Fundamentalists are people who believe they are God's chosen people with a monopoly on Truth. Fundamentalism has attracted millions of adherents for centuries. Relying on revelations from God, it elevates, it comforts, and it offers meaning and direction to those lost when uncertainty and ambiguity reign. However, lives are lost when fundamentalists seek the coercive power of the state to impose their beliefs on others.

While I'm not a member, I've had the good fortune of living among two groups of God's "chosen people", the Hutterites and the Mormons or Latter Day Saints. Both rely on revelations. Time with them taught me the wisdom of our constitutional separation of church and state.

As a graduate student at Indiana University in the 1960s, I lived on and off with the Hutterites of the Northern Plains. These gentlefolk are one of three Anabaptist religious sects in North America. (The other two are the Amish and the Mennonites.) The Hutterites are communal pacifist agrarians. They fled Russia's Crimean for America just after our Civil War and settled in the Dakota Territories.

There were many communal experiments in the 60s but their average life expectancy was measured in months. My goal was to understand how the Hutterites maintained a viable society for over 400 years. The answer wasn't obvious to an outsider.

I became a working guest on several of their colonies, mainly in South Dakota and Montana. In each case I asked the colony's leader, the preacher, how he accounted for their sustained success. And the response was consistent: "We were given God's directive and we follow it. He takes care of those true to His Word."

This answer satisfied the Hutterite Brethren for their duty is to accept authority. However, my dissertation committee wanted data--and I knew no way to empirically test the preachers' claims of divine support.

Here is my finding in brief. Through an evolutionary process of adjusting their political economy to the world's reality checks, Hutterites found ways to harmonize, or at least contain, the disruptive forces of competition. And, while their members were slaughtered in several European principalities, in America they found a tolerant, though not always benevolent, environment. In America, church and state were separate.

Clearly, the Hutterites are fundamentalist and consider themselves "chosen". Yet, they pose no danger to others for they don't use government to force their views on others.

In the early 1970s I left MSU to direct an environmental program at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Economically and topographically, Logan was much like Bozeman. But there was a critical difference. Culturally and politically, Logan was overwhelmingly Mormon.

I was a gentile. So were my Jewish friends when they came to visit. And like the Hutterites, the Mormons were recurrently persecuted for their beliefs and practices. They had been burned out and run out of Midwestern towns and their founder, Joseph Smith was murdered.

Under the inspired leadership of Brigham Young, their second "Prophet, Revelator, and Seer", the Mormons left Illinois and in 1846 began their trek to Utah. Young's goal was to establish a theocratic state, the Great Basin Kingdom. Centered in Deseret, now Salt Lake City, it would stretch from California and the Mexican border through Idaho and Montana into Canada.

As God's chosen people, they were to establish and administer law consistent with their beliefs. This included the practice of polygamy. To exercise these beliefs they had to establish their own polity.

"Chosen" people with a history of persecution are often intolerant when they gain control of government. Out of fear born of false rumor, in Sept. of 1857, the Mormon Nauvoo Legion killed a wagon train of over 100 victims in the Mountain Meadow Massacre in southern Utah. Brigham Young's advice to let the wagon train pass had arrived too late.

Salt Lake, however, did not become the capital of a theocratic Great Basin Kingdom. Rather, the Mormon Church renounced polygamy and Utah became the 45th state in 1896.

Yet, as one of the United States our Bill of Rights ultimately constrains religious zeal. The gentile in Utah may face petty annoyances, for example, no wine in some restaurants, but only the paranoid fear the Church.

The lesson is clear and compelling: we need not fear the fundamentalists among us unless they demonstrate a capacity for violence and political power.