A few years ago the first volume coming out of the Fundamentalism
Project landed on my desk. The Fundamentalism Project was generously
funded by the MacArthur Foundation and chaired by Martin Marty, the
distinguished church historian at the University of Chicago. While a
number of very reputable scholars took part in it, and although the
published results are of generally excellent quality, my
contemplation of this first volume evoked in me what has been called
an Aha! experience.
Now, the book was very big. Sitting there on my desk, massively, it
was of the "book-weapon" type, the kind with which one could do
serious injury. So I asked myself: Why would the MacArthur Foundation
pay out several million dollars to support an international study of
religious fundamentalists? Two answers came to mind. The first was
obvious and not very interesting: The MacArthur Foundation is a very
progressive outfit; it understands fundamentalists to be
anti-progressive; the Project, then, was a matter of knowing one's
enemies. The second was a more interesting answer: So-called
fundamentalism was assumed to be a strange, difficult-to-understand
phenomenon; the purpose of the Project was to delve into this alien
world and make it more understandable.
