Catholic Fundamentalism in America

Abstract

This book represents an important contribution to the study of both American religion and American Catholicism. Until recently, the word “fundamentalism” was understood to be a singularly Protestant phenomenon emerging out of a fragile alliance between evangelicals, premillennialists, Princeton theology advocates, and biblical literalists. This book proves that presumption to be wrong: a distinctively Catholic form of the fundamentalist impulse emerged shortly after the end of World War II and has grown significantly since. Like their Protestant second cousins, Catholic fundamentalists combine a sectarian understanding of religion with a militant anti-modernist stance. Also like the Protestant fundamentalists, Catholic devotees of the impulse have sought (and found) political conservatives who make common cause on a range of political and cultural issues (the place of women in American culture, the value of pluralism with the Church and the larger culture, the importance of cooperation in the culture with non-Catholics, etc.). This book thus makes a singular contribution in understanding the similarities and the differences between Protestant and Catholic conservatives in the United States in the years after 1945.