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This book provides a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of analysis, and the book scrutinizes the various political purposes that the concept has been made to serve. In 1920, the conservative Baptist writer Curtis Lee Laws coined the word “fundamentalists.” The book examines the antifundamentalist polemics of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Talcott Parsons, Stanley Kramer, and Richard Hofstadter, which convinced many Americans that religious fundamentalists were almost by definition backward, intolerant, and anti-intellectual and that fundamentalism was a dangerous form of religion that had no legitimate place in the modern world. For almost fifty years, the concept of fundamentalism was linked almost exclusively to Protestant Christians. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the establishment of an Islamic republic led to a more elastic understanding of the nature of fundamentalism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans became accustomed to using fundamentalism as a way of talking about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, as well as Christians. Many Americans came to see Protestant fundamentalism as an expression of a larger phenomenon that was wreaking havoc all over the world. This book provides an overview of the way that the fear of fundamentalism has shaped American culture, and it will lead readers to rethink their understanding of what fundamentalism is and what it does.

One is reminded of just how fickle a mistress Fame can be when considering how the renown of certain historical figures only grows with time, while the reputations of countless others fade in the light of posterity. The luster of Charles Hodge’s fame has dimmed since his death in 1878. Whatever judgements exist, the truth remains that in the life of Charles Hodge one finds a stunning panoramic view of nineteenth-century Protestantism. His story touches many, if not all, of the most critical developments in American Christianity of his era, and it is impossible to deny that he exercised a profound influence in his day with lasting consequences after his death. American Presbyterianism, American Calvinism, and much of twentieth-century Protestant Fundamentalism are deeply indebted to Hodge’s theological thinking. This book offers the first biography of Hodge to appear in one hundred and thirty years. Thus, this work stands as the only modern synthetic work of his entire life and thought, and it is built upon the conviction that few Americans can match the depth, breadth, and longevity of Hodge’s theological influence. There are few figures better able to help one appreciate the immensely powerful and hugely complex nature of conservative American Protestantism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries than the deeply pious, keenly intelligent, and yet largely forgotten Charles Hodge.