Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  Blanchard’s answer, often repeated, was that the twentieth century was simply an “age of insanity.”28 This conclusion followed from Blanchard’s premises and was confirmed by his distinctive experience as an heir to the tradition of nineteenth-century American moral philosophy. There was a considerable body of “truths which are always true and which are every where recognized as true by rational minds.” This included not only logically necessary truths, but also a whole range of common-sense experience.29 Blanchard thought, therefore, that arguments for the truth of Christianity could be constructed such that “it is impossible for a rational mind to disbelieve it.30 In Blanchard’s works he constantly appeals to an abstract personage, “the rational man.” “This man is omnipresent in Blanchard’s writing,” remarks a recent observer. “He is the sane man, the honest man, the candid man, the intelligent man, the rational man, the thoughtful man, the fair-minded man.31 Being a Christian was for Blanchard simply equivalent to using good sense. “It is true today that any man who will use good sense will be religious,” he wrote in the early 1890s. “Even if men don’t read the Bible, the evidence is sufficient if they will cease to be swine rooting about in the earth.”32

  If one accepted these premises, by the early twentieth century the world must indeed have seemed insane. Blanchard simply could not believe that people really believed, or had clearly thought about, many of the things they professed. For instance, he found the cult of Christian Science utterly baffling. His first objection to the new teaching was “that every man, sane man, knows that it is not true.” With arguments such as “if it were true one could not cut off his hand with an ax,” he concluded, “I will not say that they do not think that they believe it, but it is obvious that no person can really believe such teaching and, strictly speaking, be in his right mind, for the heavens are overhead and the earth under our feet.33

  Almost as puzzling were the new philosophies of the day. “The reason why materialists and spiritualists (in philosophy),” wrote Blanchard, “are not shut up in an asylum is because while their fundamental beliefs are irrational, their practical activities are sane.34 Such irrational philosophies, of course, could soon lead to ruin, as higher criticism and religious infidelity demonstrated.

  The common sense principle that seemed to Blanchard most helpful in accounting for the delusions of the age, was that of the intimate connection between religion, rationality, and morality. This connection was readily recognized not only by the ubiquitous “rational man,” but also by the common people. “A common sense people know that it is the Bible and Christian teachings which make their children good.”35 Moreover, said Blanchard, “unbelief seems never to have originated with the common man.”36

  How then was mass infidelity and unbelief to be explained? The fault did not lie with the common sense of mankind, but with the moral defects of false teachers. “Ministers and teachers of theology,” Blanchard asserted, “seem to be the ones who lead the Church into error, and the more these are paid, the longer vacations they have, the higher positions they obtain, the more unfaithful to God and his Church they seem to become.37 Blanchard was saying in effect that intellectual delusions were the inevitable counterparts of the moral decline against which he and his father had so long battled. How else could one account for the many seemingly well-educated and intelligent liberals who came to such insane conclusions? The high pay and extended vacations were possible explanations. Another possibility, Blanchard speculated after studying some of the higher critics, was the “poisoned Brain.” Tobacco and alcohol, two great symbols of vice to the American evangelical tradition, might be the culprits. “It is well known,” said Blanchard, “that the critics of our time have been usually men who have poisoned their nervous systems and injured their minds by the use of narcotic and other poisons.38

  In this remark, extreme though it is, many of fundamentalist themes converge. The common sense tradition in America assumed a national consensus of rationality and morality wed to Protestant religion and the revival. This tradition provided a basis for holding on to the Christian faith at all costs—which of course was the principal issue. Yet it provided no fully adequate way to account for the collapse of the consensus. Dispensational premillennialism did offer an explanation of the cultural and religious decline. Yet most fundamentalism, or at least fundamentalism as a movement, was dispensationalist only part of the time. Much of the time it was very typically American. That is, it combined with its Christianity certain nineteenth-century American ideas about truth and morality. These values, as well as a traditional and Biblical Christianity, had to be saved from the delusions of the critics. The intellectual, moral, and religious issues were too intertwined to be sorted out thoroughly.

  Although there was a respectable philosophical heritage behind this outlook, it could easily become anti-intellectualism when translated into popular rhetoric. If Blanchard, a college president, had difficulty explaining the prevalence of the new views in Common Sense terms, less distinguished popularizers could only explain the breakdown of common sense as the sinister work of evil men. That is the message of a 1925 statement attributed to Billy Sunday:

  Our country is filled with a Socialistic, I. W. W., Communistic, radical, lawless, anti-American, anti-church, anti-God, anti-marriage gang, and they are laying the eggs of rebellion and unrest in labor and capital and home, and we have some of them in our universities. … If this radical element could have their way, my friends, the laws of nature would be repealed, or they would reverse them; oil and water would mix; the turtle dove would marry the turkey buzzard; the sun would rise in the West and set in the East; chickens would crow and the roosters would squeal; cats would bark and dogs would mew; the least would be the greatest; a part would be greater than the whole; yesterday would be after tomorrow if that crowd were in control.39

  XXV. Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon

  In many respects fundamentalist Christianity was not unique to America. It had affinities with revivalist and pietistic movements around the world, and was often successfully propagated overseas by its vigorous missions. Yet almost nowhere outside of America did this particular Protestant response to modernity play such a conspicuous and pervasive role in the culture.1

  One of the closest counterparts to American fundamentalism is English evangelicalism and the differences between them are instructive. From the time of the Puritans until Dwight L. Moody, British and American evangelicalism was, to some extent, part of a single transatlantic movement. The British either originated or contributed to revivalism, the modern missionary movement, agencies for evangelism such as the Sunday School, the YMCA and YWCA, and a host of other agencies for moral and social reform. Dispensationalism and the Keswick movement were both largely British in origin. As late as 1910–1915, conservative evangelicals seem to have taken British-American ties for granted. Fully a fourth of the essays in The Fundamentals were by British authors. A. C. Dixon, first editor of The Fundamentals, left that work to become pastor of the church built by Charles Spurgeon in London. In the 1920s, however, when the American fundamentalists were fighting their spiritual battles, few in England rallied to the battle cry.

  Some English evangelicals did try to resist the trend toward liberalism in theology during the 1920s. For the great majority of English Protestants, however, the issues raised by Darwinism and higher criticism had been settled long before, in the two decades of furor over Origin of Species (1859) and Essays and Reviews (1860). Despite the efforts of Dixon and a few others to drum up a British equivalent of the militant American movement, most conservative evangelicals in England seemed to be of the non-controversialist Keswick variety. Enough conservatism survived to produce a sophisticated and militant “fundamentalist” resurgence after World War II, but from 1900 until 1940, only those closest to the movement could have realized that there was any British counterpart to the American movement.2

  The Scopes trial apparently seemed totally foreign to the experience of the vast
majority of the British public. “Perhaps no recent event in America stands more in need of explanation …,” wrote one British observer in 1925.3 Even those who followed English church life closely saw no counterpart to militant fundamentalism. “Perhaps it was [his] greatest service,” observed the Times of London in 1929 concerning A. S. Peake, a moderate Biblical critic, “… that he helped to save us from a fundamentalist controversy such as that which has devastated large sections of the church in America.”4 To the extent that conservative evangelicalism existed in England at the time, it differed significantly from the American variety in its general lack of militance and impact on the culture.5

  What was it in the American situation that fostered militant fundamentalism on such a large scale? Any answer to such a broad question must necessarily be speculative, but may, however, illuminate the issue. The following suggestions may be divided into three interrelated categories: social factors, religious-cultural traditions, and intellectual tendencies.

  SOCIAL FACTORS

  Two social factors especially useful to understanding American fundamentalism may be mentioned again here. The remarkable ethnic and denominational diversity of America, accentuated by new regional diversities, created unique tendencies with respect to the acceptance or non-acceptance of new ideas. Although limited ethnic, denominational, and regional diversity can be seen in England, the extraordinary diversity in America, as well as its sheer size, made this aspect more significant. In America, each group had its own traditions, educational system, and rate of development. In England, however, ethnic groups had long ago stabilized their relation to the larger society. Channels of communication were ancient and well established, and an issue that was discussed in the universities would likely soon be well known throughout the provinces and parishes.

  The social-psychological factor of the experience of displacement, as described in Chapter XXI, would seem to apply more or less equally to both Americans and Englishmen living in the period of the 1880s through the 1920s. On each side of the ocean, Bible-affirming evangelicals found that the values of their group had come to appear quaint and almost foreign. Significantly, however, English civilization was solidly grounded in the idea of “Christendom,” broadly and tolerantly conceived. In America, on the other hand, the religious base of the culture was perceived as somewhat narrowly evangelical. To be an evangelical in England meant to belong to a respectable minority that had learned over the course of centuries to live with religious diversity. American evangelicals, in contrast, had until very recently been socially dominant. Although many evangelicals were not themselves influential, they identified with a group that could claim notable success in shaping education and professed values in America. Although they did tolerate some internal diversity, evangelicals had not been particularly tolerant of other faiths, as their treatment of Roman Catholics and Mormons in the nineteenth century shows. For this group, until recently identified with dominant cultural influences, the experience of displacement was especially traumatic.

  RELIGIOUS-CULTURAL TRADITIONS

  To a remarkable degree, American religious experience, and hence American culture, was shaped by what may be called (to modify a phrase of Stanley Elkins) “the dynamics of unopposed revivalism.”6 Revivalism has flourished in many countries since the eighteenth century. In America, however, it encountered little resistance from pre-existing traditions and institutions. Again, a comparison with England is instructive. While revivalism was certainly a transatlantic phenomenon, in England the universities, the established church, and the pre-revivalist traditions of most of the Nonconformist groups were among the powerful and venerable forces for moderation and restraint. In America these forces were either nonexistent or had little effect. Revivalism had little competition when it came to determining the distinctive characteristics of American religious life.7

  Among these characteristics, the Biblicism and primitivism fostered by revivalism were especially important. In America, for the fírst two centuries Protestantism dominated overwhelmingly, and the Bible had played a role in shaping the culture for which there was no European parallel. Lacking a strong institutional church and denying the relevance of much of Christian tradition, American Protestants were united behind the principle of Scriptura sola. Indeed, the Bible played a major role in America’s self-understanding.8 This Biblicism, strong among the Puritans, gained new significance in the early nineteenth century. In the wake of the Revolution, Americans saw themselves as inaugurators of a new order for the ages. The new order was conceived as a return to a pristine human condition. For Protestants this ideal was readily translated into Biblical primitivism. The true church should set aside all intervening tradition, and return to the purity of New Testament practice. The Bible alone should be one’s guide.9

  Biblicism was closely related to religious individualism, also encouraged by revivalism. The individual stood alone before God; his choices were decisive. The church, while important as a supportive community, was made up of free individuals. The Bible, moreover, was a great equalizer. With Bible in hand, the common man or woman could challenge the highest temporal authority.

  This continuity between nineteenth-century revivalism and twentieth-century fundamentalism sustains the contention that fundamentalism is best understood as a sub-species of American revivalism rather than as an outgrowth of the movements espousing millenarianism or inerrancy. It characteristically emphasized doctrinal tendencies which were already strong in American cultural and religious traditions.

  Fundamentalism maintained the important distinction between the supernatural and the natural—always a strong revivalist concern. All the key doctrines depended on this. Inerrancy stressed the divine origin of Scripture and tended to subordinate its human authorship. The other traditional fundamentals—the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, his substitutionary atonement, and bodily resurrection—all involved the supernatural. Dispensationalism highlighted the role of divine forces in shaping history, and insisted that the hope for the future lay only in divine intervention, not human effort. Creation versus evolutionism was a straightforward opposition of supernaturalism to naturalism.

  The strong revivalist tradition in America doubtless contributed to the tendency to see things in terms of simple antitheses. The revivalist believed that the universe was divided into the realm of God and the realm of Satan, the righteous and the unrighteous. Revivalist hymns were full of simple contrasts between sorrow and joy, turmoil and rest, weakness and strength, darkness and light, defeat and victory, purity and impurity, guilt and forgiveness, the world and heaven.10 The whole revivalist impulse was based on the perception of an antithesis between the saved and the lost. In this dichotmized worldview, ambiguity was rare. Transitions never occurred gradually, but were, like the conversion experience itself, radical transformations from one condition to its opposite.

  This type of thinking left almost no room for the motifs that characterized liberal theology and scientific naturalism in the late ninetenth century. Both Darwinism and higher criticism postulated a natural process of development, and the new theology saw God working through similar means, emphasizing the synthesis of the natural and the supernatural, rather than the antithesis. Wherever revivalism had prevailed in American religious life, there was virtually no preparation for the acceptance of the new categories. Indeed, there was hardly a way to discuss them. Many American Protestants reacted by rejecting them outright as incompatible with the faith and by asserting their own views still more strenuously.

  Although recognition of the dynamics of revivalism is indispensable to an understanding of the popularity of the militant defense of evangelical doctrine in America, revivalism and pietism in America must themselves be viewed in the context of the older Calvinist religious and cultural tradition. Calvinism in America nearly always demanded intellectual assent to precisely formulated statements of religious truth. Revivalists often modified and simplified the doctrines involved, yet they preserved both the
emphasis on simple antitheses and the general principle that assent to rightly stated doctrine was of eternal significance.

  The Calvinist tradition helps to explain the disparity between the American reputation for religious tolerance and the actual intolerance of so much of American ecclesiastical practice. The Calvinists and their revivalist heirs eventually accepted and even endorsed civil tolerance of religious diversity. Civil tolerance, however, was quite distinct from intellectual tolerance. One may allow Quakers or Roman Catholics political equality and yet find semi-Pelagianism to be appropriate grounds for fierce theological debate and even separation.

  Such Calvinist attitudes were carried over into American revivalism and continued into twentieth-century fundamentalism; fundamentalism arose primarily among groups with Reformed origins, such as Baptists and Presbyterians, and was quite rare on the Methodist side of American revivalism, which emphasized the ethical rather than the intellectual aspects of Christianity.

  INTELLECTUAL TENDENCIES