations--a world in which religion and politics are not kept separate and in which traditional religious practices and global capitalism are thoroughly mingled. She prods her readers to consider the possibility that there is nothing about this impure world that is self-evidently bizarre or unnatural. What is bizarre, Harding suggests, are attempts to hold onto the certitudes of the modernist project in the thoroughly postmodern world in which we now live.

The Book of Jerry Falwell is not a perfect work of scholarship. It asserts Falwell's importance in shaping Fundamentalism in particular and North American culture in general more often than it demonstrates it. The causal connections that are posited in the book are sometimes unconvincing, and some of the arguments that are advanced on its pages outrun the evidence that is presented to support them. And it seems to me that The Book of Jerry Falwell underestimates the degree to which Fundamentalists engaged in politics in the years before Falwell rose to national prominence, and that it overstates the degree to which Falwell contests the modernist project and the assumptions that undergird it.

But these various shortcomings are overshadowed by the book's great strengths. This is a theoretically sophisticated book and a book that is based on years of careful research. The range of primary sources upon which it draws is very wide; its explication of those sources is imaginative and thought-provoking. The analyses it advances consistently cut through the cloud of cliches that envelops Falwell to show us things about him and about his world that we had previously failed to understand. The Book of Jerry Falwell is, I think, one of the most helpful examinations of North American Fundamentalism that the world of scholarship has thus far produced.

David Harrington Watt
Temple University