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The cultural contradictions of: Christian fundamentalism: in the second part of his essay, Guy Rundle continues to make links between Christian fundamentalism and hyper-modernity.

Article Excerpt
For many years, the more extreme forms of fundamentalism found their most receptive audiences among individuals and groups damaged or marginalised by the society around them. The lonely, the ignored, the beaten down, criminals, alcoholics and others were attracted and transformed by both the unambiguously proselytised notion of a loving, anthropomorphic, interventionist God, and by the techniques for self-development that such churches offered. For many this was accomplished by the surrender to the notion of an other that would give a sense of self-worth and connection via conscience to others.

This was similar to the first of the twelve 'steps' of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), founded at around the same time--the 1930s--as Pentecostalism was beginning to find its form as a distinct religious current. AA asked its members to surrender their will to a 'higher power' in order to establish an element of external control on selves that did not have sufficient resources to regain control from within--the 'surrender to a higher power' was, in effect, a form of civilisational regression on an individual scale in which someone who had failed to complete the modern journey to continent and controlled selfhood could return to an earlier form of strict and unquestioning obedience to an external Law. Fundamentalism often performed the same effect, or went hand-in-hand with membership of such groups, because it gave many people who had been denied the necessary processes of self-development--those from chaotic or abusive homes, lifelong criminals, for example--another manner by which they could live in the world, and achieve an existence that had meaning over time and was not simply an eternal present of criminality or self-obliteration.

The 'saved' person thus became something of a pejorative caricature of such churches--that their stock in trade was simply those who had failed in modernity, that they were a form of compensation for gaps in selfhood. It is certainly a caricature that no longer does any justice to the congregations of the churches today. If they were once based not only among the deeply distressed but also among those who had been discarded--the long-term unemployed, the unemployably ill or disabled--the bulk of their congregation is now derived from those the next level 'up', in terms of access to social power and identity. They are overwhelmingly people who could be said to be 'lower middle class', in cultural terms, even though their income and employment makes them working class. They are people in service professions, franchisees, low status office workers and the like, predominantly based in the outer suburbs and tending to be from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds.

In other words, their situation is one in which there is little access to a living tradition that would supply a measure of meaning and identity--neither that of the classic industrial working class, nor the ethnic identity of immigrant cultures, nor the remnant communal self-sufficiency of rural life. They are drawn from the vast suburban nets of new housing and, compared to earlier generations of converts, often materially well off. They break the stereotype of the old style of fundamentalist convert because nothing in their life is particularly disastrous or wrong--it is simply a way of life with a hole in it, through which meaning leaks out.

In the frontier societies--predominantly the US and Australia--where several generations of suburbanisation have created a post-historical world in which meaning-giving social struggles or collective identities have become distant memories, fundamentalism offers a gloss of a meaningful and purposive universe that can be added to a life centred in acquisition and consumption without disrupting it. It is the break that is not a break. Where the 'ascetic' protestant sects that originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--from the Seventh Day Adventists to the exclusive brethren--demand a break with any source of worldly comfort...

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