David Harrington Watt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780801448270
- eISBN:
- 9781501708541
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801448270.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter examines three texts of the 1930s and 1940s that built upon and went beyond the polemics of the 1920s. The first, H. Richard Niebuhr's “Fundamentalism,” appeared in a highly respected ...
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This chapter examines three texts of the 1930s and 1940s that built upon and went beyond the polemics of the 1920s. The first, H. Richard Niebuhr's “Fundamentalism,” appeared in a highly respected reference work published in 1931, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The second, an informal memo by Talcott Parsons called “Memorandum: The Development of Groups and Organizations Amenable to Use against American Institutions and Foreign Policy,” was written in 1940. The third text is Carl F. H. Henry's 1947 book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. During this time, antifundamentalism embedded itself in standard reference works in a way that suggested that it was a simple truth, not one side of a controversy.Less
This chapter examines three texts of the 1930s and 1940s that built upon and went beyond the polemics of the 1920s. The first, H. Richard Niebuhr's “Fundamentalism,” appeared in a highly respected reference work published in 1931, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The second, an informal memo by Talcott Parsons called “Memorandum: The Development of Groups and Organizations Amenable to Use against American Institutions and Foreign Policy,” was written in 1940. The third text is Carl F. H. Henry's 1947 book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. During this time, antifundamentalism embedded itself in standard reference works in a way that suggested that it was a simple truth, not one side of a controversy.
