Drawing on social movement theory, Michael Lienesch narrates the emergence of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century. Grounded in print and discourse communities and an assortment of institutional matrices, fundamentalism coalesced in reaction to perceptions that modernity brought with it a secularity that threatened to dissolve faith and the way of life thought to be rooted in it. Lienesch's point is that fundamentalism can be understood as the practice of an activist politics, and that such an approach to its genesis shows it to be more complex and durable than do analyses that are preoccupied with religious doctrines and spiritual aesthetics. For Lienesch, taking fundamentalism as a multifaceted social movement that elected to represent itself publicly through its opposition to evolution provides insights into its rapid ascent as well as its survival after the debacle in Tennessee in 1925. My reading of Lienesch prompts a fruitful comparison of fundamentalism to Second Amendment activism, which pressed the banner issue of gun owners' rights as the focal point for the expression of a wide spectrum of discontentedness, including anti-government and anti-regulation sentiments, rural Americans' sense of persecution, threatened gender traditions, survivalist anxieties, conspiracy fears, and personal defense concerns, among others. Fundamentalism likewise interwove a broad range of issues into its politics and publicized them through organized resistance to evolution. The Scopes trial accordingly unfolded less like the haphazard drama of lore and more like a pitched battle between two sides that had planned methodically and even cunningly for their political engagement with each other. The movement nevertheless was flexible and fluid at the same time that it proffered an unmistakable identity. The fundamentalist coalition, which initially joined religious conservatives, nativists, education activists, temperance advocates, and anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish parties, among others, grew eventually, in the late twentieth century, in its campaign for Intelligent Design, to include even extraterrestrial life enthusiasts—and welcomed back Catholics and Jews. The contribution of this book derives from its fresh approach to the history of fundamentalism and anti-evolutionism in America. In treating fundamentalism as a social movement—and in a way that is thoroughly informed by cutting-edge movement theory—In the Beginning brings to light much that has been overlooked in the emergence of fundamentalism, and it offers insight into how the politics of religious conservatism has become so important in the last twenty years.