Back to the fundamentals
Book Review
by Kurt Kleiner
The Globe and Mail Weekend (Canada), page D8
April 5, 2008
Brett Grainger’s grandfather was a fundamentalist preacher who became convinced that he knew the exact date of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. So on Sept. 11, 1988, he and his wife put on their best clothes and sat down to wait. The day wore on, Jesus didn’t come and, finally around dinner time, Grainger’s grandmother went into the kitchen to cook a roast. She had put it out to thaw that morning – just in case.
Grainger grew up in Huntsville, Ont. as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Protestant group, and he later went on to study fundamentalism at Harvard University and to write about religion as a journalist. He has combined research and personal experience to write a fascinating, readable and sympathetic study of Christian fundamentalism.
Grainger sees fundamentalism is an entirely modern phenomenon, one that was born as a reaction against the modern world, but that has also been shaped by it. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, fundamentalists are not interested in returning to a premodern age,” he writes. “They are among the most adept pupils of modernity, copying and recasting its designs for their own purposes.”
In chapters on the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., or the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Fla., he shows how fundamentalists employ sophisticated technology, marketing techniques and rhetorical tactics to promote their views.
