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Although no one has ever tried to trace in detail the historic links between the radical right of the depression and post-depression periods and the fundamentalism of the 1920’s, there are some suggestive continuities among the leaders. Many of the leaders of right-wing groups have been preachers, or ex-preachers, or sons of preachers with rigid religious upbringings. Some of the men associated with Billy Sunday in the mid-thirties later turned up as right-wing or quasi-fascist agitators. Gerald Winrod of Kansas, one of the most prominent right-wing prophets of our time, began his career of agitation as a crusading anti-evolutionist. Another, Gerald L. K. Smith, was a minister’s son and a preacher for the Disciples of Christ. The late J. Frank Norris, a Southern Baptist preacher in the forefront of the anti-evolution crusade in Texas, later became one of the most colorful right-wing messiahs. Carl McIntire, a leading organizer of contemporary right-wing opposition to modernism, was originally a protoge of the high brow fundamentalist, J. Gresham Manchen. The more recent resurgence of the right wing in the John Birch Society and various “Christian Crusaders” has made the fundamentalist orientation of a large segment of the right wing more conspicuous than at any time in the past; the movement has been led, to a great extent, by preachers and ex-preachers. The literature of the extreme right also shows a significant continuity in style–indicative of the degree to which the pattern of fundamentalism has become the pattern of militant nationalism. (It was an appropriate sense of this continuity that Gerald L. K. Smith named his paper The Cross and the Flag.)

It is not mere opportunism that causes the politically minded fundamentalist to gravitate toward the far right. No less than others, fundamentalists like to feel that they have a comprehensive world view, and their minds are more satisfied when religious and political antipathies can be linked togther. They have developed a gift for combining seemingly irrelevant animosities so as to make them mutually re-enforcing. For example, just as contemporary fundamentalists have linked their religious sentiments to the cold war, the fundamentalists of the twenties responded to the issues of the First World War and residual anti-German feeling. It was one of their most common arguments against the modernists that higher criticism of the Bible has received its strongest impetus from German scholarship; they were thus able to forge a link between the German amorality supposedly revealed by wartime atrocity stories and the destructive moral effects of Biblical criticism. This case was argued at various levels of sophistication, perhaps most simply and informally by Billy Sunday: “In 1895 at the Potsdam Palace the Kaiser called his statesmen together and outlined his plan for world domination, and he was told that the German people would never stand by and endorse it, as it was not in line with the teaching of Martin Luther. Then the Kaiser cried, ‘We will change the religion of Germany then,’ and higher criticism began.”

There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies of political intolerance and ethnic prejudice have shown that zealous church-going and rigid religious faith are among the correlates of political and ethnic animosity. It is the existence of this type of mind that sets the stage for the emergence of the one-hundred percenter and determines the similarity of style between the modern right wing and the fundamentalist. In fact, the conditions of the cold war and the militant spirit bred by the constant struggle against world Communism have given the fundamentalist mind a new lease on life. Like almost everything else in our world, fundamentalism itself has been considerably secularized, and this process of secularization has yielded a type of pseudo-political mentality whose way of thought is best understood against the historical background of the revivalist preacher and the camp meeting. The fundamentalist mind has had the bitter experience of being routed in the field of morals and censorship, on evolution and Prohibition, and it finds itself increasingly submerged in a world in which the great and respectable media of mass communication violates its sensibilities and otherwise ignore it. In a modern, experimental, and “sophisticated” society, it has been elbowed aside and made a figure of fun, and even much of the religious “revival” of our time is genteel and soft spoken in a way that could never have satisfied the old fashioned fundamentalist zeal. But in politics the secularized fundamentalism of our time has found a new kind of force and a new punitive capacity. The political climate of the post war era has given the fundamentalist type powerful new allies among other one hundred percenters: rich men some of them still loyal to a fundamentalist upbringing, stung by the income tax and still militant against the social reforms of the New Deal; isolationist groups and militant nationalists; Catholic fundamentalists, ready to unite for the first time with their former persecutors on the issue of “Godless Communism”; and Southern reactionaries newly animated about the fight over desegregation.

One reason the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right wing views of the world. Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane.

The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with this: it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that for all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a variant of Communism, which everyone knows, is atheism. Whereas the distinctively political intelligence begins with the political world, and attempts to make an assessment of how far a given set of goals can in fact be realized in the face of a certain balance of opposing forces, the secularized fundamentalist mind begins with a definition of that which is absolutely right, ans look upon politics as an arena in which that right must be realized. It cannot think, for example, of the cold war as a question of mundane politics–that is to say, as a conflict between two systems of power that are compelled in some degree to accommodate each other in order to survive–but only as a clash of faiths. It is not concerned with the realities of power–with the fact, say, that the Soviets have the bomb–but with the spiritual battle with the Communist, preferably the domestic Communist, whose reality does not consist in what he does, or even that fact that he exists, who represents, rather, an archetypal opponent in a spiritual wrestling match. He has not one whit less reality because the fundamentalists have never met him in the flesh.

The issues of the actual world are hence transformed into a spiritual Armageddon, an ultimate reality, in which any reference to day-by-day actualities has the character of an allegorical illustration, and not of the empirical evidence that ordinary men offer for ordinary conclusions. Thus, when a right-wing leader accuses Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a conscious, dedicated agent of the international Communist conspiracy, he may seem demented, by the usual criteria of the political intelligence; but more accurately, I believe, he is quite literally out of this world. What he is trying to account for is not Eisenhower’s actual political behavior, as men commonly understand it, but Eisenhower’s place, as a kind of fallen angel, in the realm of ultimate moral and spiritual values, which to him has infinitely greater reality than mundane politics. Seen in this light, the accusation is no longer quite so willfully perverse, but appears in its proper character as a kind of sublime nonsense. Credo quia absurdum est.