History Commons^™

Review: 'God's Own Party: The Making Of The Christian Right', William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

There has been no end of predictions that the demise of the Religious Right is imminent. Over the past three decades, proof of its impending collapse has included the televangelist scandals, Pat Robertson’s failure to secure the Republican presidential nomination, the election and re-election of Bill Clinton, and the emergence of “young” evangelicals who refuse to toe the Religious Right line (this one keeps popping up).

The latest version involves the notion that economically focused libertarians of the Tea Party will inevitably find themselves in heated conflict with evangelical and fundamentalist social conservatives, thus challenging the power of the Religious …

Protestantism And Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

The term "fundamentalism" has been used to describe a host of religious movements across the globe that are militantly antimodernist, aggressively patriarchal, literalist in their reading of sacred texts, and assiduous in their efforts to draw boundaries between themselves and outsiders. While "Islamic fundamentalism" has received the most attention, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, scholars and journalists have also applied the term to movements within such disparate traditions as Judaism, Sikhism, and Hinduism, as well as to various Christian groups. There are benefits to understanding fundamentalism as a global movement that grows out of deep-seated and intense …