Free Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective by Lawrence Kaplan Page A

correct way to interpret the need for "separation from apostasy." A third source of division is, to some extent, related to this second point. Conservative Protestants are also divided on the issue of legislating righteousness. Their ambivalence about imposing their morality on others who do not share their views has its roots in a genuine commitment to democracy. At points I have talked about pragmatic accommodation as if it were something distasteful which the circumstances of the American polity has forced on the NCR. While there is a certain economy in presenting the story in that manner, if left unqualified it does an injustice to the con-

 

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servative Protestant tradition. Conservative Protestantism contains within it a tension between the obligation for the saints to rule righteously (even if that means imposing righteousness on the unregenerate), and the equally strong commitment to every individual's ability to discern the will of God. Although the latter tendency is theocratic rather than democratic, in practice it results in the same thing. And it is certainly the case that conservative Protestants have historically played a major part in the promotion of democracy and bourgeois individualism. It is the tragedy (in the strict sense of the word) of conservative Protestantism that one of its most valued consequences also undermines the conditions for its survival as the key source of values for a whole society rather than as the partial world view of a self-selecting minority of saints. This is the moral to be drawn from the many surveys that show ambivalence among conservative Protestants about movements such as the Moral Majority. On the one hand, conservative Protestants want to see the world "returned to biblical standards." On the other, their theology, ecclesiology, and history give them a strongly felt commitment to freedom of choice.
Some conservative Protestants choose pietistic retreat from the world on its own intrinsic merits as an alternative to imposing their righteousness on the unregenerate. For others it has been a sensible reaction to the failure of their more activist phases. The Reformed Presbyterians are a good example. In the early days of the Reformation in Scotland, the Reformed Presbyterians (or Covenanters) were the most radical "impositionists." When they failed to win over the majority of the Church, they maintained their rhetoric of the saints and the civil magistrate working in a godly harmony, while effectively retreating from the world. The American conservative Protestant tradition displays frequent alternation between periods of active involvement and retreat. Even when the activist element has been dominant there have been those who decry social and political involvement as a diversion, a waste of the energy that should be directed to the primary task of saving souls. It needs very little by way of disillusionment with the active mode to swing the pendulum back to pietistic retreat. Not being complete retreatists, the followers of

 

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Bob Jones's position encourage Christians to be politically active but insist on maintaining such a clear separation from apostasy that concerted political action is almost impossible.
One Moral Majoritarian described fundamentalists as a ''disciplined charging army" (Fitzgerald 1981). A political scientist called them "an army that meets every Sunday" (Buell 1983). It would be more accurate to see them as a motley crew of half-hearted volunteers being pressed into service just when the crops need planting, torn between joining battle with the enemy and returning to tend their farms.
Economic and Social Cleavages
Further sources of internal fragmentation derive from socioeconomic differences among conservative Protestants. Without wishing to countenance the a priori assumption of many social scientists that religious values are secondary to more concrete economic and social characteristics such as wealth and status, it is worth