Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  The fundamentalists fought the new ideas with the Bible and with materials from the stockpile of American assumptions and concepts. Much has been said already about the great reverence in America for the Baconian tradition of scientific thought and the related philosophical Common Sense Realism.

  Once again, we may use a comparison with England. The relatively easy acceptance of Darwinism, higher criticism, and liberal theology in England seems to stem from the pre-existence in nineteenth-century England of a concept of history as gradual natural development. Darwinism itself was, of course, a product of this climate. In British church life and especially in English constitutional history there was a deeply rooted awareness of the gradual development of traditions. By contrast, the newness of America seemed to demand written and rational definitions, new departures, and a break with the past.

  This suggests that American intellectual life was distinguished from that of most western European countries by a distinctly anti-modern view of history. Substantial elements in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America lacked those assumptions central to modern historical thought and scholarship, including the assumption that history was a natural evolutionary development and the corollary that the present can best be understood as a product of the past.

  Important aspects of the American experience militated against the acceptance of such assumptions. American historiography had long been dominated by interpretations based on analogies to Biblical history which took for granted direct supernatural, or at least providential, intervention.11 History was viewed through the lens of Scripture. Obviously, this was incompatible with the higher critical idea that Scripture, like everything else, should be viewed through the lens of history. Additionally, many secular versions of American history emphasized newness and progress toward the future, rather than continuity with the past. Americans had relatively little history of their own, and their national experience often seemed like a new dispensation, totally discontinuous with the past. Primitivism, or the desire to start the new age by returning to a pristine state, was one response to this situation. Dispensationalism embodied all these assumptions and ideals, and no doubt the popularity of this imported British view in America was due in part to its affinities to this distinctive American outlook.12 Other fundamentalists had various other non-developmental and non-naturalistic views of history, although worked out with less detail.13

  In America, romanticism did not enjoy the early success that it had in England and most of Europe. America came into being during the Enlightenment, and well into the nineteenth century remained generally content with modes of thought whose origins were no later than the mid-eighteenth century. In Europe, since the 1780s romanticism had fostered suspicion of rational and fixed definitions of experience and stressed the value of the changing and the unique.14 These ideas certainly helped prepare the way for the second scientific revolution which, starting with Darwinism, saw the primary function of science transformed from the finding of fixed laws into the analysis of the natural processes of change.

  Romanticism was not a major movement in America until about the 1830s. Many of its adherents were to be found in New England, the region which would later prove most receptive to naturalistic and historicist analysis. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some important evangelical theologians, including Horace Bushnell, Henry B. Smith, and John Nevin, were introducing romantic ideas; others, however, such as Charles Hodge and Nathaniel William Taylor, remained firmly in the Common Sense tradition. Revivalism itself fostered many popular romantic attitudes by its emphasis on personal sentiment, and the holiness movement was a practical evangelical counterpart to other romantic developments. These, however, did not reflect any deep awareness of the issues at the center of the modern intellectual revolution.

  Thus in the second half of the nineteenth century many Americans were only beginning to discover romanticism at the time when the second scientific revolution forced the inclusion of the new historical and developmental views on the theological agenda. Even in the intellectual community, there was little preparation for post-romantic modes of thought. There were some very well educated people among those who fought naturalism with pre-romantic rationalism. So emerging fundamentalism did not entirely lack intellectual leadership. Its thought was not shaped simply by revivalist eccentricities, but also by the substantial pre-romantic Baconian and Common Sense intellectual system that had played a significant role in shaping American life in general.

  This philosophical outlook was buttressed by revivalist thought and the American reverence for the Bible as well as by a variety of social, ethnic and geographical circumstances. These influences combined to dispose many people to anathematize every aspect of the new views and to set up rigidly antithetical views in opposition to them. As the influence of the naturalistic developmental views increased until by the 1920s they had become prevalent, the fundamentalists continued to stress their opposing paradigms more and more urgently.

  Every modern nation, of course, has experienced religiously defined traumas and contests arising out of the transition to modernity. A comparison of these various “fundamentalist” movements casts a light on the unique characteristics of the religions and the nations involved. Muslim fundamentalism, for example, resembles American Protestant fundamentalism in a number of striking ways. In view of its militant opposition to much of modern culture, it seems appropriate to borrow the American term to describe this Islamic phenomenon.15 Yet the differences between the two movements are striking also. In Islam there has traditionally been less theoretical tension between religious militancy and actual military force than in Christianity. Moreover, Muslim fundamentalism has arisen and flourished in nations to which modernization was imported from without, via more powerful foreign cultures, and where there remains a memory of golden ages belonging to their distant past. Nevertheless, recent developments in Islam clearly demonstrate, as would surveys of other religious communities as well, that fundamentalism is not a strictly American phenomenon. It is American only in the sense that it was here that it took shape and flourished in its classic Protestant form. In its generic sense fundamentalism refers to phenomena not restricted to America nor to the early twentieth century.

  PART FIVE

  Fundamentalism Yesterday and Today (2005)

  Few of the participants in the fundamentalist struggles of the 1920s would have predicted that the movement would long persist as a major factor in American life. Ernest Sandeen made the classic remark on this point. “Ever since its rise to notoriety in the 1920s,” he commented, “scholars have predicted the imminent demise of the movement. The Fundamentalists, to return the favor, have predicted the speedy end of the world.”1 When Sandeen wrote those words in the 1960s, he was contemplating a fundamentalism that, however resilient, was playing a far different role in American life than would the fundamentalism of the later decades of the twentieth century. Much the same was still true when I began this book in the early 1970s. At that time, fundamentalism was essentially a separatist and sectarian movement on the fringes of American church life and society. The conclusion of the last chapter suggests how it looked even near the end of that decade. As an historical phenomenon I thought of it as important not so much for understanding those peripheral groups as for understanding the longer range imprint that the fundamentalist experience of the early twentieth century had on a much larger evangelical movement that came in many varieties. I added my original (now abandoned) subtitle, “The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870–1925,” partly because early fundamentalism indeed had a large impact on later evangelicalism, but also because I felt a need to justify a study of fundamentalism in terms of something larger. By the time Fundamentalism and American Culture came out in 1980, there was no need to account for a history of fundamentalism except as important in its own right. I received my first copy the morning after Ronald Reagan was first elected president of the United States.

  Writing tw
enty-five years later, the most illuminating question to ask is how the fundamentalism of recent decades differs from that of the 1920s. Answering that question casts light both on the recent and the distant past. One of the intriguing things about fundamentalism in America is that it has been a moving target. The old-time religion has always been changing, innovative, and in many ways up to date. While its core concerns for proclaiming the Gospel, its fundamental doctrines, its concerns for personal piety, and its militant opposition to liberal theology and to secularizing culture remain largely the same as in the 1920s, its ways of expressing those concerns have gone through several transmutations. In Order to better understand recent fundamentalism and its differences from its progenitors, we will trace a number of the factors that changed the movement during the twentieth century. Before doing that, let me sound the major theme.

  The most striking feature of fundamentalism since the 1970s that distinguishes it from its forebears is its deep involvement in mainstream national politics. This point must be stated carefully. Fundamentalism has always had political implications. One of the several dynamics shaping early fundamentalists was a sense of alarm over the demise of Christian culture. National revival, they urged, was the only adequate response. Salvation of souls, they affirmed, would restore righteousness to the culture.2 Born-again people, they at least implied, would choose upright leaders who honored God’s laws. Occasionally the movement did have some explicitly political components, best exemplified in the crusades against godless evolutionism and godless Bolshevism, but its political interests were haphazard.3 Prior to World War I, most of fundamentalists’ immediate precursors stayed away from most direct political involvement. The premillennial revivalist movement that revered Dwight L. Moody was invigorated by a militant sense of cultural crisis, but the primary response was to mobilize an army of evangelists. The major exception was Prohibition, but that movement had its roots in the old postmillennialism and was as much a mainline Protestant and Progressive cause as a revivalist concern. In the era that followed the 1920s, in the mid-decades of the century, fundamentalism was even less involved in direct political action. After World War II anti-communism became a conspicuous theme but its major function was as a prelude to the old call for national revival, as it was for Billy Graham, as a way of urging individual conversions and enlisting support for evangelism and missions. Some evangelists, such as Fred Schwartz, Carl Mclntire, and Billy James Hargis, specialized in anti-communism, and paved the way for the Religious Right. Yet their efforts did not result in large-scale political mobilization and they seemed marginal to the national scene. Through the 1960s the endlessly repeated mainline Protestant critique of fundamentalism was that its “otherworldliness” and emphasis on personal conversion as the only real answer to life’s problems had turned Christianity into a “private” and socially irresponsible religion.4

  The question to be addressed then is: How did a soul-saving revivalistic movement that mostly steered clear of direct political involvement emerge at the end of the twentieth century as known especially for its political stances and influences? That is not to say that political involvement has become the controlling feature of most fundamentalism or related evangelicalism. Concerns for evangelism, missions, and personal spirituality still are the central features of the movement. Many churches that are strongly conservative in theology do not emphasize politics. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that in the past generation political activism has risen dramatically in prominence as one feature of the movement.5

  FROM FUNDAMENTALIST TO EVANGELICAL AND BACK—AND HOW DEFINITIONS CHANGE

  Fundamentalism in the 1920s was a broad coalition drawn from many denominations and traditions. The most dedicated core of this many-faceted movement was made up of dispensational premillennialists, associated with revivalism, Bible institutes, and independent missions. At the same time many other conversionist-oriented, biblicist, and conservative Protestants were influenced and reshaped by the fundamentalist anti-modernist outlook. The diversity and hence decentralization of fundamentalism helped give it remarkable resilience. So, even though in the most publicized denominational and cultural battles of the 1920s fundamentalists might have seemed to be fighting for lost causes, their campaigns took deeper root at the local level, and often they flourished in adversity.

  After World War II, the strength of conversionist Protestantism became evident once again with the immense popularity of Billy Graham. The young evangelist was a purebred fundamentalist, but once he became a national celebrity in the 1950s he and his closest supporters began to reclaim the term “evangelical” to describe their movement.6 While these “new evangelicals” did not abandon their militancy, they tempered it in the interests of evangelism and in the hope to regain influence in the cultural and ecclesiastical mainstream. Usually the new evangelicals, like their fundamentalist predecessors, maintained the so-called “pietist” position that churches and religious leaders should stay out of politics and confine themselves to more strictly “spiritual matters,” especially preaching the salvation of souls, which they believed was in any case the most effective solution to social problems. They did not, however, always maintain that stance consistently. Some of the largest financial contributors to the movements in the 1950s were ardent political conservatives who saw revivals as an antidote to liberal trends in church and society. The new evangelicals also included some voices, of whom the most prominent was Carl F. H. Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today, challenging the pietist majority among them to reclaim their Reformed heritage of fostering a larger social, political, and intellectual agenda.7

  Meanwhile and partly in reaction to the new evangelicals, other heirs to the original fundamentalist movement moved in a strict separatist and more purely “fundamentalist” direction. These more rigorous fundamentalists did not differ from the new evangelicals in their implicit political leanings or the dominance of pietist-conversionist social solutions, but they did object to the efforts of Graham and his associates to build alliances with sympathizers in mainstream Protestant denominations, which they regarded as hopelessly liberal in theology. By the late 1950s strict fundamentalists split with Graham and the new evangelicals, insisting that complete separation from any alliance with doctrinal impurity should be a test of true faith. Often they demanded double separation, breaking fellowship not only with liberals but also with those who fellowshipped with liberals. Bob Jones University became a prototype of such separatism. These separatists were almost all strict dispensational premillennialists, while the new evangelicalism included some adherents from other heritages. The break between strict separatists and Billy Graham led to a change in terminology. By the later 1960s a considerable network of ecclesiastical separatists were the only ones to use the term “fundamentalist” as a self-designation (a change from the broader use of the term in the 1920s). “Evangelical” became the usual term to refer not only to the more moderate heirs to the broader fundamentalist coalition, but also to conversionist Protestants of any heritage. For a time a convenient rule of thumb was that an evangelical was anyone who identified with Billy Graham.

  Even though “evangelicalism” represented a broad and diverse coalition, most of those who used “evangelical” as their primary self-identification were from groups that had some direct fundamentalist heritage. Such “card-carrying” evangelicals, as we may call them, included a more militant or “fundamentalistic” wing, which typically emphasized the inerrancy of Scripture, and perhaps premillennialism, as among the tests of the faith, but were not strict ecclesiastical separatists as were those who actually called themselves “fundamentalists.”8

  When in the mid-1970s the Religious Right entered the national consciousness as a politically active movement, some of its early core leadership was drawn from separatist fundamentalists, of whom Jerry Falwell and Tim and Beverly LaHaye were fairly typical. As a political coalition, however, the new Religious Right soon drew in many conservative evangelicals who were milita
nt, or fundamentalistic on cultural issues, even if they might be less so on theological or ecclesiastical matters. The Religious Right also included cultural conservatives from other heritages such as Roman Catholics and Mormons. The Protestant part of this coalition has often been referred to, especially by those who do not appreciate the internal divisions within conversionist Christianity, as simply “evangelical,” or sometimes as simply “fundamentalist.” It would be more accurate to say that the Religious Right as a political movement has attracted many separatist fundamentalists and “fundamentalistic” evangelicals. “Fundamentalistic” is here used in about the same way as “fundamentalist” was used in the 1920s: as referring to a broader coalition of militant evangelical Christians drawn from all sorts of denominations. My own unscientific shorthand for this broader usage is that a fundamentalist (or a fundamentalistic evangelical) is “an evangelical who is angry about something.”9

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  19th century

  Evangelicasm

  Includes most major Protestant denominations and also newer revivalist groups including holiness and premillennialists. By end of century American evangelicalism is beginning to polarize between theological liberals and conservatives.

  1920s

  Fundamentalism

  A generic name for a broad coalition of conservatives from major denominations and revivalists (prominently including premillennial dispensationalists) who are militantly opposed to modernism in the churches and to certain modern cultural mores.

  Related revivalist groups, such as from pentecostal or holiness churches, are also often called fundamentalists although some remain separate from major cultural and theological battles.

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