| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 222 words from this article are provided below; about 397 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rethinking Zion: How the Print Media Placed Fundamentalism in the South. By Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. xxvi, 177 pp. $36.00, ISBN 1-57233-493-2.)
"The strength of fundamentalist leaders lies in their flocks," a front-page story in the Washington Post declared in 1993. "Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that [Jerry] Falwell or Pat Robertson can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command" (Washington Post, Feb. 1, 1993). Rethinking Zion traces, through a careful examination of newspapers and magazines, the emergence of that long-lived stereotype as a conventional image of southern religion in American mainstream culture.	1
Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews begins with chapters dealing with the creation of images of the South as violent, poor, uneducated, and preoccupied with prohibition. Linking the South to fundamentalism is, however, her main business. Leading historians of the movement, such as Ernest R. Sandeen and George M. Marsden, have long since demonstrated that fundamentalism in the strict sense was a northern phenomenon. Their point is that it was in the North, where theological modernism was a growing force, that the assertion of conservative Christian doctrine seemed necessary. Southern Protestants had little truck with modernism, so why bother?	. . .

There are about 397 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.