Fundamentalism and American Culture
Page 23
The war brought closer together individuals who held a variety of opinions on the proper relationship of Christianity and culture. Both radical and moderate premillennialists now gave greater importance to the preservation of civilization. American evangelicals, typified by Bryan, had always given Christian civilization top priority, and now they believed it to be gravely threatened. Postmillennialist confessional conservatives, represented by Princeton or by The Presbyterian, tempered their hope for civilization with Calvinist views of innate human depravity.59 Important points of disagreement remained and would continue to surface. Now, however, all had a shared interest in the cultural question and all regarded the state of American civilization with a mixture of hopeful loyalty and increasing alarm.
XVII. Fundamentalism and the Cultural Crisis: 1919–1920
An overwhelming atmosphere of crisis gripped America during the immediately postwar period. The year 1919 especially was characterized by a series of real as well as imagined terrors. The disruption caused by massive demobilization and postwar economic adjustments was compounded by a number of acrimonious labor disputes and strikes and by a series of terrorist bombings. There was alarm over rapidly deteriorating moral standards and a deep suspicion of foreign influence. The immediate reaction was to focus on the sinister implications of the strikes and terrorism and to rechannel the enormous emotional force of wartime patriotism against a different foreign enemy—Bolshevism. In this “Red Scare,” a real but limited threat excited near hysteria.1 Clearly it was part of the general psychological disorientation of the nation. Americans had been whipped into a frenzy of wartime enthusiasm. Abruptly the war ended, leaving behind a directionless belligerence which sought a new outlet. It seemed as though the people needed an enemy, one that could account for the disruptions on the home front.2
The continued ambivalence of most premillennialists in this highly charged atmosphere of national crisis is well suggested by the two accompanying cartoons, which first appeared in The King’s Business during the summer of 1919. The first, on the cover of the July issue, while intimating an ideal of Christian civilization, points only toward a future hope. The other, from the preceding issue3 is aimed at more immediate solutions to social problems.4
These reactions to the widely proclaimed Bolshevik threat were not unusual in the atmosphere of acute paranoia which prevailed throughout the country in the summer of 1919, and do not necessarily indicate that premillennialism had become politicized by this time.5 But the tension between the deep disturbance awakened by cultural trends and the attempt to continue to respond only in the realm of prophecy and evangelism was more acute than ever. This is evident in the Christian Worker’s Magazine of July 1919, in which editor James M. Gray identified the pressure to join the League of Nations as “the third greatest crisis” in the nation’s history. Gray averred that to join the League would be to commit “national suicide,” and urged his readers to send for the literature of Henry Watterson’s “League for the Preservation of American Independence,” which portrayed the League as incompatible with the “fundamentals of American independence.” Yet, having yielded thus far to the desire to save the nation, Gray clearly was embarrassed and attempted to disclaim that he was suggesting anything more than prayer. “We have no position to maintain and are not taking sides,” said Gray, “for this is a political more than a religious question, but we are urging our readers to reflect,… and above all to pray that the God of nations… may rule… that no harm may come to our nation and that His will may be done in the world.”6 By the time of the national election the next year, Gray dropped even this pretense of neutrality. He made it clear that both for reasons of national welfare (it would lead to war) and because of prophetic warnings (the league probably was condemned as the latter-day revival of the Roman Empire) Christians should do all they would to oppose the League.7
Cover of July 1919 King’s Business
From The King’s Business, June 1919, p. 588
Ironically, the premillennial publication that reacted most strongly to the threat of Bolshevism was the radical anti-cultural journal Our Hope, in which the war seemed to have created a heightened political consciousness. Although the editor, Arno C. Gaebelein, stuck to the sign-of-the-times format, his alarm about the political situation was clearly immediate and very real. For Gaebelein the pieces of the prophetic puzzle had suddenly fallen into place with the dramatic fulfillment of a prophecy. In 1916, before the Revolution, he had predicted that Russia (the “great power of the North”) would “play a prominent and to herself fatal part during the predicted end of this age.…”8 Now the Bolshevik Revolution made it clear what that role would be. In the “danger of Bolshevism,” the bombings and attempted bombings of 1919, he now could see clearly that “The Beast Lifts the Head in Our Land.” The government had been naïve and lax with respect to radicalism, and Americans should now expect not less but more lawlessness as “the full power of the god of this age—Satan—” is revealed.9 On the same subject a year later, he pictured Americans as confronted with a life or death choice between civilization and communism.” We are going through a reconstruction period,” he said, “… and either we are coming out of it as a family of nations in which rich and poor alike will have been chastened, and in which each citizen will accord to his fellowman the same rights and privileges that he wants for himself, or the reconstruction period will expire by giving birth to a World Communist Internationale, in which our civilization and religion will be totally destroyed!!!”10
A sense of doom was created by apparent confirmations of premillennial pessimism in the daily news, and heightened by growing dismay about the moral condition of the nation. Premillennialists shared with many conservative Americans the conviction that the moral foundations of the nation were rapidly crumbling. Statistics documented the rise in crime rates.11 Many Americans now flaunted the vicious habits often condemned by evangelical preachers. Young men and even women were openly smoking—The King’s Business spoke of “The Yellow Peril of America.”12 It was particularly galling that churches accepted such changes. Methodist church choirs, for instance, allowed young women to display “brazen bared knees.” “Who is responsible for this change of custom from the bended knee… ?” queried The King’s Business. Dancing, once an abomination to Methodists, was now allowed even in their churches.13
All of these various postwar phenomena could easily be seen as related to one another. In November 1919 the Reverend Oliver W. Van Osdel, a prominent premillennialist pastor in Michigan, did just that in a sermon on the signs of the times. Van Osdel decried everything from such classic sins as selfishness, covetousness, and greed, to the League of Nations, the celebration of the anniversary of the Armistice by public dancing in the streets, and gymnasiums and moving pictures in the churches. In an impressionistic way he summed up a fairly typical reaction to the complexity of the events and their relationships:
From The King’s Business, May 1919, p. 396.
Sometimes people ask what are the objections to dancing and theaters and card playing and such things; they say these are not to be severely condemned; but you will notice that the people who indulge in these worldly things are always loose in doctrine… the two go together, and when you find people indulging in worldliness they become loose in doctrine, then apostasy easily creeps in, the union of Christendom becomes possible and probably will be united through corrupt doctrine under one head, the Pope of Rome.14
One indication that many premillennialists were shifting their emphasis— away from just evangelizing, praying, and waiting for the end time, toward more intense concern with retarding degenerative trends—was the role they played in the formation of the first explicitly fundamentalist organization. In the summer of 1918, under the guidance of William B. Riley, a number of the leaders in the Bible school and prophetic conference movement conceived the idea of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.15 The first conference of the new agency was held in May 1919. It differed
from earlier prophecy conferences primarily in the wider range of topics discussed. There was a program of well-worn Bible school lectures in defense of the faith and featuring some premillennialism. More important, a tone of urgency prevailed at the 1919 meetings. “The Great Apostasy was spreading like a plague throughout Christendom,” declared the conference organizers. “Thousands of false teachers, many of them occupying high ecclesiastical positions, are bringing in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.” The Bible “was wounded in the house of its friends;” cardinal doctrines “were rejected as archaic and effete; false science had created many false apostles of Christ; indeed they were seeing that ‘Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.’” Yet, said the promoters, there was a “widespread revival— not a revival in the sense of great ingatherings resulting from evangelistic effort, but a revival of interest in and hunger for the Word of God.” Indeed, the premillennial leaders had some reason for this hope, which was part of the crusading mood of the moment. The WCFA meeting in Philadelphia was reportedly attended by six thousand people and was only one of a series of conferences held in various cities in 1919.16 Whereas a few years earlier the vast publication campaign of The Fundamentals had produced little perceptible effect, now the Fundamentals conference was the spark that helped to generate a nationwide movement.17
While for most premillennialists it was a departure to direct intense energy toward the organization of a counterattack on the degenerative trends in churches and culture, among the Presbyterian conservatives the cultural crisis of 1917–1920 served only to intensify existing concerns and efforts. Of the groups with a major role in the formation of classic fundamentalism, the Presbyterians had the most highly developed view of the connection between religion and culture. They had long linked the progress of truth to the progress of morality and civilization and the connection between theological decline and the demise of civilization was one with which they were quite familiar. The urgency of this concern had already been expressed in the alarmist preamble to the “five points” of 1910. With respect to organizing against modernism, Presbyterian conservatives were already in the field in 1919—indeed their representatives had been battling one or another sort of infidelity in America for close to two hundred years.
The unsettling years 1919 and 1920, however, served to accentuate the cultural dimension of the crisis for the doctrinaire Presbyterians and to bring out expressions of the same concerns felt in other circles. Writing early in 1920, David S. Kennedy, editor of the popular voice of Presbyterian militancy. The Presbyterian, reiterated and summarized his own recent analysis of “The American Crisis.” His statement, stressing the moral implications of this crisis, epitomizes the view of the nation that was coming to prevail throughout the conservative evangelical community:
It must be remembered that America was born of moral progenitors and founded on an eternally moral foundation. Her ancestors were Christian of a high order, purified by fire, and washed in blood. Her foundation is the Bible, the infallible Word of God. The decalogue written by the finger of God is her perfect guide in her religious and social life. There has been some weakening of this moral standard in the thought and life of America. This is the result of an age of luxury within and freedom from conflict from without. There is but one remedy: the nation must return to her standard of the Word of God. She must believe, love and live her Bible. This will require the counteraction of that German destructive criticism which has found its way into the religious and moral thought of our people as the conception and propaganda of the Reds have found their way with poisoning and overthrowing influence into their civil and industrial life. The Bible and the God of the Bible is our only hope. America is narrowed to a choice. She must restore the Bible to its historic place in the family, the day school, the college and university, the church and Sabbath-school, and thus through daily life and thought revive and build up her moral life and faith, or else she might collapse and fail the world in this crucial age.…18
One result of the rapid spread of this type of thinking among conservative Protestants was the formal organization of an anti-modernist protest in the Northern Baptist Convention. This was the actual occasion of the invention of the term “fundamentalist.” Curtis Lee Laws, editor of a prominent Baptist paper, The Watchman Examiner, coined the word, and defined “fundamentalists” as those ready “to do battle royal for the Fundamentals.”19 He and 154 other signatories called for a “General Conference on Fundamentals” to precede the yearly meeting of the Northern Baptists. They expressed “increasing alarm” over “the havoc which rationalism is working” in the churches, which were also affected by “a widespread and growing worldliness.”20
As the term “fundamentalist” suggests, Laws’s primary concern, as well as of the organizers of parallel fundamentalist movements at the time, was doctrinal. This point is worth emphasizing, because it might be supposed that fundamentalism was primarily a response to social and political conditions. It was not. First of all it was what its proponents most often said it was—a response to the spread of what was perceived as false doctrine.21 After the war these suspect teachings were presented more widely, openly, and aggressively, reflecting a new openness and enthusiasm generated by a changed social setting. It is true that the crusading spirit of the war, together with the urgency of cultural alarm that followed, contributed to the intensity of the fundamentalist reaction. It also served to provide, as has been pointed out, a new cultural dimension to the movement. Nevertheless, these observations, although important, should not obscure, the fact that for the fundamentalists the fundamental issues were theological.
Theology, however, did impinge upon other areas of the national culture— perhaps most observably in the schools and colleges. Most American colleges had been established by evangelical Protestants, and even the public schools had been dominated by Protestant ideas. In the half century since the Civil War, the schools had generally experienced a revolutionary secularization. Accordingly, those who were now organizing strategy for dealing with the religious dimensions of the cultural crisis saw the schools as an important arena for battle. William B. Riley in 1918 founded a paper entitled Christian Fundamentals in School and Church, which gave priority to the school issue. Here was a religious issue for which it was easy to rally support. Qualms about political involvement and establishments of religion could easily be forgotten when speaking about the schools. The King’s Business, for example, which often printed remarks like “there is no such thing as Christian Civilization in any nation on earth today,” could with respect to the education issue observe that in the public schools the Devil was dispensing “a Satanic poison that threatens the very foundations of the Republic,” and made a plea for an all-out campaign to “MAKE THE COUNTRY SAFE FOR CHILDREN.22
At the pre-convention conference of conservative Northern Baptists in 1920, the school issue was the primary focus in planning for action at the Convention itself.23 J. C. Massee, president of the new fundamentalist group (who had spoken also at the 1919 premillennialist WCFA Conference), warned against false teachers in Baptist colleges and seminaries. Massee declared that, even if an institution be nine-tenths sound, if it permitted any false teachings, “it remains unsafe until it has purged itself of that source of pernicious percolating poison.” The schools, he said, were strongly affected by the general “drift away from the ancient landmarks” (a key phrase referring to strict Baptist principles), by “modernism in theology,” “rationalism in philosophy,” and “materialism in life.” These could no longer be regarded as merely disturbing and were now dangerous and destructive. Massee’s call for action was vivid, even if his imagery is laid on with a heavy hand:
If we would save them, we must cease now to let Philistine teachers plow with our educational heifer, lest our denominational Samson, stripped of the goodly garments of his faith and virtue, fall under the witchery of a scholastic Delilah, and be permanen
tly shorn of his strength, blinded as to his spiritual eyes, and bound to the unspeakable service of godless and mocking masters.24
Most of the speakers at the Baptist conference concentrated on questions of fundamental doctrines and/or strictly ecclesiastical issues. Another premillennialist, A. C. Dixon, must take credit for explicitly extending their concerns to the whole of American civilization. The logical necessity for this extension had already been established by wartime rhetoric. Dixon, former editor of The Fundamentals, and recently returned from serving in Spurgeon’s former church in London, now clearly articulated the connections among the school issue, the future of civilization, and theological decline, with particular emphasis on the role of evolution. Evolution was not only a clear question of naturalism versus supernaturalism, theory versus fact, it was a part of “the conflict of the ages, darkness versus light, Cain vs. Abel, autocracy vs. civilized democracy.” Greek philosophers, descended from Cain, had first developed evolutionary theory between 700 and 300 B.C. Darwin had added to this the idea of survival of the fittest, which Dixon described as giving “the strong and fit the scientific right to destroy the weak and the unfit.” In Germany Nietzsche expanded this doctrine, and together with the German attacks on the Bible as the proper basis for civilization, this led inevitably to the barbaric German atrocities of World War I. By contrast, American civilization was founded on the Bible, Plymouth Rock, separation of church and state (a Baptist shibboleth), democracy and freedom, and the principles of Abraham Lincoln. Americans always stood with the weak and the oppressed against the oppressors. They had freed the slaves, “delivered little Cuba from her strong oppressor,” and come to the rescue of Britain and her allies in the World War, “defending the weak against the aggression of the strong.” America had won the victory of prohibition “over the oppressive powers of the drink traffic.” Here Dixon, although a premillennialist, harked back to postmillennial visions of a democratic America leading the world to the triumph of righteousness. The agenda for the next evangelical crusade was an attack on the anti-democratic, “might is right,” Bible-denying philosophy of evolution.25