Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.
Changing the currency will empty your shopping cart.
David Harrington Watt's Antifundamentalism in Modern America gives us a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture.
David Harrington Watt teaches at Haverford College, where he is the Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies. He is the author of Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power and A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism and coeditor of Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History.
"David Harrington Watt's expertly researched and refreshingly straightforward book is an essential contribution both to public and policy debates about religion in the twenty-first century and to the study of the history of comparative religion."
L. Benjamin Rolsky, Monmouth University:
"[H]is prose is crisp and easily accessible from both popular and academic vantages. What's even more impressive is the fact that such a style embodies decades of nuanced thinking and discernment when it comes to the academic study of global fundamentalism. In these senses, Watt's work embodies what scholarly publishing is capable of in the early decades of the twenty-first century: engaging prose backed by dense networks of historiographic insight and archival density.... In short, Antifundamentalism in Modern America is a significant contribution to at least three separate but interrelated fields of academic inquiry: American religious history, religious studies, and American history. For historians writ large, Watt's text offers a well-supported argument through the use of multiple archives and close readings of primary source material."
Diane Winston, University of Southern California, author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army:
"A work of both intellect and emotion, Antifundamentalism in Modern America transcends traditional scholarship. It is a timely and provocative book that deserves wide readership.David Harrington Watt questions taken-for-granted assumptions about fundamentalism, probing to understand the meaning, uses, and political work that surround this familiar term. His intention is not just to retrieve fundamentalism's original meaning, but also to explore how and why it came to characterize so much more than its initial denotation of a specific strand of American Protestantism. Watt stakes out the word’s journey through academia, sermons, newspapers, and popular culture, explaining its early and ongoing attraction for secular and religious polemicists. He also shows why from the 1970s on, 'fundamentalist' became a convenient label for religious others who roiled the burgeoning secular and capitalist global world order."
Rosemary R. Corbett:
"Watt is a keenly observant commentator who effortlessly blends media analysis with intellectual history, archival work with examinations of contemporary events. His prose is engaging without sacrificing depth or rigor. Perhaps most impressively, Watt is an even-handed and even generous critic of those with whom he disagrees. When it comes to the subject of fundamentalism, such equipoise is almost astonishing. But that is part of the point. Only by ratcheting down the rhetoric can one begin to dismantle the machinery that has built the targeting of ostensible fundamentalists—particularly Muslims, and often violently—into a pillar of statecraft at home and abroad."
Mark A. Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, author of Protestantism: A Very Short Introduction:
"Antifundamentalism in Modern America is an important book. David Harrington Watt shows that the term 'fundamentalism' has been used far more to critique and control than to analyze. He argues that its application to several varieties of conservative Protestants, Muslims, and others suffers grievously from lack of first-hand knowledge of the groups described, judgment masked by purportedly neutral language, and a blithe disregard for historical understanding."
Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.
