Fundamental Words: The Construction of Identity in the Protestant Fundamentalist Community, 1925--1940

238 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.This study explorer, the question of how religious identity is formed within faith communities. It argues that for fundamentalists, the identity construction and reconstruction process centered on the language shared by community members. In particular, it focus on three discursive domains: the rhetoric of child rearing, fictional literature for young adults, and the language of missionaries on the East African mission field. In each of these arenas, fundamentalists were involved in a process of identity formation. The primary question I address is not what fundamentalists had to say in these contexts, so much as what their discussions in these contexts had to say about fundamentalists. This study covers new ground both topically and theoretically. It examines the relationship between the fundamentalist community and many of the contemporary cultural trends of the 1920s and 1930s, e.g., the emerging youth culture, the redefinition of gender roles and the popularization of psychology. It also challenges recent attempts to "take religion seriously" which nevertheless leave aside the place of belief in the lives of believers. Religious identity, it argues, ought to be embraced by historians as a category of analysis. Short of speculating on the objects of belief, a close examination of the language of faith and the boundaries drawn by such language is the best means by which historians may take up this analysis.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD