American Public Media’s radio program Speaking of Faith interviews University of Chicago historian Martin Marty on the broad topic of religious Fundamentalism. An excerpt:
“In the roots of fundamentalism in our culture, it started, of course, anti-evolution, anti-biblical criticism, and then it started taking a moral cast. But its moral cast, again, was the things that you should take control of. Virtue, advice were their big terms, not social justice and social change. Take what is a virtuous person; pass laws to promote that virtue. And I certainly am leaving a wrong impression if I’m suggesting that bedroom and clinical issues don’t have social consequences. They have huge social consequences. If divorce becomes more easy and grows and families disintegrate and children don’t have models in the parental world and they’re not educable, it’s a huge difference in the culture. So they don’t have a monopoly on it either in its invention or its present carrying out, but I think more of them restrict their energies to that and, again, it’s a very politically popular thing to do.”
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