Because the same media managers were at war
with the fundamentalism of the religious right in this country, the reporting and commentary tended to become a running polemic against undifferentiated «religious fanaticism» that threatened the secular assumptions of Western elites who had been miseducated to believe that religion is a vestigial phenomenon from the unenlightened past.
His social liberalism and frequently voiced
frustration with fundamentalism will ruffle some viewers, but Bartlett's Catholic roots were taken seriously and dealt with powerfully.
While the authors attack the evangelicals who
broke with fundamentalism in 1947, they find themselves under attack from hyper - fundamentalist, rigorist separationists who see them seeking respectability and political power — in short, being exactly where the neoevangelicals were in 1947.
It can not be stressed too strongly, then, that if we wish to make any headway in our
encounter with fundamentalism, we must make a genuine attempt to understand and listen to its protest.
Exile, confusion and a gradual, painful articulation of their own stories in the face of accepted religious truth were the results of their
struggle with fundamentalism.
To be sure, those involved usually have represented only themselves, since Pentecostal denominational leaders generally have not endorsed formal participation in ecumenical dialogue, given the movement's historic
alliances with fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism rather than mainline Protestantism.
According to that yardstick, vitality, at least intuitively, seems to
increase with fundamentalism and decrease with the broadened perspective (some would say relativism) that comes with the oldline's historical consciousness and responsiveness to societal needs.
Among evangelicals, for example, belief in biblical literalism, church attendance, and
identification with fundamentalism or other sectarian religious movements defined these groups, while among Catholics, we used traditional Catholic beliefs, church attendance and confession, and identification with «traditional» or «progressive» movements in the Church.