107 - Religious Right, Religious Wrong: A Critique of the Fundamentalist Phenomenon .

Religious Right, Religious Wrong: A Critique of the Fundamentalist Phenomenon
By Lloyd J. Averill
New York, Pilgrim Press, 1989. 196 pp. $9.95.

In 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick declared that fundamentalists were displaying "one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance" that American churches had ever seen. After seventy years, the liberal Protestant response to fundamentalism has not changed. Lloyd J. Averill, professor at the University of Washington and Northwest Theological Union and a self-conscious liberal evangelical, writes this book to show that fundamentalism is a distortion of the gospel and to help "mainstream" Christians formulate a response. He devotes separate chapters to fundamentalism's origins, its affirmation of an inerrant Bible, its political aspirations, and its millenarian beliefs. In the final analysis, what bothers Averill is the same thing that bothered Fosdick. Fundamentalists are uncivil, intolerant, and, therefore, alarming. According to Averill, fundamentalism is "a faith turned in upon itself and consequently ungenerous and unlovely in its religion, flawed in its understanding of history, and dangerous in its politics."

Unfortunately, this book reveals more about the author's own faith than it does about the New Christian Right. Averill treats the movement strictly as a religious phenomenon and misses its wider social and cultural context. Indeed, recent research has suggested that fundamentalism is better understood as the response of conservative Protestants who, through the processes of modernization and the expansion of the state, have had contrary values and ideals forced upon them and their communities. Had Averill considered the problems arising from these large-scale changes, his critique of fundamentalism may not have been more sympathetic, but it would have been more informative.

D. G. Hart
Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals
Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.