Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  By this standard, it should be carefully noted, the operational distinction between simply being an evangelical and being what I am calling a fundamentalistic evangelical involves their relative degrees of militancy in support of conservative doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and/or cultural issues. “Evangelical” is broadly defined to include those in traditions that emphasize the Bible as the highest religious authority, the necessity of being “born again” or regenerated through the atoning work of Christ on the cross, pietistic devotions and morals, and the necessity of sharing the Gospel through evangelism and missions.10 Because the terms are used in so many different ways, however, it is nearly impossible to get a clear reading on the size of these groups, although there is no doubt that they have become a significant factor in American politics.11

  * * *

  1950s-mid1970s

  New Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism

  “New Evangelicals” (eventually just “evangelicals”), most of whom have a fundamentalist heritage, form the core of a broad coalition that draws in related theological conservatives, ranging from pentecostals to Mennonites, who emphasize positive evangelism, best exemplified by Billy Graham.

  “Fundamentalism,” (technically a sub-species of evangelicalism in the 19th century sense) is used as a self-designation almost only by ecclesiastical separatists who break fellowship with Graham. Almost all are dispensational premillennialists, as are some non-separating evangelicals.

  Late 1970s to early 21st Century

  Fundamentalistic Evangelicalism

  The Religious Right (which also includes Catholics and Mormons) includes “fundamentalistic” militants who from not only separatist fundamentalists groups, but also from almost the whole spectrum of evangelicals, even though by no means all evangelicals, including self-styled fundamentalist, are politicized.

  * * *

  Many of the fundamentalistic evangelicals in the new political coalition were direct heirs to the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s (either by the new evangelical or separatist fundamentalist routes) but many others come from related groups, most notably pentecostals, who were close cousins to the original fundamentalists. One difference between the “new evangelical” coalition of the mid-century and the strict separatist fundamentalists was that the former was more often open to ecclesiastical cooperation with pentecostals. Pentecostalism grew rapidly after World War II. Among its remarkable manifestations was the work of many healing evangelists, of whom Oral Roberts became the best known through nation-wide television broadcasts.12 In the 1960s and 1970s the related charismatic movement was spreading in many mainline denominations and even into Roman Catholicism. These movements emphasized expressive Christianity and usually avoided politics. By the end of the twentieth century pentecostal and charismatic Christianity had become a major part of American evangelicalism and had made a phenomenal impact in world-wide Christianity, where their adherents were estimated in the hundreds of millions.13 In the United States these movements tended to set the tone much more widely for evangelical worship, which became more oriented toward expressive spirituality, especially in contemporary praise music, and increasingly emphasized the immediate benefits of faith. Influences, however, moved in both directions. Evangelical Protestantism operates as an open market, so what works for one group quickly spreads to another. At the same time as expressive styles appeared widely among all sorts of evangelical churches, militant or fundamentalistic attitudes toward culture and politics sprang up in many (but certainly not all) pentecostal and charismatic groups. Pat Robertson, for instance, was charismatic in his theology, but fundamentalistic in his politics.

  Evangelicals come in countless varieties and their cultural and political attitudes do not always correlate with their church affiliations or theologies. Many hold moderate views or remain apolitical and are not much touched by the “culture wars” attitudes. Some vote Democratic and a few lean to the political left. Nonetheless, recognizing all these qualifications and exceptions, the news in the decades since the 1960s is that a wide variety of evangelical traditions that earlier might have been thought of as culturally marginal and on the “private” or “otherworldly” side of American Christianity have been mobilized into significant mainstream national political force that has shifted their center of gravity by adding a very “this-worldly” or “public” agenda. The intriguing question is: How did this revolution take place?

  THE SOUTH RISES AGAIN

  One of the most important cultural developments between the 1930s and the 1970s was the rise of the South from a self-consciously separate region to more of an integral part of the national culture. That transformation was not possible until the turmoil of the civil rights movement receded and the South formally joined the rest of the nation in accepting racial integration, at least in principle. During the era of the triumph of civil rights legislation and enforcement of school desegregation in the 1960s, opposition to these causes was a major force in separating many white southerners from the Democratic Party, as was most evident in George Wallace’s 1968 campaign for president. Despite religious dimensions in that opposition, piety was probably no more conspicuous there than it was in most other aspects of southern public life, whether conservative or progressive, white or black. In any case, only after white southerners were no longer automatically voting Democratic was it possible to organize a truly national movement of political conservatives. Furthermore, once civil rights receded as the defining political issue so that not everything that southern conservatives did was dismissed by their critics as motivated by veiled racism, the door was open to marshal southern conservative political energies and resentments elsewhere. So it is no accident that almost as soon as the divisive issue of civil rights formally receded, the Religious Right emerged as a national movement with conspicuous southern leadership, best exemplified by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Robison.14

  It may seem odd that a movement that, as I and others have argued, appears to be primarily northern in its origins should now seem to have its most solid base in the South. Yet it is not new that many fundamentalists should speak with a southern accent. A number of the most influential early proponents of the movement, including William B. Riley, A. C. Dixon, Curtis Lee Laws, John Roach Straton, J. C. Massee, J. Gresham Machen, and J. Frank Norris, were from the South.15 fundamentalist militancy typically arises when proponents of a once-dominant religious culture feel threatened by trends in the larger surrounding culture. In other words, to use a non-fundamentalist analogy, it takes two to tango. If organized fundamentalism is to arise not only does there have to be a conservative religious community but also the more liberal-secular culture has to be strong enough to be impinging on the once-dominant religious culture and seem to be threatening to replace it. Accordingly, although transplanted southerners were prominent in northern fundamentalism, for a long time there was very little organized fundamentalism in the Deep South. Special fundamentalist organization there would have been redundant. Though people might be aroused against an alien teaching such as evolution, on the whole southern evangelical culture seemed secure. When evangelical white southerners were directly confronted with seemingly inexorable national secularizing trends, some of them, such as the early fundamentalist leaders who had been transplanted to the north, were ready to fight.

  Organized fundamentalism, by way of contrast, has long been stronger in the western South and the upper South, where southern culture was less isolated from the national mainstream. Dallas Theological Seminary, founded in 1924, was the most influential seminary promoting dispensationalist theology. J. Frank Norris, born in Alabama, established the major southern outpost of early organized fundamentalism in Fort Worth. John R. Rice, a native Texan, as a young pastor in Dallas followed Norris in breaking with the Southern Baptist Convention in 1927 and in 1934 established The Sword of the Lord, which was probably the most influential fundamentalist periodical for the next four decades. Bob Jones, Sr., originally a Southern Methodist,
in 1926 established a college, named for himself, which migrated from Panama City, Florida to Cleveland, Tennessee (1933), and Greenville, South Carolina (1946), where it became one of the first centers for organized separatist fundamentalism in the Deep South. Even so, Bob Jones University drew much of its support from the upper and western south, the rust belt Midwest, and California.16

  During the first half of the twentieth century in much of the South, white evangelical Protestants typically exercised, as Grant Wacker has so nicely put it, “custodial” control over the local culture.17 So long as their cultural dominance was secure, they could afford to be champions of separation of church and state and of “the spirituality of the church,” a popular code phrase for the doctrine, sacred since the days of slavery, that churches should not meddle in political causes. Even though “the spirituality of the church” was transparently a way of protecting the segregated social order and churches did exercise their influence when it came to approved political causes such as prohibition, Sabbath observance, or anti-evolution,18 most of that influence was informal or taken for granted and did not require special political organization. Jerry Falwell’s famous 1965 sermon “Ministers and Marchers,” in which he proclaimed that the duty of the church was simply to “preach the Word” and not to “reform the externals” was an expression of this classic southern and fundamentalist stance.19

  One of the earlier sources of the transition to political fundamentalism was the massive migration out of the South during the 1930s through the 1950s. Transplanted white southerners could be found in fundamentalist churches in every northern city. J. Frank Norris, for instance, established in 1932 a second headquarters in Detroit. By 1970 some seven and a half million white southerners were living outside the South. Many settled in the Midwest.20 Perhaps the most dramatic impact of the migration, however, was in southern California. Southern migrants, particularly from the Arkansas/Oklahoma region, helped make southern California a center for the old-time religion. Billy Graham’s much heralded success in his 1949 Los Angeles crusade, which vaulted him into national prominence, was built on this demographic trend. Other lesser known southern evangelists, such as “Fighting” Bob Shuler, John Brown, J. Vernon McGee, and Bill Bright, all from Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Tennessee, had already laid the groundwork for revivalist Christianity in California. The real story, however, was at the local level. White southerners, used to a friendly custodial environment, were confronting a more diverse and secular American culture. Often the initial confrontations involved what was being taught in the public schools, leading to local political mobilization. By the 1960s such grassroots organizations, often growing out of local churches, had become considerable sources of support for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and then, more significantly, for Ronald Reagan’s successful run for governor in 1966. From that time on it would be difficult to find any aspect of the renewed religious and cultural militancy of the emerging Religious Right that did not have a major southern component. By the early 1970s people were talking of the Americanization of the South, and the “southernization” of America, and the “Californization” of Texas.21 The early Moral Majority emerged from the upper South, but eventually similar attitudes could be found throughout the region, as the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention best exemplifies. Conservative attitudes were now strong throughout the Sunbelt. That is not to say that latter-twentieth-century fundamentalism was a southern invention or a purely southern product. To the contrary, its roots were firmly entwined with and grafted onto traditions and attitudes traceable to the fundamentalism of the 1920s and its mid-century northern heirs. Nonetheless, the new even more resistant hybrid that emerged after the mid-1970s flourished especially well in the southland sun.

  The participation of significant numbers of white southerners in recent fundamentalism in some ways paralleled the experience of some northern ethno-Protestants who played roles in the movement since its beginnings.22 The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination and probably the largest source of the fundamentalistic Religious Right of recent decades, for instance, has some traits like those of ethno-religious groups, such as Missouri Synod Lutherans (German origins), or the Christian Reformed Church of North America (Dutch origins). Each tends to be inward looking in terms of ecclesiastical and theological concerns. Each used its religious commitments to preserve a distinctive outlook throughout the twentieth century. As each came into contact with the mainstream culture it developed both a moderate wing and a strong group of conservatives who made the inerrancy of Scripture a firm test of the faith and who tended to adopt the causes championed by the Religious Right.23 Others of Protestant ethnic heritage joined fundamentalist or evangelical churches. Especially in the Midwest, one can find alliances between people of Protestant ethnic heritage and transplanted southerners in the Religious Right.

  THE COUNTERCULTURE, PATRIOTISM, AND THE FAMILY

  As in Reagan’s California, the countercultural revolution of the 1960s vastly accelerated a sense of cultural alarm not only for transplanted white southerners but also for many other sorts of Americans. Two sorts of issues energized the backlash that in 1969 was still far enough beneath media radar to be tagged by Richard Nixon “the silent majority.” First was patriotism and the Vietnam War. Ever since the Russian Revolution, anti-communism had been a leading theme for evangelists who were evoking a sense of world crisis. Such religious anti-communism supported and sometimes amplified political anti-communism, but evangelists usually left actual political organization to others.24 In the 1940s and 1950s communism stood not only for atheism, totalitarianism, and a nuclear threat from abroad, but also at least intimated the menace of atheistic secularism promoted by big government at home. During the early Cold War American patriotism was at a peak and not surprisingly often took on a “Manichean” quality. On the “good” side of this dichotomy was “The American Way of Life,” often associated with family values and a “Christian,” or increasingly “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Fundamentalists, as such, were seldom taken seriously in the cultural mainstream, although everyone knew they were plentiful on the fringes. The immense popularity of Billy Graham, even in his early fundamentalist phase, might have suggested how deeply that religious style, once again with a southern accent, could resonate with a wide segment of Americans. Another significant area where explicitly evangelical influence was growing was the American military. Here again the rise of the South and the prominence of southerners in the military contributed to this trend, which by the 1960s was running counter to the growing secularism of public life.25 More broadly, when opponents of the Vietnam War seemed to question patriotic anti-Communism and to undermine the military, the backlash, whether from the North, South, or West, had one of its strongest bases in conversionist Christianity.

  The cultural revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially the assaults on traditional standards of family and sexuality, had an even larger impact in reshaping fundamentalism. Dramatic changes in standards for public decency, aggressive second-wave feminism, gay activism, and challenges to conventional family structures all generated alarm. These changes were not simply countercultural but in most cases the movements were co-opted by the commercial culture and promoted in its media.26 Archie Bunker reminded the world each week that conventional views on family and sexuality were both laughable and associated with racism. This revolution in standards for sexuality and gender coincided with aggressive efforts to secularize public culture, of which the 1963 United States Supreme Court ruling against Bible reading in the public schools became the chief symbol. Echoing the reaction to the revolution in mores in the 1920s, the idea that America was a Christian nation that had forsaken its heritage gained new credibility. Campaigns to counter that trend gained new urgency.

  Fundamentalism as a backlash against a revolution in morals both suggests a striking parallel to the 1920s and also one of the biggest differences between the two movements. One of the oldest and mos
t common interpretations of the rise of fundamentalism in the 1920s is that it was part of a “Puritanical” reaction to the excesses and changing mores of the 1920s jazz age. Fundamentalism and American Culture has been justly criticized for not emphasizing such factors more. My only defense is that since such interpretations were so commonplace, I was both taking for granted the impact of the revolution in mores and trying to show that fundamentalism was considerably more than gut reactions to cultural change.27 I have long said that fundamentalists were militant evangelical Protestants who were fighting battles on two fronts: They were fighting against the inroads of theological modernism in mainline denominations and they were combating a variety of alarming changes in the culture. Nonetheless, I need to acknowledge that the account would have been fuller and more balanced had I included more detail on the sense of cultural crisis. Particularly, I neglected the alarm of fundamentalists over issues of gender, sexuality, and the family. The book would be better balanced if it included accounts of fundamentalist distress over changing sexual standards, the new woman, women’s suffrage, women’s ordination, flappers, birth control, divorce rates, and the decline in family authority. It should also have included much more on fundamentalist views concerning women and the roles of women who were fundamentalists. Although fundamentalists typically held that church leaders and public spokespersons should be male, women accepted and defended their subordinate roles and often exercised far more influence in practice than would have been apparent by examining the theory alone. Fortunately these topics have been well covered in the literature since Fundamentalism and American Culture first appeared.28

  Despite continuities in fundamentalist concerns over sexuality, gender, and family from the 1920s to the later decades of the century, the immense difference is that in the former era these issues did not lead to any considerable political mobilization. Fundamentalist editorials may have run more than ten to one against women’s suffrage,29 but that was not an issue over which fundamentalists themselves were organizing a political countermovement. One reason was that the relationship of politics to the revolution of mores of the 1920s was much different from that of the 1960s and 1970s. The era of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge was as much the era of Prohibition as it was of women’s suffrage. Politically the Protestant establishment was still more-or-less in place in the 1920s, while in the 1960s and 1970s it was rapidly disintegrating. The earlier revolution in mores was not perceived as part of a larger secularizing political trend that had to be resisted.