Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  This was the Reformed tradition, which, as Machen expressed it, saw the consecration of all culture to the service of God as both a religious obligation and a long-range practical necessity. The fact of the matter was, however, that conservative Reformed scholars were finding it increasingly difficult to remain Renaissance Christian humanists. Although they might, as Machen did, chart a broad course across civilization, the track they usually had to follow was of narrow gauge. This was certainly the case for Machen himself. Although he attempted to remain broad-minded and humane, he soon found himself increasingly caught up in peculiarly Presbyterian struggles that eventually forced him into a virtually sectarian position.

  In the context of the growing warfare against modernism, Machen also found himself with a peculiar set of allies, including Gray, Bryan, and Sunday. Thus, despite his ambition to penetrate the academic centers of the culture, he more often found himself invited to places like the Winona Bible Conference. There Machen, who was raised in a dignified tradition of educated Southern aristocracy, was appalled by the “rough house” element. “Practically every lecture, on whatever subject,” he wrote in 1915, “was begun by the singing of some of the popular jingles, often accompanied by the blowing of enormous horns or other weird instruments of music.”57 Nevertheless, Machen often returned to Winona. Likewise, when Billy Sunday spoke at Princeton in 1915, Machen defended him against sophisticate critics at the university.58 Later, during the 1920s, James Gray even intimated on a couple of occasions that Machen should be his successor at Moody Bible Institute,59 and about the same time admirers of Bryan embarrassed Machen somewhat by publicly offering him the presidency of “Bryan Memorial University” at Dayton, Tennessee.60

  The affinity which grew out of fighting a common enemy tended to obscure essential differences within the movement concerning the task of Christianity within the world. All were militantly committed to an essentially supernatural, Biblically based, traditional faith. All, no doubt, were profoundly alarmed by the cultural crisis, especially after World War I when its dimensions became clear, and all no doubt felt personally uprooted by it. Yet there was no single social understanding common to the movement.

  PART THREE

  The Crucial Years: 1917–1925

  XVI. World War I, Premillennialism, and American Fundamentalism: 1917–1918

  Between 1917 and the early 1920s American conservative evangelicals underwent a dramatic transformation. In 1917 they were still part of the evangelical coalition that had been dominant in America for a century. Some theological conservatives, premillennialists, and revivalists were often warning against the modern tendencies of their liberal, postmillennial, or Social Gospel opponents; but all of these groups operated within the same denominations and interdenominational agencies, and at times still cooperated.1 Occasionally the anti-liberals became rather strident, but the relative moderation of The Fundamentals was more characteristic of the conservative tone of the time. After 1920 conservative evangelical councils were dominated by “fundamentalists” engaged in holy warfare to drive the scourge of modernism out of church and culture.

  Two factors help to explain this remarkable shift from moderation to militancy. One is that more aggressive and radical forms of theological liberalism had developed. Fundamentalists themselves occasionally explained the phenomenon thus, and their claim had some basis. Clearly, however, fundamentalism was more than a reaction to theological change. After 1920 fundamentalism became conspicuously associated with a major component of social and political alarm—most evident in the effort to save American civilization from the dangers of evolutionism. This perception of cultural crisis, in turn, appears to have created a greater sense of theological urgency. Thus, fundamentalist theological militancy appears intimately related to a second factor, the American social experience connected with World War I.

  The most important clue to understanding the impact of the war on fundamentalism is the lack of a distinctive social or political stance in the emerging anti-modernist movement before World War I. Although a variety of traditions was represented, most of the movement’s leaders in fact expressed relatively little interest in political or social issues. Most retained to some degree the idea that the strength of the American Republic was rooted in Christian principles, and they encouraged legislation for select causes.2 Yet for a variety of reasons they had scruples against deep political involvement. So while on the whole their tendencies were politically conservative, no particular position or interest characterized the movement.

  The initial reactions of the proto-fundamentalists to World War I confirm this point. Almost as wide a variety of responses appeared among these adamantly conservative Protestants as in any group in America. Some were patriots or super-patriots; others were opposed to all wars. Still others displayed only moderate patriotism, expressly qualified by first allegiance to God.

  One has only to look at the two most popular individuals connected with fundamentalism to see something of the pre-war variety of opinion. William Jennings Bryan, although not a typical fundamentalist in either his political activism or his brand of politics, distinguished himself in 1915 by resigning as Wilson’s Secretary of State rather than take steps that might lead to war. A peace advocate rather than a pacifist, he reluctantly but dutifully supported the war after it was declared in April, 1917. Yet throughout the war he avoided the rabid anti-German hysteria that had possessed most Americans by 1918.3

  Billy Sunday, on the other hand, competed with George M. Cohan4 and Teddy Roosevelt for the position of most extravagant patriot. Although Sunday had little interest in the war until the United States joined it, he soon concluded that zeal for the Gospel and patriotic enthusiasm should go hand in hand. It apparently did not strain his principles (which included premillennialism and opposition to the “social gospel”) to conclude in 1917 that “Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms and hell and traitors are synonymous.”5 As the war effort accelerated he used the rhetoric of Christian nativism to fan the fires of anti-German furor and was famous for sermons that ended with his jumping on the pulpit waving the flag. “If you turn hell upside down,” he said, “you will find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.”6 Praying before the House of Representatives in 1918 he advised God that the Germans were a “great pack of wolfish Huns whose fangs drip with blood and gore.”7

  Between Bryan and Sunday were many conservative Protestants whose degree of patriotism does not seem to have been much different from that of the American public generally. For example, the conservative Baptist journal The Watchman-Examiner avoided commenting on the war for a long time before March 1917. The Baptist tendency to avoid politics may account for this. When the editor, Curtis Lee Laws, broke the silence in March 1917, he defended “pacifists” (meaning peace advocates) but said “pacifists are not ‘peace-at-any-price’ men.” With Woodrow Wilson he agreed “we must prepare for war, however much we hate it.”8 During the war, although the magazine’s support was unquestionable, it was not extravagant in the context of the excesses of the day.9

  The conservative Presbyterian weekly The Presbyterian, by way of contrast, possibly because of its postmillennial leanings, emphasized the importance of religion and morality for civilization and had few scruples about war. Government was ordained to wield the sword, which was the only way to keep the peace. War would cease only at the coming of Christ, meaning apparently “when the world is evangelized.” In the meantime, “The conflict is one between Jehovah and Prince of Darkness. Right and wrong cannot compromise.”10

  During the war conservative Baptists and conservative Presbyterians, together with virtually all Americans, became far more politically oriented, and by late 1918 their journals were filled with vigorous commentaries on the war. Aside from this important politicization, however, there was nothing especially remarkable in the development of their wartime views. At the end of the war their position, although more ostentatiously patriotic, was nevertheless consistent with their
prewar attitudes.

  The premillennialists, however, were not only politicized by the war, but for some the war experience involved a remarkable change in their view of the nation. This development is so dramatic, and the premillennialists played such a central role in organizing fundamentalism immediately after the war, that a close look at their wartime views is most helpful for understanding the relationship between fundamentalism and its cultural context.

  Premillennialism taught that no trust should be put in kings or governments and that no government would be specially blessed by God until the coming of the King who would personally lead in defeating the forces of Satan. Although opinions varied, many premillennialists of the radically anti-worldly type followed the logic of this teaching to a pacifist conclusion. The dispensationalist journal Our Hope, for instance, was out-and-out pacifist at the beginning of the war. Its reasoning, however, was not that of Bryan or the humanitarians who opposed war because they favored peace. Rather, this thoroughly anti-political attitude consistently emphasized the hopelessness of all efforts to solve the world’s problems through political efforts, whether pacifist or military. Bryan, they thought, was chasing illusions. Referring in 1913 to his proposal for a world court of arbitration, editor Arno C. Gaebelein said that such was typical of “man’s plans during ‘man’s day.’” “‘Peace and safety’ is what the world and apostate Christendom wants to hear.” “Sudden judgment,” Gaebelein prophesied, “will someday bring the terrible awakening.”11

  When this prediction was in a sense fulfilled by the catastrophic European events of the next year, Our Hope took little interest, except to say that the war was a sure sign the end times were close. The conflict was important, however, in that it provided some more pieces to be fit into the prophetic puzzle. Gaebelein was intrigued by the question of whether German ambitions for empire might represent the beginning of the predicted re-forming of the Roman Empire. A thoroughgoing literalist, Gaebelein thought not, since Prussia and the greater part of present-day Germany had never been within the boundaries of the original Roman Empire.12 The most revealing of the speculations concerning the combatants was Our Hope’s prediction in 1916 concerning Russia, then part of the allied powers toward which the United States was leaning. It “is known to every close student of prophetic portions of the Bible,” Gaebelein affirmed, “that this power of the North will play a prominent and to herself fatal part during the predicted end of this age.”13 The apparent confirmation of this prediction in the Boleshevik Revolution of the next year, combined with preexisting prejudice against socialism, resulted eventually for Gaebelein, as we shall see, in a fierce anti-communist partisanship.

  When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Gaebelein was still intent on his neutralist, “signs of the times” and “I told you so” course. “It has doubtless awakened rudely from their dreams many who had not conceived that such a war was possible,” he wrote in July. The Dictator and the Anti-Christ, he added, should be expected shortly. As to premillennialist service in the war, Our Hope published as late as September 1917 a thorough exposition of the question “Should a Christian Go to War?” in which the answer was clearly “No.” Quoting the passages that advocated peace in the New Testament (and dismissing more easily than did most American Protestants any relevance of examples of divinely ordained warfare from the Old Testament dispensation), the author said, “The very question well-nigh answers itself.” Christians should separate themselves from the world, should not enter politics nor vote, and should not “set to ‘improve the world.’” On the other hand, they must obey the powers that be when governmental commands do not go against God’s word, and they must pray for their government (which in any case is more effective than fighting). So the answer was that Christians must serve, but without fighting. “There are lines of duties as clerical, ambulance service on the field of battle, ministering to the wounded and dying in the hospitals—ministering Christ, as we minister to the body.”14

  While Our Hope continued into 1917 to confine itself to reading the signs of the times. The King’s Business, then the leading premillennial journal, was more typical of the tension in the movement between other-worldly prophecy and genuine concern for the political direction of this world. The King’s Business was in a sense a continuation of the work of The Fundamentals, having been recommended as such in the concluding number of that series The journal was published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which at that time prospered with the Stewart brothers’ oil money under the leadership of Reuben Torrey.15

  During the two years preceding America’s entry into the war its editors firmly and repeatedly announced their total opposition to the war. “At the present time,” they said in a typical statement, “all other interests seem sacrificed to the monstrous war god.”16 Warfare was inevitable (prophecy made it clear that this war would not be the last), yet it was still terribly wrong. Indeed, the lead editorials of August 1915 could have been taken from the pages of the most sentimental liberal-pacifist journal. There is ‘neither Greek nor Jew,’… English, German, or American,” said the editors; hence “we must never forget we are brethren, and we must show our love for one another in every way possible.’’ This sentiment is especially poignant in the face of the editors’ note that they have lost a fine Christian friend on the Lusitania; still they steadfastly maintain that “‘Vengeance’ belongs to God, not to us…. Our part is to feed our hungry enemy (Rom. XII:20) and to ‘overcome evil with good.’”17 These high sentiments could, moreover, be translated into political action. The editors advised in the spring of 1916 that Teddy Roosevelt should be opposed because a vote for TR would be a vote for war.18 In remarkable contrast to later fundamentalist opposition to unholy alliances. The King’s Business in 1916 was willing to quote Bertrand Russell at length on the anti-war issue and to reprint an entire peace sermon by liberal Protestant spokesman Henry Sloan Coffin.19

  The European war, by widespread testimony, sharpened interest in prophetic teachings even outside the usual perimeters of the premillennial camp. A remarkable example of this is found in the socially active, theologically conservative Christian Herald. When the European war broke out in 1914, peace became the overwhelming preoccupation of The Christian Herald; in contrast to The King’s Business, however, this interest was framed in postmillennial terms which identified the progress of humanity with the advance of the kingdom. “World-wide philanthropy, international friendship, arbitration, popular education and advance in scientific hygiene, even the regulation of trusts,” the editors had said on the eve of the war, “must all be included among the ideals toward which we have been reaching of late years.” But there is another, they added, “—remote, illusive, but finer than all else—the vision of world-peace.”20 During the period prior to America’s entry into the war in April of 1917, The Christian Herald continued to advocate peace. In the meantime, however, the editor, George Sandison, apparently altered his eschatology drastically. By January 1917 he stated that “we are living in a time of prophetic fulfillment, though just now how far that fulfillment may reach no man knows….” “No one,” he went on, “on this side of the Atlantic… occupies so high a position” in this field of prophetic interpretation as James M. Gray of Moody Bible Institute. Recent articles by Gray had “been widely read and universally appreciated” and now a new series, “The Mountain Peaks of Prophecy,” was “certain of a still larger audience.”21 For the next three years until the end of Sandison’s editorship, The Christian Herald was (as it had been at its inception) a predominantly premillennial journal.22

  The dramatic wartime increase in interest in premillennialism created alarm among liberals23 and precipitated what may be the strangest episode in the development of fundamentalism. Beginning in 1917, for several years the theologians at the University of Chicago Divinity School led a fierce assault on premillennial teaching. These attacks, directed largely against their cross-town rival. Moody Bible Institute, were the first stage o
f the intense fundamentalist-modernist conflicts. In retrospect it seems utterly bizarre that one of the liberals’ main accusations during the war was that premillennialism bred a lack of patriotism and hence was a threat to the national security.

  Whether the Chicago polemics were motivated primarily by theological or nationalist zeal is difficult to say. The question is probably unanswerable because to the modernists at Chicago the progress of Christianity and the progress of culture were so intimately bound together that the two were always considered together. “Modernism,” in fact, meant first of all the adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture. So when the modernists affirmed the immanence of God, they characteristically meant that God is revealed in cultural development. The corollary was that human society is moving toward realization of the kingdom of God.24 These principles, and especially this last, represented (as we have seen) new versions of postmillennialism; the spiritual progress of the kingdom could be seen in the progress of culture, especially democratic cultures in Europe and America.

  World War I was a tremendous challenge to this faith in the progress of both culture and kingdom. European culture, for all its faults, had generally been viewed—together with its American offspring—as the best hope for the world. Now it seemed bent on destroying itself. When America was drawn into the war, liberal Protestants—like their conservative brethren—were divided. A fair number had at least some reservations about America’s entry into the war and some of these continued simply to see the issue as war versus universal peace. Many others, however, viewed the war as a struggle for democratic civilization (and hence, in the long run, peace) against autocracy. Those who took this view were subject to the extreme and extravagant enthusiasm that swept the American people generally. For these modernists a war to ensure the safety of democracy and to end war, exactly fit the logic of their hopes for the kingdom.25