Fundamentalism and American Culture
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3. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION PRESERVED
William Jennings Bryan—who did not receive the majority in November of 1908 and hence had plenty of time to pursue his religious interests—represents in his attitude toward culture a third segment of the conservative evangelical movement. Despite his political prominence (he remained the leader of the Democratic Party until 1912 and was then Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State until 1915), Bryan maintained even before his last election defeat that he was “more interested in religion than in government” because “the most important things in life lie outside the realm of government.…36 Bryan’s religious interests, however, resembled his political ones. In both areas he dwelt on moral reform. During the first two decades of the century he spoke widely on the Chautauqua and religious circuits, urging the importance of the Bible and religion for civilization and in particular campaigning vigorously for prohibition and peace.37
Bryan represented the culturally dominant evangelical coalition which took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century. In it, the ideals of Christian piety went together with the ideals of the progressing and democratic American nation. These Christian and American ideals were revealed not only in the Bible but also in divine law available to all persons of common sense. Bryan’s interest in peace and hope for universal harmony were part of an optimistic strain in the evangelical heritage that had suffered somewhat since the Civil War. Bryan’s assumptions also included the more generally accepted faith in divine law and in the destiny of the United States to guide the world morally, as well as “a persistent faith in the essential goodness of Man who would respond immediately and wholeheartedly to the truth once he was made to see it and understand it.38
Any of a number of stock speeches on religious subjects would serve to exemplify Bryan’s outlook, but a little known address entitled “The Old-Time Religion,” delivered at the Winona Bible Conference in the summer of 1911, provides a particularly clear indication of his attitude toward the impending religious crisis. The setting, perhaps as much as the speaker and his subject, shows us the character of the respectable evangelicalism in what turned out to be its twilight days. The extended summer Bible conference, with a series of famous speakers as the main attraction, had become one of the principal means of evangelical expression and was still in its heyday. Like almost everything else of the time that was non-denominational and evangelical, it bore the strong impression of D. L. Moody. Moody had suggested to Winona’s founder, the late evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, that he establish a counterpart to the Northfield conferences at the Indiana resort. Although in 1911 the current director reminded the audience of the “Fundamental Principles upon which Winona was founded and for which it had ever stood, ‘Faith in the inspiration of the Scriptures and belief in the deity of Christ,’” these are rather vague and inclusive terms. The divisive aspects of the Moody-Chapman heritage, including premillennialism, were not mentioned.39
The coalition represented at Winona in 1911 was broad. It was, in fact, not greatly different from that attending the Evangelical Alliance meeting of 1873. Although some of the conference Bible studies were laced with attacks on higher critics, in other areas more progressive tendencies predominated. Several speakers, including William H. Roberts, the first president of the Federal Council of Churches, affirmed the virtues of church union and the end of doctrinal exclusiveness. One of these speakers, a Presbyterian, observed that when he had heard his fellow Presbyterian Billy Sunday preach a sermon packed with Arminian theology, he had responded, “Good! The walls are breaking down.” The present generation, he suggested, had a better understanding of the purposes of God than did John Calvin.40 In the social sphere, advocates attacked the “liquor traffic” and “the white slave trade,” appealed for more “industrial work” projects for Negroes, presented a plan (from the National Reform Association) to “thoroughly Christianize America” by making Bible teaching in the public schools both legal and mandatory, and championed international peace, to which an entire day was devoted.41
The Christianity of William Jennings Bryan and that of the Winona conference were much the same. They each combined a commitment to preserve traditional Christianity (rather broadly interpreted) with a willingness to cooperate with those who differed and an emphasis upon the practical and the social.42 These were typical of most of the conservative evangelicalism of the day. They found wide expression in the popular press, as exemplified by the Christian Herald, as well as in denominational journals. The most ambitious such expression was the new “Men and Religion Forward Movement,” a vigorous interdenominational campaign to mobilize laymen in a massive concerted effort in 1911 -1912 to advance both evangelism and social action.43
Bryan’s remarks on “The Old-Time Religion” were received with enthusiasm and frequent applause at Winona. Bryan indicated that he had picked his topic in reply to sermons claiming that Christianity should change to suit the conditions of the day. Bryan maintained the opposite: “… it is better to raise the temperature than to change the thermometer.” Those who would change Christianity rather than the culture, said Bryan, were infected with the materialist philosophy that had for nineteen centuries challenged the spiritual religion of the Bible. The church, said “The Great Commoner,” was healthy when it was poor; “but in the abundance of our wealth, we have surrounded ourselves with material comforts until the care of the body has absorbed our thought and the saving of the soul has become a secondary matter.” Material advances might indeed be construed as progress in many areas, but the associated materialist philosophies of the modern world had nothing to offer to the soul of man.
To illustrate this point Bryan, whose quest for a dramatic settlement would eventually undo him, proposed a hypothetical contest. The idea, which he said had occurred to him only a few weeks before, would be comparable to a contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. It would be a “Bible test.” On the one side would be those who believed the Bible to be inspired by God. On the other side would be atheists and materialists who said it was the work of man and outdated by modern progress. The challenge: “Let the atheists and the materialists produce a better Bible than ours, if they can.” Let them “use to the full every instrumentality that is employed in modern civilization, let them embody the results of their best intelligence in a book and offer it to the world…. Have they the confidence that the Prophets of Baal had in their God?”
Bryan’s defense of Christianity was essentially pragmatic, resting on his concept of civilization. True, he reiterated (to the most fervent applause) the basic doctrines of the old-time religion: God the Creator, the Bible as his Word, the divinity of Christ, and his saving work. Nevertheless, Bryan, himself a Presbyterian, admitted that he never had had time to study the doctrinal differences between Baptists, Methodists, and his own denomination. He added that his standard answer to those who asked him if he could explain everything in the Bible was that “if we will try to live up to that which we can understand, we will be kept so busy doing good that we will not have time to worry about the things that we do not understand. [Applause]” Bryan thus abandoned, in the spirit of popular American pragmatism, not only the fine points of theology but also any attempt to present a theoretical defense of Christianity and relied on the evidence of practical results in individuals and in nations. As is apparent in his challenge to the prophets of the modern Baal, he believed that the evidence of Christianity’s beneficial effects on civilization was decisive. Speaking of his travels abroad, the future Secretary of State declared that he had found “that in the countries where other religions and philosophies prevail, except where they have borrowed from Christianity, they have made no progress in 1500 or 2000 years.” Conversely, he was sure that “Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.” In the light of this exalted view of t
he practical effects of Christianity on culture, it is easy to understand Bryan’s passion in later years when he found that in America the two had become separated.44
Bryan’s view of Christianity and culture was far more popular than any other conservative position and had been common in the revivalist tradition. Despite some important differences, Bryan’s position was not so very far from that of Billy Sunday, who had in fact moved to Winona Lake to have a permanent residence near the conferences.45 The most obvious difference is that Billy Sunday was a premillennialist, whereas Bryan’s basic optimism about the progress of the kingdom in American culture amounted to a very vague sort of postmillennialism. Sunday’s premillennialism was not, however, related to the rest of his beliefs in any consistent way, so that it could hardly be said to be a determining trait. He mixed a simple do-it-yourself (with God’s grace) Gospel message with the traditional American moral virtues of decency, patriotism, manliness, thrift, sobriety, piety, and hard work.46 His interest in doctrine and denominational differences was even slighter than Bryan’s. Like “The Great Commoner,” Sunday always emphasized the use of Christianity to improve society. During the first part of his career he built a reputation as an advocate of progressive civic reform. By the eve of World War I, this interest had narrowed down to an attack on liquor, and he was capitalizing, in a way that Bryan never would, on the fear of too much liberal “social service.” Yet his concern for the welfare of the nation did remain and was more than adequately demonstrated by his wartime patriotism. Premillennialism and suspicions of worldiness did not dim in the least his conviction that America represented Christian civilization— an ideal for which he, like Bryan, would make a desperate last stand in the 1920s.47
4. TRANSFORMING CULTURE BY THE WORD
Presbyterians Bryan and Sunday represent the more “American” side of that denominational tradition—a broad, somewhat tolerant, not highly doctrinal, moralistic, patriotic, and often optimistic version of evangelical Protestantism. These attitudes could be found in all the major American denominations of the era. They were the ideals of the evangelical consensus of the first half of the nineteenth century, although some of these attitudes could be traced back directly to the Puritan ideals for building a Christian culture. It is possible to distinguish conservatives within the mainstream American evangelical tradition from more strictly denominational conservatives.48 Within a group as diverse as the Baptists, however, such lines cannot be clearly drawn. Most conservative Baptists had a strong commitment to preserve their special denominational heritage. While patriotic, almost all held dogmatically to the ideal of “separation of church and state.” In other respects they seem to have had conventional American evangelical attitudes. A range of unexceptional opinion concerning the relationship of Christianity to culture was found among Baptist conservatives,49 so that it is difficult to pin down a distinctive conservative Baptist position on the subject.
Among the Presbyterians, by contrast, the lines had been drawn more sharply by a mid-nineteenth-century schism between an “American” revivalist and activist “New School” and a traditionalist-confessionalist and doctrinaire “Old School.” After the reunion of the two parties in 1869 the Old School position was preserved most carefully at Princeton Theological Seminary. On the other hand, the New School party of the nineteenth century helped to open the door for the growth of Presbyterian liberalism. At the same time, however, a conservative version of the New School tradition of activist revivalism and patriotic social reform was carried into the fundamentalist era by such leaders as Bryan and Sunday.50
These two traditions held in common the conviction that Christianity had an important mission to civilization. They differed on what was most important in accomplishing such a goal. The Old School tradition emphasized three points whose origins antedated the heyday of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. One was a pessimistic assessment of most of culture and its achievements, with an emphasis on the pervasive effects of the Fall on the human race. Second was a view of the separation of church and state which had grown out of the Scottish controversies. Although Christians as individuals and groups might band together for moral and political efforts, the church as such should scrupulously stay clear of any involvement or even pronouncement on affairs of state. Third, the primary contribution of Christianity to culture was the fostering of right belief, as contained in the creeds. Moral action was important, but it always must proceed from true faith, for which right doctrine was necessary.
In principle, the twentieth-century heirs of the Old School tradition were interested in the welfare of civilization. Unlike the premillennialists, they expected to see signs of the kingdom in this age. One of the strongest manifestations of this concern appeared in the outright postmillennialism of B. B. Warfield. In contrast to his personal view of sanctification, Warfield held that in this age “Christ Jesus came forth not to war merely but to victory.” Although he doubted that evil would be entirely eliminated, he thought that a spiritual “golden age” of the church lay ahead, in which the whole world would be won to Christ before his return.51 Warfield who, as we have seen, expected Christianity “to reason its way to its dominion,” interpreted the apocalytpic Biblical prophecies of warfare as pertaining to the battles and victories of the truth declared. Taking the “hint” of Revelation 19 that the sword of victory proceeds out of the mouth of the Conqueror, he concluded that “the conquest is wrought by the spoken word—in short, by the preaching of the Gospel.” In this conquest, the moral evil of the world will be subdued.52
Although some, like Warfield, were sure that truth and reason would be victorious in the long run, other conservative twentieth-century Presbyterians had a less fully developed view of the progress of the kingdom and were more affected by the crisis of the civilization than by hopes for this age. When formulating the famous five Presbyterian “fundamentals” of 1910, the framers included in the preamble an elaborate litany of crisis. “It is an age of doubt …,” they said:
Laxity in matters of moral opinion had been followed by laxity in matters of moral obligation. It is an age of impatience and restraint. The spirit of licence and lawlessness is abroad. Authority in Church and State alike is decadent because its defiance has so often been unchecked. The decline in the elements of essential religion is followed by a groveling and growing superstition that shames alike our sanity, our faith and our civilization.53
This period saw the rise to prominence of a brilliant New Testament scholar at Princeton Seminary, J. Gresham Machen, who eventually assumed Warfield’s mantle as chief intellectual spokesman for conservative Presbyterians. Machen, who had a more limited view of the development of the kingdom in this age than did Warfield,54 was at this early stage of his career intensely interested in the crisis of the culture in which he found himself. Having studied at Johns Hopkins, Marburg, and Göttingen, as well as at Princeton, Machen struggled to preserve both his inherited Presbyterian faith and his intellectual integrity in a world in which the leading intellectuals, and even many theologians, ridiculed traditionalist Christianity.55
In 1912, speaking at the opening session of Princeton Seminary, Machen addressed himself to the question of “culture and Christianity.” Viewing the situation as “desperate” although not hopeless, he affirmed with “little hesitation” that the tremendous crisis of the church “lies chiefly in the intellectual sphere,” Those who emphasize practical work such as evangelism, missions, and “relieving the misery of man” were engaged in activities of great importance, he conceded, but their gains would be temporary, if not founded on a solid intellectual base. What they failed to realize was the extent to which indifference or hostility to the Gospel was “due to the intellectual atmosphere in which men are living.” In the long run, then, the key to the battle to win men to Christ was in the universities. “What is to-day matter of academic speculation,” Machen proclaimed, “begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.”
Machen considered disas
trous each of the two major ways in which Christians were responding to this crisis. The more dangerous was that of the liberals who said that “Christianity may be subordinated to culture.” In Machen’s view, this resulted in a counterfeit Christianity. Many evangelicals, on the other hand, seemed to seek to destroy, or at least to ignore, culture in order to maintain a pure Christianity. Machen declared this in some respects better than the liberal attitude but nevertheless illogical, unbiblical, and impossible to maintain. Since the cultural crisis was rooted in the intellectual crisis, an attempt to bypass culture and intellect, the arts and sciences, would simply make the situation worse. “The Church,” he said, “is perishing to-day through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.”
Machen’s solution was the consecration of culture. “Instead of destroying the arts and sciences and being indifferent to them,” he said, “let us cultivate them with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist, but at the same time consecrate them to the service of our God.” Christianity, he declared, in reference to the great missionary impulse of the day, “must pervade not merely all nations, but also all human thought.” Hence, “instead of obliterating the distinction between the Kingdom and the world, or on the other hand, withdrawing from the world into a sort of modernized intellectual monasticism, let us go forth joyfully, enthusiastically to make the world subject to God.”56