Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  The “immigrant” analogy should not be pushed too far. Immigrants normally come to a new land voluntarily. Fundamentalists, by contrast, experienced the transition from the old world of the nineteenth century to the new world of the twentieth century wholly involuntarily. Thus they not only experienced a sense of alienation, but felt called to a militant defense of the old order; they had a fondness for military imagery and did not hesitate to describe their cause as a holy war.26 So the metaphor may be extended to picture fundamentalists sheltered behind their ideological ghetto wall, with the wall itself as heavily fortified as the very wall of Zion. Behind this barrier, the possibility of intellectual isolation, extremism, and paranoia was greatly increased.

  This immigrant analogy is also inadequate in that fundamentalists’ sense of alienation seems to have been in force only selectively. Much of the time they appear to have identified with the old Victorian Protestant establishment. Their struggle was not really that of trying to adjust to a new culture or to break into the centers of influence in the culture. Rather they saw themselves, and the groups with which they identified, being forced out.

  Fundamentalism appealed, as we have seen, to a number of actual immigrant groups, especially those who shared a northern European Protestant heritage. Somewhat paradoxically, many from these groups seem to have found fundamentalism an acceptable milieu for their Americanization. In any case fundamentalists and immigrants had some basic affinities. Some of these were important common social denominators—non-urban Protestant origins for example. The importance of such influences is difficult to assess, but one central aspect of their common uprooting and anxiety was explicitly expressed: their sense of finding themselves in a culture that was turning from God. In twentieth-century America many Scottish and English Protestants could sing one of the most popular fundamentalist songs together with newer Americans:

  I am a stranger here,

  within a foreign land;

  My home is far away,

  upon a golden strand;

  Ambassador to be

  of realms beyond the sea—

  I’m here on business for my King.27

  The widespread defection from traditional Christianity had another important effect that tied fundamentalists’ social experience to their intellectual and theological concerns. With the culture less and less dominated by evangelical values, the religion was losing its social base. It was no longer automatically supported by community pressure and the reward of respectability. This was especially true in the cities. With this social base seriously eroded, something else had to give cohesion to the movement. Thus greater stress was placed on personal commitment and belief as the basis for solidarity. Certain key beliefs—inerrancy, anti-evolution, often premillennialism—gained special importance as touchstones to ascertain whether a person belonged to the movement. Exactly correct belief then became proportionately more important to the movement as its social basis for cohesiveness decreased.

  XXIII. Fundamentalism

  as a Political Phenomenon

  Ever since fundamentalism first appeared on the scene, its opponents had suspected the existence of a sinister political dimension to the movement. In World War I, professors at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago suggested that the premillennialists might be supported by German money. When the war was over and fundamentalist patriotism was no longer in question, there came the more plausible accusation of complicity with business interests. In 1921, the Christian Century still equated premillennialism with fundamentalism, and it opined that business had initiated “a new courtship” with premillennialism. “When the capitalist discovers a brand of religion which has not the slightest interest in ‘the social gospel,’ but on the contrary intends to pass up all reforms to the Messiah who will return on the clouds of heaven, he has found just the thing he has been looking for.”1 “It may appear,” wrote Kirsopp Lake in The Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1925), “to large financial interests that industrial stability can be safe-guarded by Fundamentalists who can be trusted to teach ‘anti-revolutionary’ doctrines in politics and economics as in theology.2 Later interpreters suggested similar connections. William McLoughlin in his studies of American revivalism, and Richard Hofstadter in his comments on fundamentalism, both stressed the political leanings of their subjects. Paul A. Carter’s “semi-Marxist” interpretation of the Social Gospel written in the 1950s was based on the assumption of business support for fundamentalist conservative politics.3

  Since the early 1960s, however, most interpreters have agreed that fundamentalists’ deepest interests were more ideological and theological than political. In 1968 Paul Carter published a radical revision of the view he had defended in the 1950s. Referring to fundamentalist political interests. Carter now argued that “in deepest essence this was not what the fundamentalist controversy was about.” While acknowledging that political interests were sometimes important to fundamentalists, Carter argued that their principal concerns were simple. They were “defending what the Fundamentalists honestly believed was all that gave meaning to life, ‘the faith once delivered to the saints.’”4 In a more detailed study Robert Wenger concurred with Carter that “we cannot adequately explain fundamentalism in terms of social and economic interests.” Wenger held that since some fundamentalists could be found on each side of almost every social-political issue, no political stance could be regarded as a test of faithfulness to the movement. Furthermore, he pointed out that much political conservatism, which was indeed the dominant political tendency in the movement, was little more than a manifestation of commonplace American opinions of the day. Fundamentalist nationalism was, moreover, tempered by a sense of God’s judgment, a sense absent from the patriotism of most Americans. The unity of the movement, he maintained, “lay in its biblically-based Christian theology.” This faith “helped to shape the fundamentalist’s view of his culture far more than his culture shaped his faith.”5

  Faith and theology were no doubt foremost in determining the general outlook of fundamentalists; nevertheless their cultural experience had a great deal to do with shaping their secondary attitudes, especially their political views. This is obvious if one compafes fundamentalism in the later 1920s or the 1930s with the earlier stages of the movement around 1900 or 1910. In the era before World War I expressions of cultural alarm were infrequent, nationalism was not strong, and progressive political sentiments were still common, even though conservatism prevailed. By about 1930 politically liberal sentiments had disappeared almost entirely from the movement.6 As we have seen in Chapter X, the disappearance of progressive sentiments is a complex phenomenon related explicitly to fundamentalists’ reaction to liberalism’s identification with the Social Gospel. But not only was fundamentalism’almost uniformly conservative in politics by the 1920s. In addition, during the decade following the first world war, leading fundamentalists were commonly found preaching alarmist views of the state of American culture. They expressed alarm not only about modernism and evolution, but also about the spread of communism. Occasionally even anti-Jewish sentiments were incorporated. At the same time the unqualified fundamentalist patriotism was growing rapidly.7 The marked contrast with the period before World War I confirms Paul Carter’s statement that “fundamentalism may have been not so much one of the causes of that wartime and postwar intolerance, as has so often been assumed, as it was one of its victims.”8

  This observation reinforces the point that American fundamentalism was not simply an expression of theology or of concern about false doctrines (as it might have been described in 1910). As this work has emphasized, in the minds of most fundamentalists the theological crisis came to be inextricably wedded to the very survival of Christian civilization—by which they meant a Bible-based civilization. One cannot comprehend the character of the movement without recognizing this social and political dimension. Although the anti-worldly direction taken by revivalist evangelicalism had precluded most explicitly social programs by Wor
ld War I, the traditions from which fundamentalism sprang almost always had encouraged some political involvement—whether temperance. Sabbath legislation, anti-Masonry, anti-slavery, or any of the other evangelical causes. It was therefore not entirely out of character when the movement was dramatically politicized after World War I, as in the campaign to legislate against evolution. Nor was it particularly incongruous for a politican to emerge as the chief spokesman for fundamentalism. It does seem a bit anomalous that the premillennial leaders should fall all over themselves in their enthusiasm to enlist Bryan as leader of their organizations; that phenomenon is perhaps the best evidence that premillennial otherworldliness was not decisive in determining fundamentalists’ behavior. The belief that America should be a Christian nation founded on God’s word was more deeply rooted in their tradition.

  Fundamentalism had indeed become politicized in the 1920s, but this politicization was haphazard. Although many fundamentalists supported the anti-evolution crusade, they do not seem to have been very united on other political questions. They did participate in the general conservative Protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism and Al Smith in 1928, and they also joined with most Protestants, conservative and liberal alike, in supporting prohibition.9 Otherwise, the movement does not appear to have been identified with any political stand. The immediate origins of fundamentalism reveal almost no systematic political thought, except perhaps some inherited wisdom from the days of the nineteenth-century evangelical establishment—which of course tended to be conservative and Republican. For reasons already mentioned, revivalists, premillennialists, holiness teachers, and Baptist and Presbyterian conservatives had concerned themselves relatively little with such such subjects since the Civil War. Certainly they had developed no clear consensus on them, except that the church should not be involved in political affairs. The closest thing to a political principle that most fundamentalists seemed to share was a profession of individualism that paralleled their theological dictum that the individual was the basic unit in the work of salvation. Even this principle was not consistently developed, since many fundamentalists held that God judged whole nations. Seldom, in fact, did fundamentalists work out their political views in any systematic way.10 In general individualistic, not oriented toward politics, and suspicious of the growing connection between liberal theology and liberal politics, the precursors of fundamentalism had drifted in a politically conservative direction. Yet they were essentially drifting, rather than moving purposefully. Hence after 1917, when social and political issues once again loomed large, they responded to the issues haphazardly and on the basis of inherited prejudices and formulae, with next to no theoretical preparation to guide them.

  The emergence of the notorious political extremism of later fundamentalism should be considered in this context. Before World War I the lists of vices illustrating the decline of civilization contained only scattered references to socialism and anarchism. In 1919, fundamentalists, and most Americans, became acutely aware of the Bolshevik threat. The premillennialists’ earlier predictions concerning the menacing role of Russia in the end times added a degree of plausibility to such fears. It was not until 1923 or 1924 that these fears in their most extreme forms began commonly to appear to fundamentalist literature. This development seemed to be connected with their anti-evolution interests. “As a matter of fact,” said Moody Monthly in 1923, citing Frank Norris as an authority, “evolution is Bolshevism in the long run. … It eliminates the idea of a personal God, and with that goes all authority in government, all law and order.”11 At about this time, William B. Riley began to stress the connection between socialism and evolutionism as atheistic threats to “Christian America” and its schools. The King’s Business likewise began to emphasize the seriousness of the communist threat.12 Increasingly, modernism, evolutionism, and Bolshevism were lumped together as part of the same basic threat to Bible belief. “Christendom reposes upon a book, the Bible.” Christian Fundamentals in School and Church quoted with approval this statement of a Union Seminary (New York) graduate who in 1926 described his school as linked to the “Socialistic Revolution.”

  From The King’s Business (May 1925), p. 197.

  “Since these professors deserve high place in socialistic ranks because they are propagators of communism,” the magazine added, “how would it do to nominate the very Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick for president on the Socialistic ticket? Perhaps it would not be amiss to nominate Clarence Darrow as his running mate. What a combination!”13

  By the 1930s such views of collaboration among the various conspiracies against Christian civilization had generated some really extreme beliefs, especially among the premillennialists. Arno C. Gaebelein in The Conflict of the Ages (1993) presented probably the most comprehensive catalog of interrelated conspiracies. Starting with the struggle between God and Satan in the Garden of Eden, Gaebelein compiled a classic list of conspiratorial threats that had faced America, including the lliuminati who promoted the infidelity of the French Revolution, secret societies, Roman Catholics, socialists, and the Jews. The Jews were condemned on the basis of the post-World-War-I publication of the factitious Protocols of the Elders ofzion. William B. Riley was not the separatist that Gaebelein was, but he enumerated a similar list of menaces. Roosevelt, he was convinced, was “painting America Red.” “Disarmament,” “Internationalism,” and “Social Gospel,” he said, “have become passwords of the secret order which deliberately plots, not alone the downfall of the American Government after the manner of Russia’s collapse, but the overthrow of every civilized government in all the world.”14 Riley, like Gaebelein and a few other fundamentalists of the 1930s, was convinced by the spurious Protocols of the Jewish aspect of the international threat. This anti-Jewish sentiment, while by no means characteristic of fundamentalists generally, was remarkable in light of the strong pro-Zionist convictions of most premillennialists.15 Gerald Winrod, editor of the Defender Magazine, and sometime publisher of Riley’s diatribes of the 1930s, was an especially vocal anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and indeed pro-Nazi fundamentalist leader of the time.16 Frank Norris, on the other hand, defended the Jewish people.17 Norris, however, who began his career with militant anti-Catholic attacks, and always represented extreme views in the Southern Baptist Convention, found in anti-communism a cause that exactly fit his mentality.18 By the 1950s most political fears had coalesced into the communist threat, which would continue to attract considerable audiences for such premillennialist leaders as Carl Mclntire or Billy James Hargis.19

  Even though the political attitudes of most fundamentalists were much like those of their non-fundamentalist Republican neighbors, the development of hyper-American patriotic anti-communism is a puzzle and an irony in the history of fundamentalism. How could premillennialists, whose attention was supposed to be directed away from politics while waiting for the coming King, embrace this highly politicized gospel? It is difficult to account for the phenomenon on simply rational grounds. Perhaps the puzzle can be solved by understanding a type of mentality, or disposition of thought, sometimes associated with fundamentalism. Richard Hofstadter aptly described this mentality as “essentially Manichean.” The world, in this view, is “an arena for conflict between absolute good and evil…. This outlook lies behind a view of history that has often appeared on the American political scene. “History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power….” This view, says Hofstadter, led to “the paranoid style” often seen in American political thought.20

  This syndrome has a near affinity to the view of history central to the fundamentalists’ outlook. They held, as other Christians often had, that history involved a basic struggle between God and Satan. This premise in itself was not particularly conducive to conspiracy theories. The fundamentalists, however, were disposed to divide all reality into neat antitheses: the saved and the lost, the holy and the unsanctifled, the true and the false. Moreover, their common sense philosophical assumptions added t
he assurance that they could clearly distinguish these contrasting factors when they appeared in everyday life. Add to these predispositions the fundamentalist experience of social displacement (which Hofstadter makes much of) and the “Manichean mentality” becomes comprehensible.

  Given this mentality it is perhaps possible to shed some light on the paradox of super-patriotic premillennialism. During the half century before World War I premillennialists developed very little in the way of political theory. After the war when communist and other conspiracy theories arose as explanations of what was going wrong, they had little basis for evaluating these theories on their own merits. The conspiracy theories did, however, appeal to their general disposition of thought. Like their premillennialism, the political threats could be placed in the framework of the conflict between the forces of God and of Satan. The two types of conspiracy theory, the political and the religious, might well have appealed to a single mind-set in such a way as to override the difficulty of reconciling specific details.

  The paradox involved here was certainly not unique to those premillenni-alist fundamentalists holding extreme political views. Their experience reflected the tension felt throughout the fundamentalist movement between an otherworldly profession and the lingering conviction that God’s kingdom could indeed be found in America itself. After World War I the evidence suggested that Satan was assailing Protestant America on every front. Some maintained that counterattacks should be confined to the theological and ecclesiastical arenas. Others, however, extended the battle to the schools. It seemed consistent then for some fundamentalists to conclude also that Satan’s hosts would appear in clearly identifiable political manifestations, just as they appeared so clearly in the churches and schools. In the face of this threat, the political battle to defend God’s kingdom could not be entirely postponed until a coming era.