DAMNING FUNDAMENTALISM: SINCLAIR LEWIS AND THE TRIALS OF FICTION

Critiqued from a wide range of disciplinary angles, but still regularly deployed by scientists, clergy, and others, this ideology of objectivity assumes that human beings can neutrally access a certain, provable knowledge-whether about God or the cosmos-that exists without any regard for interpretive position.1 It is equally endemic to school district battles over biology curricula, door-to-door and media-based proselytism, atheistic pronouncements about religious delusions, and, in a post-9/11 world beset by school and university massacres, even the martyr videos of various suicides. Historians like George Marsden have invested considerable energy in drawing parallels and distinctions between twenties fundamentalism and the Religious Right that emerged in the late seventies; the time is ripe for scholars of literary and cultural studies to build on and further complicate such observations.17 Whatever emotions these phenomena generate, it can only help to have more careful analyses of religion's reach beyond traditional institutions into the fabric of daily life, including scientific and technological areas like digital media, stem-cell research, and artificial intelligence.