Anouar Abdel-Malek examines the roots of America's Christian fundamentalism The days that brought about the re-election of George "Dubya" Bush were pregnant with surprises. Most astounding was the failure of almost all the brilliant minds and pioneering thinkers in the West, in Europe in particular, to realise what the rest of the world -- notably Asia, the Islamic and Arab worlds, Africa and Latin America -- knew would happen. Europe believed that Kerry would win, if only because opinion polls showed that the vast majority of countries and people around the world did not want Bush to gain a second term. Airing European bewilderment at the results of the election former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine declared in a televised interview that the results of the presidential elections would impact profoundly on global opinion. With very few exceptions all nations of the world had hoped to see a new incumbent in the White House. That the results were to the contrary indicates a profound gap in the American people's understanding of the rest of the world and in the world's understanding of American society. The post-election bewilderment contrasts starkly with the pre-election certitude epitomised by the illustrious Economist of a month earlier. In its assessment of the choice between "incompetence" and "inconsistency", as it summed up the American presidential race, it opined that John Kerry, "in spite of all our doubts about him, will be in a better position to achieve America's major tasks". Europe's and, in general, the West's failure to predict the outcome of the US elections, in spite of all its claims to intellectual superiority, boils down to a single, inescapable fact. The Western mentality has convinced itself that it is dealing with a single "global village" consisting of some 200 nations and dozens of cultural circles spread over five continents and that the only distinguishing factors between these entities are quantifiable and verifiable in terms of population figures, resources, economic might and a host of other indicators that can all be plotted on a scale of "growth" or "development". This matrix rules out deeper diversities and is incapable of comprehending the dynamics of cultural specificity in a global order centring around the West in this age of American hegemony and globalisation. Each "unit" in this imaginary world is a replica of the others; social, national or cultural entities with unique and individual properties that determine their own internal realities are not acknowledged. We must descend from the clouds of this abstract homogenised world and take a close and serious look at the specific properties of the US at a time when it has reaffirmed its hegemony for the next four years over the traditional Western-centric world order. To understand the historical context of the character of the US we should take as our starting point Thomas Jefferson's observation that "America is the only true nation in the world", by which he meant that it was the most modern nation and the least encumbered by history. The conventional understanding of this message is that the American national ethos was formed by two distinct groups. One was the original British settlers in what is now the area of the northeastern US referred to as New England. Commonly designated by the term Wasps (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), this group, at the end of the 18th century, formulated the concept of the United States as epitomised in the Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776), the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (1787). On top of this dominant minority came the influx of immigrants from other parts of Europe and later from Latin America and Asia throughout the 18th and 19th century. As these peoples swept across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, they crushed and annihilated the native Indian populations upon whose land they settled. Meanwhile the millions of black slaves upon whose sweat and blood the agricultural wealth of the south was built until Abraham Lincoln, championing the victorious industrialised north in the civil war declared the abolition of slavery, receded into political and social oblivion. On this matter the various constructionist, or rigidly quantitative and descriptive versions of the development of American society are generally in accord. A second formative factor of the American ethos emanates from the story of the migration of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers from the eastern to the western seaboard, the story of the conquest of the "wild west" and the "gold rush", subject of hundreds of Hollywood films and television series. This vast westward drive inspired the "frontier theory" espoused by the American historian, Fredrick Jackson Turner, at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893. His highly influential paper on the significance of the frontier in American history, delivered at the age of 32, struck a deep chord in the American consciousness and remains a source of both inspiration and heated controversy until the present day. Turner maintained that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" explained American development. He posited that the existence of a frontier line in that gradual westward drive was what characterised "the first period of American history" and that it was the frontier that had produced the American mode of democracy and individualism, a manifestation of the American spirit of opportunity. "So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power," he proclaimed. It followed that the frontier was "the line of the most rapid and effective Americanisation", or otherwise put, it "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people". It had stripped the immigrant of most of his cultural baggage, subordinated him to the discipline of the wilderness, and finally imposed on him a set of new habits and institutions. It was this that developed the essentially American traits -- coarseness and strength, acuteness, inventiveness, restless energy, a "masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends". According to Turner, at each recession of the frontier civilisation took a leap forward into the vast unknown, subjecting successive generations to the same transforming discipline. He writes: "American social development has been continually beginning time and time again on the frontier." Waves upon waves of new settlers created the map of the United States, with the exception of the eastern and western seaboards and the area surrounding the Great Lakes. In that vast stretch in between reside the majority of the American people, descendants of the rugged frontier folk that cleared the way for their civilisation by slaughtering the native inhabitants and keeping the blacks confined and subjugated in the south. These are farming communities and small and far flung towns, populated by people who believe that America, the land of opportunity, is God's land, and that traditional values of the family, marriage and religion will prevail. This is the America that brought the "old and venerable" Republican Party into power for most of contemporary American history: from 1861 to 1913, from 1921 to 1938 and, apart from a scant 18 years, from 1953 to 2008. This is the America that Bush will be representing during his second term. A resurgent conservative tide rising from what de Gaulle called the "deep country" is pushing with ideological zeal to etch into stone the moral, political and economic outlook of the US. What accounts for its unstoppable momentum? How will it shape the tenets of American policy over the coming years? In order to understand the conservative tide emerging from America's heartland we must return to those early gatherings at the constantly shifting American frontier. What were they like? The customary answer to this innocent question was that they were immigrant communities rejoicing in the freedom and opportunity of the American dream. But the people who made America were settlers, by which we mean groups of human beings who relocate to another land, driven by a collective goal, which often manifested itself in a form of charter defining the nature of their new community and its relationship with the mother country. For a fuller understanding of the development of American society we must look back much further than the 19th century period that inspired Turner's frontier theory. America's first settler communities were founded in the opening decades of the 17th century. It was these that began to carve their way inland, working their way westward across the Appalachians, clashing with Native Americans along the way for nearly a century and a half before the "founding fathers" created the constitution. As Samuel Huntington put it in his recently published book, Who are we? : "Before the founding fathers there had to be founding settlers." Who were these people at the threshold of the founding of the US? According to the 1790 census there were 3,929,000 people in what was then the US. Excluding the Indians who were not counted and the 698,000 blacks who were not citizens, about 80 per cent of American society was of British origin and the remainder mainly of German and Dutch origin. And 98 per cent of the population was Protestant. Almost a century later, Huntington notes, the term "immigrant" was introduced in American English usage to distinguish the influx of late arrivals from the founding settlers. However, the essence of American culture was and remains until today the culture of the settlers who formed American society in the 17th and 18th century. The central traits of this society can be defined variously. Its constants, though, are Christianity, Protestant values, the work ethic, English and the British legacy in law, justice and the definition of the powers of the state. On top of this were overlain elements from the arts, literature, philosophy and music of Europe. Successive waves of European settlers, mostly British with a sprinkling of Germans and Dutch, constantly on the move as they pushed the American frontier westward, clinging to their Anglo- Saxon cultural roots and legacy while simultaneously sensing the need to formulate a set of principles and ideas around which they could gradually coalesce -- these were the people that ultimately produced the American constitution a century and a half after the first settlements were established, and this was the society that gave rise to the "American creed", a term first used by the historian Gunnar Myrdal in his seminal An American Dilemma (1944). According to Myrdal this "creed" is founded upon the notion of the "fundamental human dignity" of the individual, which presumes essential equality between all human beings and a set of inalienable rights in the pursuit of liberty, justice and opportunity. In Myrdal we hear, of course, the echo of one of America's founding fathers and drafters of the Declaration of Independence, which spoke of the equality of all under the law and certain inalienable rights in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". He also had several precursors in the attempt to define what it was to be American. Notable among these was Alexis de Toqueville who, in On Democracy in America (1840), wrote that people in America were in accord on the principles of liberty and equality, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly and the accountability of governing officials. With similar reverence James Bryce in The American Commonwealth 1888 held that "the political faith of the American people embraces rights, the sanctity of the individual, the people as the source of political authority, government under law and by the people, the preference for local over national government and majority rule". Others felt that such descriptions fell short of describing American life and identity. Rogers Smith, for example, observers that for most of their history Americans enslaved and then suppressed and isolated black Americans, massacred and then banished the Indians, treated Asians as outcasts, denigrated Catholics and obstructed immigration from everywhere but western Europe. According to the historian Michael Lind, the American republic was founded upon an Anglo-Saxon Protestant national ethos and as such was as much a manifestation of racial and religious affiliations as it was of a political outlook. Or, as Huntington puts it, American identity had a number of formative factors, but the national polity was not one of them. Such glimpses, if hastily sketched, into the origins and nature of American identity seem to point to that remarkable phenomenon that has been having such a growing impact on American political life. The upsurge in religious movements and the intensity of their involvement in political and social movements and organisations has put paid to Reverend Richard Neuhouse's famous obituary to the role of religion in American public life in The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1984). With a following of more than 30 per cent of the American people, the American evangelical movement, with its diverse organisations, has assumed the vanguard of this "resurrection". What was once a fringe movement acquired immense organisational impetus in successive stages, beginning with Falwell's Moral Majority organisation in 1979 and followed a decade later with the Christian Alliance, founded by Pat Robertson. By 1995 the membership of this organisation had soared to 1.7 million and by 2002 the evangelical movement had established more than 600 major churches, each with between 2,000 and 200,000 parishioners. Since the beginning of its resurgence in the 1980s the American evangelical movement has focussed its energies on what it regards as manifestations of moral degeneracy in American society. Sexual freedom, the decline of the family, rising divorce rates, crime, drug abuse, abortion and pornography and violence in the media are, according to its pundits, the product of the liberal ideas advocated by the Democratic Party. In 1985 Supreme Court Chief Justice William Renquist said: "The wall of separation between church and state is a metaphor based on bad history... It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." Thus began the countdown to the rise of the neo-conservatives, for which read Christian fundamentalists, to the White House.
