ABSTRACT
Fundamentalism is a religious reaction to the perceived assault of modernity upon traditional culture. The religious reaction of fundamentalism to everything dissolving under one's feet is to return, in a defiant spirit of dogmatic literalism, to the foundational sacred texts of the culture. This chapter presents the conversion narrative of Elder Walter Evans of the Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Elder Evans explains that he had always felt like a stranger in his own life, especially when he observed religious rites. The chapter also presents a modernist text that shows how the fundamentalist imagination, with an unmatched ironic vengeance, may appear not simply in terms of the familiar crises of intellectual history or political institutions, but as the uncanny truths of modern love. D. H. Lawrence renounces all fundamentalism and all facile critique of fundamentalism, in the service of his vision of the new truth of the greater life that composes a new pastoral mode.
