Politics & Power Quote by Maggie Gallagher

“Whatever their defects” is a throat-clearing that pretends to concede critique while quietly re-centering the people being critiqued. Gallagher’s line works by smuggling a judgment into a reassurance: yes, fundamentalists may be flawed, but the real point is that they’re harmless, familiar, and therefore undeserving of alarm. It’s a rhetorical move that shifts the burden of proof. If they’ve “lived peacefully among us” for centuries, then anyone treating them as a threat must be hysterical, prejudiced, or historically illiterate.

The subtext is less about fundamentalists than about the cultural conversation swirling around them. Gallagher is writing into a climate where “fundamentalist” often functions as shorthand for anti-modernism, anti-pluralism, even proto-theocracy. Her sentence aims to defang that caricature by invoking an American baseline: we’ve managed this before; we can manage it now. The phrase “among us” is doing extra work, too. It frames fundamentalists as part of the national family, not an alien faction, and implies that the suspicious “us” may be the ones betraying American tolerance.

The context, though, makes the line slippery. “Christian fundamentalists” as a self-conscious political force is more 20th century than colonial. And “peacefully” depends on whose peace you mean: dissenters, minorities, and women have often experienced religious moral campaigns as coercion by other means. Gallagher’s intent is to argue for inclusion and against panic; the sentence’s power comes from how smoothly it turns a fraught political struggle into a story of continuity, civility, and normalcy.