Fantasyland, Part 4

As Kurt Andersen progresses thorough his Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 5000 Year History (2017; Random House, 2018) he contracts his attacks on religion from a general religiosity to Protestantism to Protestant fundamentalism. Jill Lepore also writes on evangelicals and fundamentalism:

Fundamentalism did not die when Bryan's head fell on his pillow. Fundamentalism endured, and the challenge it posed to the nation's founding principles and especially to the nature of truth would be felt well into the twenty-first century.

 These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, 2018); Chapter Ten: Efficiency and the Masses; p. 418.

Andersen wrote this which gives an example of his overlap with Lepore and his differences:

Not very many call themselves fundamentalist anymore. Ever since anti- modern Christians coined  the term a century ago, fundamentalist has carried some taint. At midcentury, canny mass-marketers like Billy Graham rebranded by reviving the old term evangelical. Today the great majority of Protestants identify as evangelical, the way all  Americans call themselves middle class. Conservative evangelicals (ne fundamentalists) believe that God crated everything around 4000 B.C.E. and that Roman Catholics are going to Hell, whereas other evangelicals concede He  probably created Earth billions of years ago and that non-Protestant Christians might get to Heaven. As with America's denominational disputes from the beginning, the tendencies differ at least as much by temperament as by belief. "A fundamentalist," the religious historian  George Marsden famously said, "is an evangelical who is angry about something." 

Chapter 30: American Religion from the Turn of the Millennium; p. 268

This does make me make glad to have joined up with the Eastern Orthodox Church who do get a mention in Fantasyland:

But leaving aside the Protestant half of us aside (and Mormons and Greek Orthodox)....

p. 269

So, at least, we got some mention.  

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3/17/20 

[7/15/21: Just for the record, the Orthodox Church does have different views on creationism (for example: Evolution or Creation Science?) and creation itself (Creation And Holy Trinity).]