Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  More specifically, to point out how American fundamentalism was shaped by historical circumstances is not to place that movement in any special category in the history of Christianity. Since God works among imperfect human beings in historical settings, “pure” or “perfect” Christianity can seldom if ever exist in this world. God in his grace works through our limitations; for that very reason we should ask for the grace to recognize what those limitations are. So we may—and ought to—carefully identify the cultural forces which affect the current versions of Christianity.

  In American church history many authors have pointed to the intertwining of Christianity with the various “isms” of the times—nationalism, socialism, individualism, liberalism, conservatism, scientism, subjectivism, common-sense objectivism, romanticism, relativism, cultural optimism, cultural pessimism, intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, self-ism, materialism, and so forth. Fundamentalism, as we have seen, incorporated some of these into its vision of Christianity. Yet God can certainly work through some such combinations. Christians’ trust in God may be mingled or confused with some culturally formed assumptions, ideals, and values. Inevitably it will. The danger is that our culturally defined loves, allegiances, and understandings will overwhelm and take precedence over our faithfulness to God. So the identification of cultural forces, such as those with which this book is concerned, is essentially a constructive enterprise, with the positive purpose of finding the gold among the dross.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Mencken, Prejudices, Fourth Series (New York, 1924), pp. 78–79; Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York, 1929), p. 12; Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York, 1956 [1929]), pp. 9, 16.

  2. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) makes a similar point, pp. 257–287. Hutchison’s is the most valuable study of the development of modernism in the period of this study.

  3. Gray, “Modernism a Foe of Good Government,” Moody Monthly XXIV (July, 1924), p. 545; Bryan, “The Fundamentals,” The Forum LXX (July, 1923), from excerpt in Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., ed., Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution (Nashville, Tenn., 1969), p. 137; Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York, 1923), p. 6. Gatewood’s volume is a very valuable collection of documents with perceptive introductions.

  4. While militancy against modernism was the key distinguishing factor that drew fundamentalists together, militancy was not necessarily the central trait of fundamentalists. Missions, evangelism, prayer, personal holiness, or a variety of doctrinal concerns may often or usually have been their first interest. Yet, without militancy, none of these important aspects of the movement set it apart as “fundamentalist.”

  5. See Chapters XXII–XXIV below on these interpretive traditions.

  6. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970). I have commented on Sandeen at greater length in “Defining Fundamentalism,” Christian Scholar’s Review I (Winter, 1971), pp. 141–51; cf. Sandeen’s reply, I (Spring, 1971), pp. 227–232. See also comments on Sandeen in Chapter XXII of this volume.

  7. Cf. George Dollar who in A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville, S.C., 1973) has this strict separatist fundamentalist perspective of today and agrees basically with Sandeen’s definition.

  8. LeRoy Moore, Jr., “Another Look at Fundamentalism: A Response to Ernest R. Sandeen,” Church History XXXVII (June, 1968), pp. 195–202 makes this and other valuable criticisms of an earlier statement of Sandeen’s thesis.

  9. In this approach I agree with C. Allyn Russell in his worthwhile volume Voices of American Fundamentalism: Seven Biographical Studies (Philadelphia, 1976).

  10. Sydney E. Ahlstrom writes, “No aspect of American church history is more in need of summary and yet so difficult to summarize as the movements of dissent and reaction between the Civil War and World War I.” A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), p. 823.

  I. Evangelical America at the Brink of Crisis

  1. George L. Prentiss, “The National Crisis,” American Theological Review, 1st ser., 4 (October, 1862), pp. 674–718; William Adams, “The War for Independence and the War for Secession,” American Presbyterian and Theological Review, 2nd ser., 4 (January, 1866), p. 92. These quotations are from George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven, 1970), pp. 207, 209, which provides some background to the present study.

  2. The Kingdom of Christ on Earth: Twelve Lectures Delivered Before the Students of the Theological Seminary, Andover (Andover, Mass., 1874), p. 2, quoted in Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Reality (New York, 1971), pp. 98–99. Handy’s work is a good source on the identification of America with the kingdom.

  3. The Rev. W. W. Patton, “Revivals of Religion–How to Make them Productive of Permanent Good,” History, Essays, Orations, and Other Documents of the Sixth General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, Held in New York, October 2–12, 1873. Philip Schaff and S. Irenaeus Prime, eds., (New York, 1874), p. 351. (Hereafter cited as EA 1873.)

  4. Joseph Angus, “Duty of the Church in Relation to Mission,” EA 1873, p. 583.

  5. See John Harris Jones, “Christianity as a Reforming Power,” EA 1873, pp. 661–62, for an illustration of this argument.

  6. “The Relations of Constitution and Government in the United States to Religion,” EA 1873. p. 527.

  7. Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb, Illinois, 1971) provides a good portrait of this age.

  8. Quoted in Handy, A Christian America, p. 84. Handy, pp. 84–88, provides a very valuable account of this concern.

  9. “Sunday Legislation,” EA 1873, pp, 540–43.

  10. Both quotations are from Handy, p. 85, the first from a Congregational statement in 1877 and the latter from the Northern Methodists in 1884.

  11. Brian Harrison points out that in Sabbatarianism “flourished … a genuine coincidence of interest between evangelicals and working men….” Past and Present, 38 (Dec., 1967), p. 105, cited in Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 10–11.

  12. William H. Allen, “The Labor Question,” EA 1873, pp. 670–74.

  13. “The Right Use of Wealth,” EA 1873, pp. 357–61.

  14. Anderson says precisely this, ibid., p. 361. Cf. Daniel Walker Howe, “Victorian Culture in America,” in Howe, ed., Victorian America, p. 24. Howe’s essay is perhaps the best brief account of the American Victorian outlook.

  15. George P. Schmidt, The Old Time College President (New York, 1930).

  16. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976) explores these trends. Cf. Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York, 1962).

  17. Cf. G. Stanley Hall’s remark in 1879, “there are less than a half dozen colleges or universities in the United States where metaphysical thought is entirely freed from reference to theological formula.” Quoted in Herbert W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1946), p. 376.

  18. Among the number of very useful summaries of Common Sense Realism which have helped in formulating this account are: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History XXIV (Sept., 1955), pp. 257–72; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill, 1977); George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York, 1968); Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1977); S. A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford, 1960); Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); William McLoughlin, ed., The American Evangelicals, 1800–1900 (New York, 1968); Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the
Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1961); Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); Donald H. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment (New York, 1976); D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience, the Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, 1972); Perry Miller, ed., American Thought: Civil War to World War I (New York, 1963 [1954]); Herbert W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1946); Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York, 1971); John W. Stewart, “The Tethered Theology …,” uncompleted manuscript (1978) Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

  19. Meyer, Democratic Enlightenment, pp. 191–92. Cf. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).

  20. See especially Bozeman and Daniels, cited note 18 above. Also Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978).

  21. Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, Joseph Angus, ed., (London, n. d. [1835]), p. 85 and p. 4.

  22. Ahlstrom, cited note 18 above, points out the optimistic, humanistic, and individualistic tendencies of Common Sense philosophy.

  23. On the tensions between Calvinism and individualism, see Bozeman. Cf. Marsden, Evangelical Mind.

  24. See discussion, Chapter XIII below.

  25. “Grounds of Knowledge and Rules for Belief,” Princeton Review 57 (January, 1881), p. 18; for a compendium of Common Sense arguments to cure “honest doubt,” see p. 1 and passim.

  26. Letter to Frederic Hedge, quoted in Francis P. Weisenburger, Ordeal of Faith: The Crisis of Church-Going America 1865–1900 (New York, 1959).

  27. Hitchcock, “Romanism in the Light of History,” EA 1873, p. 436 (Hitchcock’s address is actually a plea for more understanding toward Rome than was generally expressed at the meetings).

  28. “Recent Questions of Unbelief,” Bibliotheca Sacra XXVII (July, 1870), p. 469.

  29. William E. Dodge, “Opening Address,” EA 1873, p. 14.

  30. M. Cohen Stuart, “Holland,” EA 1873, p. 93; Hermann Krummacher, “Germany,” p. 80; Christlieb, “The Best Methods of Counteracting Modern Infidelity,” p. 207.

  31. “American Infidelity: Its Factors and Phases,” EA 1873, pp. 249–54. The Rev. E. A. Washburn, a New York pastor who followed Warren to the platform, echoed similar sentiments, “Reason and Faith,” pp. 255–69.

  32. “Religious Aspects of the Doctrine of Development,” EA 1873, pp. 264–75.

  33. EA 1873, Appendix, “Discussion on Darwinism and the Doctrine of Development,” pp. 317–23.

  34. Cf. Bozeman’s discussion of “doxological science.”

  35. This interpretation follows more or less that of James Ward Smith’s excellent essay, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds., The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton, 1961), pp. 402–42.

  36. Moderate reconciliations, such as that suggested by McCosh, seem to have been more readily accepted in Great Britain. See George M. Marsden, “Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon, A Comparison with English Evangelicalism,” Church History 46 (June, 1977), pp. 215–32.

  II. The Paths Diverge

  1. This summary is based most immediately on the following: Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia, 1976); Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York, 1967); Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (Dekalb, 111., 1971); Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience (New York, 1970); H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal (Syracuse, N. Y., 1963).

  2. As D. H. Meyer says, “The Victorians of the late nineteenth century replaced the medieval alliance of faith and reason with a combination of sentimentalism and intellectualism….” “The Victorian Crisis of Faith,” in Howe, ed., Victorian America, p. 76.

  3. Cf. William G. McLouglin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870 (New York, 1970), pp. 185–220 and Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses, J. R. Howard, ed. (New York, 1887). For an engaging account of the Beecher family see Marie Caskey, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven, 1978).

  4. Paul Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, pp. 111–32, has a helpful account of Beecher’s reputation.

  5. Cf. Sydney Ahlstrom, “Theology in America: A Historical Survey,” James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds., The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton, 1961), p. 294.

  6. Cf. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

  7. McLoughlin, Beecher, pp. 25–26; 134–51. Cf. Clifford E. Clark, Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for Middle Class America (Urbana, 111., 1978), who likewise argues for this thesis.

  8. McLoughlin, Beecher, p. 49.

  9. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, p. 125.

  10. Quoted in Caskey, Chariot of Fire, p. 248.

  11. Cf. Perry Miller, “Nature and the National Ego,” Errand into the Wilderness (New York, 1956), pp. 204–16.

  12. Cf. McLoughlin, Beecher, pp. 4–5; see also Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, pp. 259–68, on immense popularity of Emerson among students.

  13. Quoted in McLoughlin, Beecher, p. 67.

  14. “Future Punishment,” The Original Plymouth Pulpit, Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, vol. V. (Boston, 1871), pp. 99–111.

  15. The Modern Movement in American Theology: Sketches in the History of American Protestant Thought from the Civil War to the World War (New York, 1939), p. 86.

  16. “The Two Revelations,” Evolution and Religion (New York, 1885), pp. 44–55. For explication of the romantic defense of science see McLoughlin, Beecher, esp., pp. 34–54.

  17. Evolution and Religion, p. 24. Foster quotes this passage with great approval, an indication of the extent to which Beecher enunciated a basic principle of later liberalism.

  18. Yale Lectures in Preaching (New York, 1872), pp. 76–84, 87–90; reprinted in William R. Hutchison, ed., American Protestant Thought: The Liberal Era (New York, 1968), pp. 37–45. Hutchison in The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) points out that many liberals were not as optimistic or as liberal as Beecher, e.g., p. 100.

  19. Foster, Modern Movement, pp. 16–27. Cf. Daniel Day Williams, The Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology (Morningside Heights, N.Y., 1941).

  20. Old Faiths in New Light (2nd ed., New York, 1879), pp. 383–91, reprinted in H. Shelton Smith et al., eds., American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, vol. II, 1820–1960 (New York, 1963), pp. 266–70. Compare this analysis to that of Daniel Day Williams, Andover Liberals, p. 173: “Liberal theology has been both attracted and repelled by the possibility of the limitation of human knowledge to that which is scientifically verifiable. It has accepted science as the valid interpretation of certain aspects of nature and has avoided accepting the full consequences of this acceptance.”

  21. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, pp. 50–55. Abbot quotation from The Evolution of Christianity (Boston, 1892), p. 227.

  22. “The Law of Growth” (1877), The Law of Growth and Other Sermons, Ninth Series (New York, 1902), p. 12.

  23. Frances C. Blanchard, The Life of Charles Albert Blanchard (New York, 1932), p. 23.

  24. Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York, 1835), p. 177, quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962), p. 94.

  25. “A Perfect State of Society,” Sermons and Addresses (Chicago, 1892), pp. 35–36. Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York, 1976), discusses Blanchard, Finney, and other radical evangelical reform of the time.

  26. Clyde S. Kilby, Minority of One: The Biography of Jonathan Blanchard (Grand Rapids, 1959), pp. 15–102; Richard S. Taylor, “Jonathan Blanchard: Nineteenth Century Evangelical,�
� M.A. thesis, Northern Illinois University, 1970, pp. 20–93. Taylor’s work has been revised and expanded in “Seeking the Kingdom: A Study in the Career of Jonathan Blanchard (1811–1892),” Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1977. References below, however, are to the earlier version.

  27. Kilby, Minority, pp. 100–102, 120–21, 137–47. Cf. George P. Schmidt, The Old Time College President (New York, 1930), p. 210n.

  28. “The Kingdom of Christ: And the Duty of American Colleges Respecting It” (1846), Sermons and Addresses, p. 114.

  29. Taylor, “Blanchard,” pp. 103–5; William Delahoyde, “Common Sense Philosophy at Wheaton College (1860–1940),” unpublished paper, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1976.

  30. “The Kingdom,” pp. 104–5.

  31. Cf. Richard S. Taylor, “Millennialism in American Education: Jonathan Blanchard at Knox and Wheaton,” paper delivered at the American Society of Church History, December, 1977, pp. 10–11.

  32. Finney wrote The Character, Claims, and Practical Workings of Freemasonry (Chicago, 1869).

  33. “The Spirit of the Cynosure,” Christian Cynosure I (July 11, 1872), p. 154.

  34. Blanchard wrote to Finney, Nov. 12, 1868, “The Masons are hunting and hounding me to death—but Christ is with me, and ‘I will not fear what man can do.’” Quoted in Taylor, “Blanchard,” p. 139. One need not assume, of course, that such active opposition was wholly imaginary, although perhaps exaggerated.

  35. See Thomas A. Askew, Jr., “The Liberal Arts College Encounters Intellectual Change: A Comparative Study of Education at Knox and Wheaton Colleges, 1837–1925,” Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1969, for a fascinating account. See also Timothy L. Smith, “Uncommon Schools: Christian Colleges and Social Idealism in Midwestern America, 1820–1850” (essay printed by the Indiana Historical Society, 1978), which sets such developments in a wider context.