Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  XXIV. Fundamentalism

  as an Intellectual Phenomenon

  Clarence Darrow said in Dayton that his intention was to prevent “bigots and ignoramuses” from controlling the schools. This view of the fundamentalist intellect would continue to prevail in the liberal community. Stewart Cole populated his History of Fundamentalism with “religiously disturbed” defenders of “antiquated beliefs,” contending against “open-minded seekers for the truth that makes man free.”1 According to H. Richard Niebuhr “inadequate development of educational institutions” and “the distrust of reason and the emphasis on emotion” resulted from the isolation, poverty, and hardships of farm life.2 Norman Furniss observed that “ignorance … was a feature of the movement; it became a badge the orthodox often wore proudly.” Fundamentalists’ “distorted opinions,” said Furniss, were based on “complete misunderstanding” of evolution and modernism. They had to resort to coercion because they “were aligning themselves against ideas that had the weight of fact behind them….3 These interpretations gained some stature in the American historical community when Richard Hofstadter identified the “paranoid style” of fundamentalist thought as a species of “anti-intellectualism” reflecting a “generically prejudiced mind.”4

  As Hofstadter showed, anti-intellectualism was a feature of American revivalism, and fundamentalists were certainly not free from this tendency. The suggestion that the ancestors of Ph.D.s were monkeys and baboons was always good for a laugh from an anti-evolution crowd. Likewise the titles of the learned were enumerated “D.D., Ph.D., L.L.D., Litt.D.”—ending with “A.S.S.” Even the well-educated and usually humorless Reuben Torrey would stoop to this.5 Moreover, some champions of the Bible school movement were beginning to assert that Bible education was the only proper education, not just an expedient for lay evangelists, as it was originally conceived. There was a strong tradition in America that the Bible in the hands of the common person was of greater value than any amount of education.6 As William Jennings Bryan often said “It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages, than to know the age of the rocks; it is better for one to know that he is close to the Heavenly Father, than to know how far the stars in the heavens are apart.”7

  If one reads fundamentalist literature, however, it is apparent that such Bible-versus-science themes were usually brought up only as a last line of defense. The Bible was thought to be scientific (in the sense of reporting the facts accurately)8 whereas evolution was wholly unscientific. Scientists and Ph.D.s might deserve ridicule, but not because they were scientists or Ph.D.S. The joke was that in spite of so much learning they arrived at conclusions that common sense knew to be patently unscientific.

  It was endlessly repeated that true science rested on facts, while evolution was mere hypothesis. This was basic to William Jennings Bryan’s argument. “It is not scientific truth to which Christians object,” he wrote for a speech meant to be the capstone of the trial at Dayton, “for true science is classified knowledge and nothing can be scientific unless it is true.” “Evolution,” on the other hand, “is not truth; it is merely hypothesis—it is millions of guesses strung together.”9 It was appalling to Bryan that a doctrine so destructive to both Christian belief and civilization was based on guesses that were “absurd as well as groundless.”10

  In several respects the views of Bryan and Darrow were similar. Each considered the other’s view ridiculous, and wondered aloud how any sane person could hold it. Each thought that the theories of the other were being imposed by the state on school children and saw the legal issue as the abridgment of traditional American freedoms. Bryan pointed out that Darrow, acting for the defense in the notorious Leopold and Loeb child murder, had suggested the Leopold had taken too seriously the evolutionary views of Nietzsche which he had been taught at the University of Chicago. In response Darrow quoted his own remarks from the transcript of the Leopold trial, to the effect that the university has a duty “to be the great storehouse of the wisdom of the ages, and to let students go there, and learn, and choose.”11 In a parallel statement Bryan affirmed his confidence in free inquiry. “The people will determine this issue,” said the Commoner in his last speech in court; “… this case will stimulate investigation and investigation will bring out information, and the facts will be known, and upon the facts, as ascertained, the decision will be rendered…,”12

  From The King’s Business (August 1923), p. 809,

  It is a mistake, then, to regard the fundamentalist controversies as at bottom a conflict between science and religion. It is incorrect to state, as John Dewey did in 1934, that

  the fundamentalist in religion is one whose beliefs in intellectual content have hardly been touched by scientific developments. His notions about heaven and earth and man, as far as their bearing on religion is concerned, are hardly more affected by the work of Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin than they are by that of Einstein.13

  Indeed, fundamentalists had resisted Darwin and knew little of Einstein, but they were not opposed to science as such. Rather, they were judging the standards of the later scientific revolution by the standards of the first—the revolution of Bacon and Newton. In their view, science depended on fact and demonstration. Darwinism, so far as they could see, was based on neither. The larger objection of course, was that the evolutionary approach to the interpretation of biology and history took only natural causes into account, to the total exclusion of the supernatural. In the Newtonian worldview it had been possible, as indeed it was for Newton himself, to regard the Bible as a repository of facts on a par with the book of nature. To fundamentalists, a worldview that excluded the most important facts in favor of a set of tenuous and speculative hypotheses was patently absurd and disastrous in its consequences.

  The issue was a classic instance of what Thomas Kuhn, the controversial historian of science, describes as a “paradigm conflict” of two scientific worldviews. It is not necessary to subscribe to Kuhn’s extreme view of the subjective character of knowledge to appreciate the persuasiveness of his argument that scientific thought does not progress by a simple accumulation of new and more advanced theories as more facts are discovered by objective observation. Kuhn maintains that science advances by a series of revolutions. With each revolution comes a change in basic perceptions, models or paradigms, and language. For example, to pre-Copernicans “earth” was, by definition, “a fixed position.” To them, therefore, it was nonsense and unscientific to speak of the earth as in motion. The Copernicans reversed the paradigm, and it then became equally nonsensical and unscientific to think of the earth as fixed. The facts, that is, the observable phenomena, had not changed, but there was a different model for perception. Because it was a difference in perception, rather than a matter of facts or logic, the two sides were unable to communicate. Kuhn claims that this process underlies every scientific revolution. He quotes Max Planck: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Kuhn adds that “the transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.”14

  The paradigm theory, whatever its validity with respect to the field of natural science,15 helps to clarify the nature of the fundamentalist experience. Fundamentalists had committed themselves totally to a “normal science.” That is, they took one model of perception as normal for all persons. This was a “Baconian” model based on common sense. Almost all their apologetic and interpretation of Scripture rested on this foundation. Their opponents, however, belonged to a philosophical tradition that, especially since Kant, was willing to see perception as an interpretive process. Hence they were more open to speculative theories. They nevertheless considered these theories to be reliable inferences from the facts, and felt that no modern scientific person could seriously doubt them. In fact, they too had accepted perceptual models (for example, naturalism or the assumption that process a
nd change are normal) that limit the theories that may be derived from the perceived facts.

  Kuhn argues that the necessity for paradigms can be understood as part of the sociology of knowledge. The scientific community, because of its needs as a community, tends to affirm one set of theories as “normal science,” to present these authoritatively in texts, effectually excluding all other theories. Kuhn suggests that this tendency to establish an orthodoxy is more characteristic of the natural sciences than of any other discipline, “except perhaps theology.”’16

  In America between 1860 and 1925 something like the general acceptance of a new perceptual model took place in both the scientific and theological communities. Non-Darwinists, of course, were ostracized from scientific circles. Similarly, the modern theological community adopted a model for truth that in effect stigmatized theologians who rejected evolutionary views as neither scientific nor legitimate theologians. The conservatives were equally dogmatic. No compromise could be made with a worldview whose proponents denied the fixed character of supernaturally guaranteed truth. Communication between the two sides became almost impossible. Fundamentalists, excluded from the community of modern theological and scientific orthodoxy, eventually were forced to establish their own community and sub-culture in which their own ideas of orthodoxy were preserved.17

  This explains something of what gave the fundamentalist coalition its cohesiveness. A simple theological definition of fundamentalism, such as Sandeen’s with its emphasis on premillennialism, is too narrow and excludes some key figures, such as Machen and Bryan. There is, however, a common underlying assumption that explains the unanimous militant opposition to liberalism of these conservative Protestants of differing theological emphasis. Despite their differences, they agreed that knowledge of truth was of overriding and eternal significance, that truth was unchanging, and that it could be known by true science and common sense.

  The intellectual issue probably was most clearly defined in the thought of J. Gresham Machen, as expressed in his critique of a non-fundamentalist conservative, E. Y. Mullins. Mullins, the distinguished president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, attempted to bridge the gap between traditional and modern thought in his own defense of supernatural Christianity, published in 1924 as Christianity at the Cross Roads. Machen reviewed this work of “a true friend,” but took the opportunity to expound his belief that the compromises which Mullins allowed would eventually result in the destruction of Christianity.

  Mullins had attempted to save supernatural Christianity from the depredations of modern science by arguing that religion should be held separate from both philosophy and science. Religion, he said, was not governed by the principles of science and philosophy, but rather by its own principle of “personal relation.” Such a relation could be confirmed only by “the immediate experience of God.”18

  Machen replied that science, philosophy, and religion all dealt with precisely the same thing—facts. Either persons saw the facts correctly or they did not. Hence, contrary to Mullins’s view, only one philosophy could be true. False science and philosophy resulted when sin obscured the facts or led one to accept naturalistic presuppositions that excluded some of the facts. So, said Machen, “We ought to try to lead scientists and philosophers to become Christians not by asking them to regard science and philosophy as without bearing upon religion, but on the contrary by asking them to become more scientific and more philosophical through attention to all, instead of to some, of the facts.”

  Machen regarded Mullins’s position as a dangerous concession in principle to the chief tendency in modern thought—away from direct knowledge of facts to subjective experience. The issue was most clear with respect to the resurrection of Jesus. According to the assumptions of modern thought, Machen pointed out, scientific history could only talk about “the belief of the disciples in the resurrection.” Machen, on the other hand, in accordance with Common Sense Realism19 assumed that what we know about in history is not the idea of the event (which is in the present) but the event itself (which is in the past). It would not do to say, as Mullins did, that religion dealt with “spirit,” rather than with “matter.” “The question of the resurrection of our Lord,” said Machen, “in accordance with the common-sense definition of ‘resurrection’ which Dr. Mullins certainly holds, does concern ‘matter’; it concerns the emergence or non-emergence of the body from the tomb.” The issue, Machen insisted, was not one of ideas about the event; ultimately it came down to “whether the events really took place.”

  Machen saw it as a question of scientific Christianity versus “modern anti-intellectualism.” Just as those who held to the paradigms of naturalistic science found supernatural Christianity wholly “unscientific” and even “obscurantist,” so Machen, holding firmly to the view that science dealt with the facts directly, found modern philosophy and religion equally unscientific. Compromisers like Mullins, he said, seemed to place themselves “in the full current of present-day anti-intellectualism.” Some, including Mullins himself, Machen conceded, would not be swept away, even in letting go their firm hold on facts. “But,” he added, “it would never be safe for us.” In Machen’s view, faith without science would soon be dead.20

  Machen, like Bryan, was something of an anomaly in the fundamentalist movement. Each found his place in it not just because he defended evangelical Protestant supernaturalism (many moderates such as Mullins did so also), but also because of the view of science, philosophy, and the facts that almost all fundamentalists held in common.

  The leading premillennialists expressed a similarly firm trust in proper reason and science. A. C. Dixon, assuming the role of Daniel in the lion’s den, in a 1920 speech to “an Infidel Club in Chicago,” asserted confidently “I am a Christian BECAUSE I AM A THINKER. … A RATIONALIST. … A SCIENTIST.” “I do not mean,” he added, “that I devote all my time to scientific investigations, but I believe in the scientific method of ‘gaining and verifying knowledge by exact observation and correct thinking.’ An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory.”21 It is a mistake to suppose, wrote William B. Riley in another typical statement,

  that those of us who represent Christianity have any quarrel with science. We have not…. but Christianity like all truth, is not tolerant of error, and it will not harmonize with this pseudo science,—this utterly false philosophy.22

  With the scientific community in fact regarding fundamentalist views as pseudo-science and false philosophy, the fundamentalist search for scientific confirmations of Christianity seems to have been at times an almost desperate one. Some continued to insist, along the liues suggested earlier by A. T. Pierson, that the Bible contained amazing scientific predications. Riley, for example, claimed that when in Job XXVIII it says “To make weight for the wind,” the Bible was predicting air pressure.23 Others searched the Scriptures for mathematical formulas. In 1922 Moody Monthly published an argument correlating the seven days of creation with the seven notes in the octave, relating these to the seven sayings of Christ and the seven parts of Psalm 23 and concluding “what need we of further proof that ‘all Scripture is God-breathed.’ …”24 Even more elaborate was Ivan Panin’s work on “Scripture Numerics.” In an incredibly complex scheme, Panin claimed to have demonstrated that if one counts up all the words and letters in any given section of the Bible the totals arrived at will be a multiple of seven. The King’s Business, which published a sample of Panin’s work, presented it as “An Unanswerable Proof of the Divine Authority of the Bible,” which “no Critic has ever dared answer.” “While life is too short,” an editorial added, “for the ordinary Bible student to attempt to go into details in following up this system, he can at least take a great deal of comfort in the discovery and can safely rest assured that it cannot be disproven.”25

  Parallels of the seven notes of the scale, seven colors of the spectrum, and seven days of creation. From E. J. Pace, “The Law of the Octave,” Moody Monthly (May 1922), p. 1023.

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sp; This grasping after scientific straws was a side effect of a serious intellectual crisis. The fundamentalists took it to be a crisis in common sense. Their worldview, which until recently had been generally considered both sacred and academically impeccable, was now becoming a laughingstock. This was a key part of the fundamentalist experience of social displacement. Machen and the movement’s other able exponents, who saw the underlying philosophical issues as they were, could still present a reasoned defense, at least one respected by critics. Others, however, who accepted the common sense assumptions more naively, began to turn to increasingly extreme versions of their view of reality to explain the widespread failure of rationality in the culture.

  This phenomenon is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the life of Charles Blanchard, president of Wheaton College from 1877 to 1925. Blanchard’s adult life spanned almost exactly the years of this study and he was a prominent participant in many aspects of fundamentalist development. A friend of Moody, he supported both revivalism and evangelical education, was converted to premillennialism, and adopted Keswick holiness teaching.26 As we have seen, he carried on the ideals of moral reform inherited from his father, but by the end of his career the focus of these reforms had narrowed considerably and a degree of premillennial pessimism had clouded his hopes for a “Christian America.”

  Blanchard, perhaps more than any other figure, can be seen attempting to explain the demise of evangelicalism as a cultural force by applying apparently unquestioned assumptions of Common Sense philosophy. The failure of common sense and of the evangelical effort in America was especially poignant for Blanchard because he came from a heritage that had had the highest hopes for national moral reform based on Christianity and sound education. Jonathan Blanchard had established the program at Wheaton in the 1860s on the foundation of Scottish Common Sense philosophy and his son Charles was still propounding these doctrines in the 1920s.27 In the meantime, however, a most distressing question had arisen, with which many others of Blanchard’s generation (B. B. Warfield, for example) had had to wrestle. If each individual is normally endowed with both intellectual and moral senses that enable him to perceive the right, how could almost the whole culture have turned away from common sense and God?