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THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL, HIS HAIR IN A POMPADOUR, HIS SUIt tight at the seams, his speech and visage astir with moral outrage, first arrived on the national public stage in 1979 to announce the formation of a national political organization of Bible-believing Americans called the Moral Majority. Falwell was a big, bulbous white man with a bass voice and self-satisfied smile who thereafter plunged into the late twentieth-century "culture wars" with the skill of a boxer and the showmanship of a television wrestler. From the secular point of view, he was an iconic figure who perfectly represented his type, the dreaded fundamentalist preacher.
The reaction of secular Americans, most of whom were themselves religious, to Falwell's announcement, or rather to the sea change in the political scene that his iconic figure and the organization's audacious name telegraphed, was huge. Falwell might as well have risen from the dead. Something had just happened that we thought was impossible, something that violated the basic tenets of modern history. Both our common sense and our intellectual theories had assured us for several decades that people like Falwell - fundamentalist preachers and their church folk - were disappearing, soon to be extinct, incapable of surviving in a world increasingly ruled by reason and science. Suddenly, it seemed, "they were back." Their coming back not only shocked us, it took something away from us, something more than our sense of which way history was headed. For it turned out that who we were as secular Americans somehow depended on our assumptions about who they were. If "they" weren't dying out as a social category, "we" no longer represented the natural, normal, secularizing outcome of modern history. "We" no longer owned the future. Our seemingly capacious, ecumenical, universalizing "we" became a particular and contingent "we," a "we" like any other.
At the time, most of us did not recognize these sensations at all, let alone see them as the classic signs of lost hegemony, of our having lost the easy and apparently (but not really) effortless assumption of political and cultural predominance. Instead, we, or the secular public intellectuals who represented us, set about trying to explain how this breakdown of the secular order had occurred so that we might...