How we got here, continued

Another excerpt from Richard Hofstadter's classic collection of essays The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Now we start getting into the confluence of fundamentalism and the rise of late 20th century (pseudo-)conservatism. (Earlier excerpts here and here.)

Under the aegis of right-wing politics, rigid Protestants of a type once intensely anti-Catholic can now unite with Catholics of similar militancy in a grand ecumenical zeal against communism and in what they take to be a joint defense of Christian civilization. The malevolent energy formerly used in the harassment of Catholics can now be even more profitably spent in the search for Communists, or even in attacks on the alleged subversiveness of liberal Protestant denominations. The Manachean conception of life as a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil and the idea of an irresistible Armageddon have been thinly secularized and transferred to the cold war. The conflict between Christianity and communism is conceived as a war to the death, and Christianity is set forth as the only adequate counterpoise to the communist credo.

Fundamentalist leaders play a part in right-wing organizations far out of proportion to the strength of fundamentalism in the population at large. Among them are Robert H. Welch, Jr., the founder of the John Birch Society; Dr. Fred C. Shwarz, the head of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and Reverend Billy Hargis, of the Christian Crusade, which flourishes in the Southwest.

A large part of the rise in fundamentalist ultra-conservativism may be linked with the astonishing growth of the Southern Baptist Church, which increased from 2,300,000 members in 1936 to 10,000,000 in 1952. A comparable growth has also been enjoyed by the right-wing Churches of Christ. The increase in these groups has far outstripped that of more moderate Protestant denominations in the same period. Such church groups have created a vast religious public, once poor and depression-ridden but now to a large degree moderately prosperous, whose members sometimes combine the economic prejudices of the newly well-to-do with the moral prejudices of the revolt against modernity.

We know more, of course, about the role of fundamentalist leaders in rightwing groups than we do about fundamentalism among the mass following. The presence of two kinds of subcultures in the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade is suggested in a study [. . . whose] findings point to a bifurcation between a relatively affluent, educated, and "sophisticated" wing, concerned most intensely with the economic content of ultra-conservatism, and a more deeply religious wing, leaning toward fundamentalism, primarily concerned with religious and moral issues.

Richard Hofstadter, "Pseudo-Conservatism
Revisited--1965" in The Paranoid Style in
American Politics and Other Essays (1964)