ABSTRACT
This ethnographic sketch of a fundamentalist Baptist church community in the United States stems from a broader inquiry into the social bases of popular support for the conservative 'pro-family' movement. That inquiry involved field work also among right-tolifers, parents campaigning against sex education and conservative Catholics running their own 'home school'. This report was written four months after I began field research in the Shawmut Valley Baptist Church. Although this research continued over the next three years, subsequent findings have not led me to change, in the main, any of the impressions set down here.
