I asked, "Who are today's evangelicals and fundamentalists?" Today, I ask, "Why are they who they are?"
The simplest answer is the straight answer. Today's White (mostly) evangelicals and fundamentalists are white Christian male supremacists. However, that was true eighty years ago when many Southern religious absolutists were still struggling with finding their roles among all religions that flourished in the USA. They were rejected by religious alliances wherein leaders and preachers sought to keep Americans in church during the hard days of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II. The less conservative religious leaders and organizations looked for intelligent and empathetic messages, not merely as strategies for individual conversions but mainly as strategies for institutional strength. The preachers who led the evangelical movements of the 1930s thru 1950s -- independent of larger associations like the Southern Baptists -- did not play well with others. They were not ostracized from inclusive and forward-thinking religious alliances; they simply refused to participate.
Whereas other religious organizations also espoused white Christian supremacy, they did so with the caveat, "We should show charity while the Negro slowly climbs up from his native non-Christian roots." Others more boldly preached racial equality. But southern white evangelicals and fundamentalists held firmly and unapologetically to The Curse of Ham theory. Holding on to the archaic belief that all of dark-skinned African ancestry were cursed to live violent and destitute lives in submission to all other humans -- even though many Black people practiced Christianity -- became the great divide across which they refused to acknowledge the value of joining other alliances to increase Christianity's strength.
This was also a time when most Americans wanted to strengthen democracy and eschew politics that divides citizens against each other -- in the way that the extremes of fascism and communism were prone to. Especially after the war, Americans wanted unity and were willing to consider improvements in race and class relations. They wanted to move forward. Southern white fundamentalists seemed uneducated and provincial, more like their white sharecropper and poor homesteader ancestors than the generation of Americans who were going to college and buying homes. Often the first in their families to achieve these. The Southern white fundamentalists preached against state and Ivy league college educations, against Christian alliances, against voting rights for all, against women seeking careers, against popular music and film, against "humanism and elitism"...They were against a whole list of things toward which most Americans were opening their minds.
The Southern white evangelicals and fundamentalists built their own Bible colleges where their boys could earn theology degrees and their girls could marry the right boys. Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, is a prime example of that early urge to train their own kind. They would protect their strict tenets and raise a generation of preachers who could empower the movement. Liberty University, started by Jerry Falwell, Sr, a graduate of Baptist Bible College, was started later when Christian Nationalism was born in reaction to the 1960s civil rights and voting laws. The early days of growing the fundamentalist movement -- uniquely American in its white male supremacy and willful defiance of all liberal education -- was not political. They were in survival mode.
Forward to the 1970s. Baptist Bible College was growing. Hundreds of other Bible colleges also sprang forth. Southern white evangelicalism was spreading across the states into areas where Lutheran and Catholic churches had once reigned supreme...all because of one thing. Only one generation prior to this decade, the evangelicals and fundamentalists were alone in their quest. But politics had shifted its goals. After all the events that shook Washington D.C. in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Republican party was losing ground. The conservative party was hurting. Into this opportunity for promotion stepped the Southern white male Christian supremacists who were trained in obscure Bible colleges to believe in their right to rule the world. Christian Nationalism was born. Republicans welcomed the southern Democrats who built the exlusionary Bible colleges, who wanted to keep Jim Crow laws in place, who subjugated women and all non-white ethnicities, who abhored open societies and "educated elitists", who wanted 1928 back again -- except for the female flappers of course. Christian Nationalists helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency. Then they set the long game into motion.
For all their raising of hands and clapping in worship, their mega churches and their foreign missions, their gospel music and their empowerment in the Republican party...white evangelicals are the same as they were in 1950. They are willfully ignorant -- Ivy league college degrees does not change that fact -- exclusionary, mean-spirited, defiant, self-serving, white male supremacist and ego-centric. Of course there are outliers and examples that seem to disprove my generalization. Every big family has one weird uncle. But we've only to trace the Republican party's slow but steady push to the political far right to see where that influence started, from whence the party gets its extremism. America's white evangelicals and fundamentalists tasted political power, experienced power's corrupting influence and willingly stuck with the Republican party these five decades to achieve their evil religious goals.
They are who they are because Power and Greed never changed their core beliefs in White Male Supremacy. Power and Greed merely sweetened the political deals they made.