The Christian Ragnarok

They've been around since Sir Walter. This naive SF kid thought progress would edge 'em out and make 'em fade away. Moreover, this spiritual outlook dates back millennia and is at odds with the material world which is regarded as evil, even among those who love and understand how to live and work in it, building nations from raw nature. The method? Force.

The classic interpretation to fundamentalism is that it was a rural (and small-town) backlash to modern urban-industrial life. The frontier-prowess contingent of colonialist settlers felt culturally displaced as cities became more diverse, secular, and scientifically oriented.

Now always remember, we're spirits in a material world. A picture of the world is as much neuro-glandular as it is cognitive-cerebral. This is the molecular question. I suppose it is implicit in the classical SF I read. My precarious experiences were informed by a more adaptive consensus that included jet planes, syringes, rockets, and running water. And evolutionary striving. This could be what drives Musk to the stars as a moral imperative.

The 1920s culture wars were reinforced by the flattening s-curve of the prevailing economic system. Always remember American history is not isolated from the rest of the culture that grew up in the Roman ruins. The Gilded Age here was the Fin de siècle over there.

I don't know when the "mountain-meanness" waxed so significant but the easy anger verging on hate is a matter of my personal experience. Its persistence is one of the factors that set the course of my intellectual life. The 1920s wasn't merely a response to WW I. Instead, it's more correct to view WW I as a response to the flattening s-curve. Call it a historical cycle in civilizational evolution. Keep in mind that evolution also includes regression. And the psychological reaction to it. Maybe neglecting this contextual way of thinking about it is the reason Libs have been blindsided. PBS is unable to produce a series about our inner Nyarlatheps. Maybe it's no coincidence that the Cthulu mythos was formulated during the Roaring Twenties. I call it the chthonic level; you might call it the Jungian Shadow. In the intellectual revolution of the 6th century BCE, it appeared as the Zoroastrian Ormazd.

As urban America embraced consumerism, new social norms, and scientific modernism, rural America felt called upon to defend traditional Protestant values and felt threatened by immigration, pluralism, and new ideas. I remember the Campus Crusade motto of "One Way" with the up-pointing finger. Ignore the variants; git holistic. This is the theology of the cornered rat ready to fight to the death.

This is how deep the theological roots are. Ernest Sandeen and later scholars argue that fundamentalism was not merely a sociological backlash but a theologically coherent movement rooted in dispensational premillennialism and Princeton Theology's doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The whole story has to include the culture lag overlapping with the avant-garde and a self-conscious theological project. Instead of the Lotus, think of the Gothic Cathedral.

I think Spengler was right to call our culture Faustian.

But in terms of proximate social factors, there's the rapid immigration into cities which created cultural anxiety among "old stock whites" who were reluctant to include Irish as white people. That's how reactive it got. The influx of blacks into Yankee cities promoted the Irish in this world-picture.

Urban scientific institutions promoted evolution and higher criticism of the Bible, provoking backlash. Many fundamentalists felt like “strangers in their own land,” culturally displaced by urban modernity.

The theological factors include this organized intellectual lineage. It was not simply anti-modern, it was a competing vision of modernity. It's a counter-cosmology, a protean urge that approaches a conclusive form. Here in the States, the Archangel Michael has strapped on a six-shooter and is loaded for bear.

Coming as it did on the eve of a Toynbeean Time of Troubles (my Epochal Crisis foreshadowed [this time] by bank panics and labor unrest) in which urbanization and the cultural changes it brought were major catalysts,  this Protestant reaction to the threat included, on the religious plane, the formulation of a counter-cosmology that harks back to Persian dualism.

It wasn't fundamentalism and creationism yet. This culmination drew upon a world-picture that predates Plato and his distrust of the senses.

The colonial settlers lived inside a fully religious world-picture. Religion in colonial America “was fully integrated into the lives of the colonists and completely informed their world view.” The colonies were founded as “plantations of religion” by people fleeing persecution and seeking to build a “city on a hill” or “holy experiment.”

Religion wasn’t a compartment of life; it was the cosmic frame. Time, law, morality, community, and identity were all interpreted through scripture.  The wilderness itself was read as a theological landscape—a proving ground, a testing ground, a stage for providence. This is exactly the “old‑time religion” sensibility: a world saturated with divine meaning.

The frontier intensified this religious cosmology  

The Harvard piece emphasizes that the frontier myth—from the 17th century onward—functioned as a sacred narrative. It offered a “sacred history” of regeneration through crossing new frontiers. It cast settlers as providential agents transforming wilderness into a new Eden. It encoded a world-picture in which expansion was not just political but spiritually charged.

The frontier didn’t secularize settlers; it amplified their providential world-picture. This is why revivalism, millennialism, and populist Protestantism flourished on the frontier. The landscape itself reinforced a cosmic drama: God + wilderness + chosen people + destiny.

Unquestioned and unchallenged, it wasn't fundamentalism yet. And it's continuing: fundamentalism, creationism, evangelicalism.

It persists as the substrate. A literalist, providential, scripture‑centered world-picture; a sense of chosenness; a belief that society must be ordered by God’s revealed truth.  Suspicion of pluralism and heterodoxy has armored their cognition in a compartment secure from education. Acing symbolic logic class in college does not reflect the acceptance of a liberal education or an appreciation of the humanities as refracted through the lens of a progressive world-picture. No neuroglandular actor wants his or her precious agency left out of a cosmic drama of good vs. evil unfolding in real time.

This is the cultural and theological soil from which fundamentalism later grows.

I used to wonder why you don't appreciate this fact. You must be compartmentalized, too, living in a bubble like today's American liberals. You must be doting on the optimism that emerged during the Long Century after the defeat of Napoleon (who was the political culmination of the previous Time of Troubles when it was commercial capitalism that was in an epochal crisis. Today it's Yankee Finance, austerity, farm auctions, and deindustrialization. American asset-stripping has set the stage for a new Battle of Britain, too. The aggressor nation is Us. And the Pax Americana has gone rogue. This empire has helped you to preserve your naive, incautious optimism, your sunny dispositions.

Colonial and frontier religion provided the world‑picture that later fundamentalism inherited, intensified, and weaponized. It was not yet fundamentalism, but it was the proto‑cosmos: a totalizing religious frame that shaped identity, morality, and destiny. Most potently, perhaps, is that it also gives its true believers a sense of belonging.

You must also stop blinking incomprehensively at their odious vicar. He is permitted every atrocity. Mark Twain knew this.