Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  The sense of social crisis also brought to the fore a new type of fundamental leader, the moral reformer. William B. Riley’s rise to the leadership of the movement is, as has been already mentioned, evidence of this trend. The subsequent emergence of William Jennings Bryan as a prominent spokesman for fundamentalism fits the same pattern. It was in keeping with the direction the movement was taking that a politician should come to represent it.26 In fact, the optimistic Bryan could really add little—beside the prestige of his support—to the combination of patriotism, evangelism, and Biblicism already articulated by a premillennialist such as A. C. Dixon. The fusion of these traditions suggests, however, that fundamentalism represented a new combination of revivalist, conservative, and premillennial traditions, united in an effort to bind together once again the many frayed strands of evangelical America.

  Although the career of Frank Norris of Texas could be used to illustrate this same point,27 John Roach Straton of New York City perhaps comes closest to the “ideal type” of the fundamentalist moral reformer. Straton came to Calvary Baptist Church in New York in the spring of 1918. He was a Southerner, rather well educated, who had held several other major city pastorates. In his early career he was an ardent champion of both moral and social reform, attacking not only notorious vices such as prostitution and the use of alcohol, but also advocating some more progressive causes, such as women’s and children’s labor reform, wage reform, fair housing, and prison reform.28 During this period, although he preached a traditional Gospel of salvation, he was not a premillennialist in any significant sense and often sounded more like a postmillennialist believer in progress.29

  Soon after his arrival in New York, the two major characteristics of his later career appeared: his social message became focused almost entirely on notorious vices,30 and he emerged as a prominent card-carrying premillennial fundamentalist. His social program is evident in his nationally published sermon of the summer of 1918, “Will New York Be Destroyed if it Does not Repent?” in which he attacked the vice, gluttony, gaming, and indecency of New York’s hotels and cabarets, comparing the city with Nineveh, Babylon, Sodom, Gomorrah, and (drawing upon more recent history) San Francisco before the earthquake. Although Straton pictured New York as facing an impending doom, there was still no trace of premillennial prophecy in his message. Rather, he suggested that “the destiny of the human race for hundreds of years to come is in the balance.”31 Despite the lack of explicit premillennialism in his prophetic preaching of 1918, by 1919 Straton had identified himself with premillennial fundamentalism and was in fact a speaker at the first WCFA conference.32

  Premillennialism seems not to have dampened Straton’s zeal to expose and eradicate the immorality of his time. The most sensational period in his career, in fact, commenced in the spring of 1920 with a highly publicized raid and exposé of vice in the Times Square area. During the succeeding years Straton supplied the New York newspapers with a steady stream of sensational attacks on vice, including everything from Sabbath desecration to ballroom dancing and prize fighting. Such attacks helped to tie fundamentalism to the popular idea of the Puritan tradition as morally repressive. One observer described Straton as “like Oliver Cromwell in a nightclub, or Bishop Asbury at the Saratoga races.”33 Straton’s own view of the situation is caught in the title of his two most sensational books: “The Menace of Immorality in Church and State” (1920) and “Fighting the Devil in Modern Babylon” (1929).

  Despite this latter title, Straton never quite made up his mind whether the United States was Babylon or the New Israel. Perhaps he thought of New York City as Babylon in the midst of Israel. At any rate, despite his non-stop prophecies of doom, he always remained a full-fledged patriot. Indicating that “the deadliest danger now confronting America is the union of irreligion and political radicalism,” he declared:

  Can anyone doubt that God has lodged with us in this free land the ark of the convenant of humanity’s hopes? So surely as God led forth ancient Israel for a unique and glorious mission, so does he seem to have raised up Christian America for such an hour as this.34

  Straton’s impetus for his fierce attacks on the dance, theaters, and other worldly amusements seems to have been a sense that Christian America was losing touch with its foundation in Biblical teaching. The Bible, he said, in the context of a typical attack on dancing, “is the foundation of all that is decent and right in our civilization.”35 Thus it was consistent for Straton to identify himself with the central fundamentalist cause—the defense of the fundamental doctrines of the faith.36 For Straton, whether attacking vice or debating modernists, the key issue was the same—the all-importance of Scripture. Frequently he made the accusation that attacks on the Bible would lead to lawlessness and ultimately to the total demise of civilization. At this point the theological aspect of fundamentalism merged with its concern for the social and moral welfare of the nation. The battle for the Bible was a battle for civilization.

  Prom The King’s Business. July 1922, p. 642.

  By the end of 1920 most Americans had recovered from the most extreme manifestations of crisis mentality and were set on course for a return to “normalcy.” Fundamentalists too were committed to a return to the status quo ante bellum, but they wished to revive an evangelical theological consensus that had in fact been gone for at least a generation. Such a quest for normalcy could hardly be satisfied by a vote for Harding. Moreover, while the postwar sense of crisis was apparently only a temporary disruption for most Americans, for fundamentalists it was the beginning of a crusade. They began to organize precisely at the time of the crisis in 1919 and 1920, and as a result they institutionalized and preserved important parts of the outlook of that era of intense feeling and opinion.

  XVIII. The Fundamentalist Offensive on Two Fronts: 1920–1921

  Between 1920 and 1925 fundamentalism took shape as a movement distinct from its antecedents and representing more than just the sum of the sub-movements that supported it. It flourished on two fronts. In the major denominations fundamentalists battled against those who denied, or would tolerate denials of, the fundamentals of the traditional faith. In American culture as a whole they fought to stop the teaching of evolution in the public schools. By the early summer of 1925 fundamentalists appeared to be on the verge of winning major victories that would legislate reversals of long-developing trends away from evangelical orthodoxy in both churches and culture. Yet as the movement came closer to effecting such a revolution, the main body of its adherents hesitated to follow those radicals who would tolerate no compromise. During the following year the mood of the country swung sharply away from the uncompromising radicals, and their movement was left in a shambles. From 1920 to 1925 fundamentalism was a broad and nationally influential coalition of conservatives, but after 1925 it was composed of less flexible and more isolated minorities often retreating into separatism, where they could regroup their considerable forces.

  The issues that shaped fundamentalism during this critical five-year period were most fully developed in ecclesiastical debates, although these cannot be separated from the context of the anti-evolution movement. Fundamentalism took definite form especially in the conflicts within the Northern Baptist and Northern Presbyterian (Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) denominations. These became centers of the anti-modernist movement because in each of these denominations advanced and aggressive modernism was faced by a conservative counter-force of comparable strength. In other denominations, either the liberals had already gained virtually complete freedom (as among the Congregationalists) or the conservatives were so overwhelmingly dominant (as among Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians) that there was no possibility of protracted controversy.

  By World War I there were strong liberal and conservative parties within the Northern Baptist Convention, and among the conservatives there was also a prominent dispensational premillennialist element. In fact, the prophecy movement in America, which initially had been dominated by Presbyterians,
was now (to judge by denominational affiliations of Bible teachers) predominantly Baptist.1 The preservation of active Baptist affiliations was natural. The Presbyterians had some intellectual affinities to dispensationalism, but the Baptists had a broader set of interests in common with the prophetic movement. The Baptist movements themselves had formed in reaction against ecclesiastical establishments. Thus, like the dispensationalists, their traditions emphasized individual salvation, the right of conscience against ecclesiastical authority and the local congregation against centralized power, separation of church and state, and the New Testament in preference to the Old.

  The dispensationalists prodded other Baptist conservatives into taking a strong stand against liberalism. In fact the original Baptist fundamentalist movement was not predominantly dispensationalist and its leadership included spokesmen for the larger element of non-dispensational conservatives. In January of 1917 Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the conservative Watchman-Examiner, began a series of editorials sharply contrasting “Old and New Theologies.”2 In the same year Augustus H. Strong, the leading conservative Baptist theologian of the day and recently retired president of Rochester Theological Seminary, completed writing A Tour of the Missions, a scathing denunciation of liberalism at home and abroad. Neither Laws nor Strong was a dispensationalist, and neither was especially narrow-minded or intolerant. Indeed, neither argued for the inerrancy of Scripture.3 Laws admitted that the new theology was “based on a sounder religious psychology” than was the old and that the old was burdened with some outdated forms. The most important point he made, however, was that the two theologies contained “irreconcilable differences.”4 President Strong’s final disillusionment with the new theology was dramatic and unexpected. Strong, whose seminary at Rochester had included Walter Rauschenbusch among its faculty, had spent much of his long career attempting to reconcile the assumptions of modern theology and criticism with traditional Baptist belief.5 Now his tour of the mission fields startled him into the conviction that the Baptists were “losing our faith in the Bible.” “The unbelief in our seminary teaching,” he said, “is like a blinding mist which is slowly settling down upon our churches, and is gradually abolishing, not only all definite views of Christian doctrine, but also all conviction of duty to ‘contend earnestly for the faith’ of our fathers.” Strong felt that this unbelief was connected with desire for unity with other denominations, and he judged it not simply a lapse in Baptist principles but the “far more radical evil” of apostasy from Christ.6

  The increasingly aggressive and ambitious character of interdenominational Protestant liberalism in the immediate postwar years aggravated such concerns. In 1918 and 1919, journals such as The Biblical World and the weekly Christian Century not only kept up a constant barrage of arguments against premillennialism, but they also repeatedly asserted that they sought the eradication of the defective forms of Christianity associated with conservatism. In the spring of 1919, for example. The Christian Century—whose controversialist propensities had originated in battles among the Disciples of Christ—ran an advertisement offering $100 for the best serial story “dealing with the conditions of modern church life, especially the embarrassment and evils of denominationalism, revivalism, traditional theology, etc., and making a constructive contribution to the modern way of thinking about religion.”7

  The spirit of interdenominational solidarity fostered by the war had raised new hopes for cooperation and eventual unity of the denominations on a broad liberal basis. Among Baptists efforts in this direction involved attempts to increase denominational centralization, which added to conservatives’ alarm concerning the overall trend (although conservatives were not themselves adverse to using centralized power when it furthered their own cause). The idealistic Interchurch World Movement was most immediately disturbing. Initiated just after the war, this was a colossal effort both to raise money and to coordinate Protestant benevolence and missions. As its opponents pointed out, the Interchurch World Movement was American Protestantism’s version of the League of Nations8 and, indeed, although the plan generated some enthusiasm in 1919, by 1920 the opposition was as strong as that against the League. Early in the summer of 1920, the Interchurch collapsed, partly because of a lack of outside financial support, but also significantly because effective campaigns of the conservative opposition had seriously hurt internal support both from Northern Baptists and from Northern Presbyterians.9 Similarly, a proposal to unite America’s Protestant churches which was put forward with great enthusiasm in 1919 was by 1920 left in ruins by popular resistance in various denominations.10

  These events provided the ecclesiastical context for the organization of Baptist fundamentalism as a denominational movement in the “war against rationalism.” At the pre-convention conference in 1920 the Baptist fundamentalists had emphasized the danger of false teaching in the Baptist schools. At the subsequent meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention the new fundamentalist party succeeded to the extent of having a committee (including the president of the fundamentalist group, J. C. Massee)11 appointed to conduct a formal investigation of the suspect institutions.

  In 1921 the “Fundamentalist Feliowship,” as it now became known, held another pre-convention conference and prepared to urge its views on the denomination as a whole. One of the major problems that would eventually ruin the movement was already disturbingly apparent. The Northern Baptist Convention was designed to promote positive practical cooperation, not to act as a court. Ultimately its power was derived from the Baptist constituency. Although expressing disapproval of some of the teachings that Massee and others had documented, the report of the committee investigating the schools (which the Convention accepted) pointed out there was nothing the Convention could do.12 In anticipation of such a result, the pre-convention group in 1921 had searched for a way to regulate the teachings in the denomination. One possibility within the genuine American Baptist tradition (which included two quite opposite heritages on this point) was to adopt a creed. In preparation for such a move, in 1921 the Fundamentalist Fellowship, demonstrating an inclination toward centralized regulation, prepared a creed that incorporated elements of the Philadelphia and New Hampshire Confessions with other broad statements of Baptist principles. They postponed proposing this creed to the Convention itself for one year. Meanwhile, the conservative party took another tack, which they hoped would bring them to the same destination. A contributor offered nearly two million dollars to Baptist missions on the condition that the funds not be used in aid of anyone not subscribing to orthodox beliefs. The proposed test of orthodoxy was similar to the five fundamentals that the Presbyterian General Assembly had first adopted in 1910 and then reaffirmed in 1916.13

  Mission work was a crucial factor in the emergence of fundamentalism as an organized movement, and long remained one of the most hotly debated issues in both the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations. Conservatism was strong in the mission field and so was dispensational premillennialism. As we have seen, missions had been a positive force for creating a sense of unity among revivalists and other conservative evangelicals. American Southerners were also well represented in foreign missions and so these Southern conservatives were drawn into fundamentalist militancy. The formation of the Bible Union of China in 1920 was especially significant. Dispensationalists and Southern Presbyterians (who as a rule were not dispensationalists) were particularly active in this organization.14 On the mission field the implications of liberalism were obvious, practical and urgent. Here the suggestion of the more extreme liberals that God revealed himself in non-Christian cultures had profound implications for missionary programs. In Africa or Asia these implications were naturally far more obvious than in nominally Christian middle-class America. The conservatives believed the issue at stake was nothing less than the salvation of souls—and this was unquestionably foremost of all evangelical concerns. On this question feelings were deep and often unalterable. Conservative missionaries, such as those of the Bible Union, wer
e quick to impress on any who would listen (as A. H. Strong already had) the dangers of the liberal teachings which were dampening evangelical zeal and thus allowing precious souls to go to perdition.

  The mission field thus played a substantial role in making fundamentalism an interdenominational movement. In 1921, while the Baptist fundamentalists debated mission policy, similar concerns brought conservative Presbyterians into the distinctly fundamentalist phase of their controversies. The Presbyterian combatants, especially as represented by The Presbyterian of Philadelphia, had already assimilated the idea of the antithesis of true Christianity and modernism.15 The furor over missions simply gave them a new point on which to press the issue. The debate started early in 1921 when dispensationalist W. H. Griffith Thomas returned from a visit to China, where he had ties with the Bible Union, and reported to a group of Philadelphia Presbyterians that liberalism was rife among Northern Presbyterian missionaries. The accusation created a minor sensation and several attempts were made to get the 1921 General Assembly to start an investigation. The issue was temporarily put aside; two conservatives, Robert E. Speer and Charles R. Erdman, both contributors to The Fundamentals, assured the Convention of the fidelity of the Presbyterian missionaries.16 Erdman was a professor at Princeton Seminary and a well-known premillennialist. His appearance as a spokesman for tolerance was significant for the course the disputes would take in the next years.