Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  18. James M. Gray, “Relation of the Christian Church to Civil Government,” 2nd ed. (pamphlet) (Chicago, n. d.), pp. 3–10.

  19. An important distinction, common by 1900, was that often those who were saying (in reaction to a Social Gospel) that social action should not come first, before evangelism, nevertheless thought (as Moody apparently did) it important that social benefits would naturally result from evangelism. Robert Speer, a product of the Student Volunteer Movement, sometimes a Keswick speaker and later the leading Presbyterian missionary spokesman, in 1900 distinguished between the “aim” of foreign missions and the “results.” The aim is strictly “a spiritual and a religious work,” which missionaries should stick to. The resuhs, however, will touch the body and involve social progress. “The Supreme and Determining Aim,” Ecumenical Missionary Conference New York, 1900, vol. I (New York, 1900), pp. 74–75. The importance of these results for Speer is indicated in his essay, “Foreign Missions or World-Wide Evangelism,” The Fundamentals: A Testimony, vol. XII (Chicago, c. 1915), p. 73. Arthur Johnson, The Battle for World Evangelism (Wheaton, 111., 1978), pp. 32–33, uses Speer’s 1900 remarks in a recent evangelical argument against a Social Gospel.

  20. This social characterization is made, among other places, in Sandra Sizer, Gospel Hymns and Social Religion (Philadelphia, 1978), p. 139. Sizer argues that the revivals were a response to the political and social crises of the times. Although there likely is something to this argument, it is difficult to substantiate, since every era has a political and social crisis but not all have revivals. Sizer is correct, however, in pointing out that even the apolitical revivals had political implications, especially in that they were seen as the necessary counteraction to the moral disease that was regarded as the basis of political and social ills, esp. 138–59.

  21. Fundamentalist social and political views, before and after World War I, are discussed below in Chapters XV and XXIII.

  22. Sizer, Gospel Hymns, p. 139. Cf. James F. Findlay, Jr., Dwight L. Moody (Chicago, 1969), pp. 262–302. Walter Edmund Warren Ellis, “Social and Religious Factors in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Schisms Among Baptists in North America, 1895–1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1974, shows from four local studies that fundamentalists tended to be relatively younger and somewhat lower middle-class than their non-fundamentalist Protestant counterparts, who were more settled. Probably one can assume that middle-class church growth is more likely to occur among the relatively less settled. On Ellis, see below, Chapter XXII.

  23. Dayton, Evangelical Heritage, pp. 121–35, Moberg, Great Reversal, pp. 34–38, and Pierard, Unequal Yoke, 29–33, all suggest some social factors in addition to new doctrines and anti-modernism. Dayton emphasizes rising affluence, which probably applies more to Holiness groups than to the more strictly fundamentalist types, who generally were not drawn originally from as far down the social scale.

  24. See below, especially Chapters XVI and XVII.

  25. Ellis, “Social and Religious Factors,” for instance, finds considerable overlap, even though he shows significant overall differences between the two groups.

  26. These conflicts are suggested, for instance, in William G. McLoughlin, Jr., Modern Revivalism (New York, 1959), pp. 393–99, who claims that Billy Sunday’s rise to his greatest prominence after 1912 was on the crest of reaction to the Social Gospel.

  27. The two clear exceptions to this are William Jennings Bryan, whose progressivism was too integral a part of his identity to be abandoned; and fundamentalist support for prohibition, which was too sacred and ancient among their causes to be forsaken simply because liberal Protestants supported it also.

  28. Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, Robert D. Cross, ed. (New York, 1964 [1907]), p. 6.

  29. There is some debate on the degree of the antipathy of the classic Social Gospel to traditional evangelical Christianity. There are, of course, varieties of the Social Gospel and shades that might blend more into compatibility with traditional belief. Yet in Rauschenbusch, at least, the prevailing tendency is to follow William James and John Dewey in regarding ideas as plans of action rather than as mirrors of reality. Traditional theological categories will not fare well in such an approach. James Ward Smith, “Religion and Science in American Philosophy,” The Shaping of American Religion, Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds. (Princeton, 1961), pp. 429–30, quotes a long passage from Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, and then comments: “There you have it—the metaphysical heritage of the Christian West shrugged off as ‘pagan superstition and Greek intellectualism’! What could Dewey say that would shock a clergy accustomed to this?” To my mind, the test of a genuine example of the Social Gospel is whether other aspects of Christianity are subordinated to, and in effect incidental to, its social aspects.

  30. The impact of fear of liberalism on social questions is suggested in two answers from Dr. C. I. Scofield’s Question Box, compiled by Ella A. Pohle (Chicago, n. d. [c. 1920]), from Moody Bible Institute’s Record of Christian Work in the preceding decades. In answer to a general question on “the relation of the believer to the present world system and politics,” Scofield mentioned that Jesus healed the sick and fed the hungry and that love toward neighbors demanded that “whatever we can do to benefit them or to keep them from harm, we should gladly do.” This might include political action, although Scofield (not himself a great champion of social action) mentioned only saving neighbors from “the open bar-room.” When a similar question suggested a limited Social Gospel (“Is it not part of the mission of the church to correct the social evils of our day?”) Scofield was entirely negative. Christ’s only response to slavery, intemperance, prostitution, unequal distribution of wealth, and oppression of the weak was to preach regeneration through the Holy Spirit. “The best help a pastor can bring to the social problems of the community is to humble himself before God, forsake his sins, receive the filling with the Holy Spirit, and preach a pure gospel of tender love,” pp. 35–36.

  31. Both trends seem to accelerate dramatically after World War I. One good example is John Horsch, Modern Religious Liberalism: The Destructiveness and Irrationality of Modernist Theology (Scottdale, P., [1924] 1920). This second edition is introduced by James M. Gray. Horsch characterizes the Social Gospel as teaching that “education and sanitation take the place of personal regeneration and the Holy Spirit. True spiritual Christianity is denied.” The most that Horsch has to say in favor of social concern is that “social betterment is excellent as the outgrowth of Christianity…,” meaning out of personal regeneration. Social reform is the business of government, he says, not the church. The rest of his account is entirely negative, pp. 127–39.

  32. To the extent they did modify these conservative views, as discussed in Chapter XXIII below, they accentuated them by adopting extremist versions of them, such as extreme anti-communism.

  XI. Holiness and Fundamentalism

  1. Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago, 1970), pp. 208–32. See also Chapter V, note 17, above.

  2. Helpful surveys of these developments are David W. Faupel, The American Pentecostal Movement: A Bibliographical Essay (Wilmore, Ky., 1972); and William W. Menzies, “The Non-Wesleyan Origins of the Pentecostal Movement,” Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, Vinson Synan, ed. (Plainfield, N.J., 1975), pp. 83–97. Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York, 1979), is a very complete account of Pentecostal origins.

  3. E.g., “Pentecostal Saints and the Tongues Movement,” by “a former sympathizer of the Pentecostal movement,” Moody Monthly XXI (January, 1921), p. 211; “Fundamentalism Knows No Relation to ‘Pentecostalism,’” Christian Fundamentals in School and Church VIII (Jan.–March, 1926), pp. 31–35.

  4. Frederick Dale Bruner, A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids, 1970), pp. 45–46.

  5. A.J. Gordon, The Ministry of Healing: Miracles of Cure in All Ages (Harrisburg, n. d.). Ar
thur T. Pierson, Forward Movement of the Last Half Century (New York, 1900), pp. 389–408, discusses the growth of belief in divine healing. It was rather common for the associates of Moody to talk of divine healing. They seem, however, to have been somewhat equivocal on the subject, saying prayer could bring miraculous cures, but saying also that God might well have good reasons to continue an affliction; e.g., James M. Gray, “Is any Among you Afflicted? Let Him Pray” (tract) (Chicago, n.d.); Charles Blanchard, “The Bible Teaching Concerning Healing” (tract) (Chicago, n. d.). Discussion of this subject seems to have faded after Pentecostals sensationalized the teaching.

  6. Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids, 1971), p. 206.

  7. Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals: The Charismatic Movement in the Churches (Minneapolis, 1972 [1969]) includes considerable discussion of fundamentalist traits of Pentecostals.

  8. Anderson, Vision, p. 6 and passim, argues that Pentecostalism was part of fundamentalism, but qualifies this by saying that the relationship was like that between Quakers and Puritans (which I think is an apt analogy). Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal, pp. 221–22, points out that Pentecostals were little involved in the fundamentalist controversies. Synan, who stresses the Holiness roots of Pentecostalism more exclusively than do most interpreters, also says less of fundamentalist influences.

  9. This is especially the case in the National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942. Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal, pp. 205–7. All these topics are elaborated in Edith Lydia Waldvogel, “The ‘Overcoming Life’: A Study in the Reformed Evangelical Origins of Pentecostalism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard, 1977. Waldvogel points out that in the 1920s Pentecostals could readily identify themselves with fundamentalists and that the Assemblies of God especially recommended works of Torrey, Gordon, Simpson, and Keswick writers, even though fundamentalist leaders, including Torrey, explicitly condemned tongues, pp. 205–6.

  10. A. M. Hills, Pentecost Rejected: and the Effect on the Churches (Titusville, Pa., 1973 [1902]), p. 63.

  11. Hills, Holiness and Power for the Church and the Ministry (Cincinnati, 1897).

  12. Hills, Pentecost Rejected, pp. 63–68.

  13. Ibid., pp. 30–68. Hills, p. 68, lists a number of other contributions to this growing debate.

  14. Tongues (Manchester, 1910); Scriptural Holiness (Manchester, n. d. [c. 1910]).

  15. Quoted from Harmon Alley Baldwin, Objections to Entire-Sanctification Considered (Pittsburgh, 1911), in Bundy, Bibliographical Essay, p. 45. See Bundy, pp. 42–45 for account of the Keswick-Holiness dispute.

  16. (Neptune, N. J., 1912).

  17. Anderson, Vision, esp. pp. 114–36, documents the overwhelmingly poor economic status of early pentecostals. Walter Edmund Warren Ellis, “Social and Religious Factors in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Schisms among Baptists in North America, 1895–1934,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1974, suggests more of a lower-middle-class status of early fundamentalists. Holiness groups appear to have stood somewhere between.

  18. William R. Hutchison, “Cultural Strain and Protestant Liberalism,” American Historical Review 76 (April, 1971), pp. 386–411, doucments the relative affluence at least of liberal leadership. Presbyterian conservatives, who like the liberals were drawn from older and well-established American stock, appear most affluent of the fundamentalists.

  19. The Victorious Christ: Messages from the Conferences Held by the Victorious Life Testimony in 1922 (Philadelphia, 1923), pp. 5–7, 249–52; Bruce Shelley, “Sources of Pietistic Fundamentalism,” Fides et Historia V (Spring, 1973), p. 75.

  20. See, for instance, the personal testimonies, pp. 243–48, The Victorious Christ, also the “Selected Lists of Literature,” pp. 270–72. Cf. Victory in Christ: A Report of Princeton Conference, 1916 (Philadelphia, 1916), pp. 253–62.

  21. Trumbull, “The Sunday School’s True Evangelism,” The Fundamentals XII (Chicago, n. d. [c. 1915]), p. 61.

  22. The Victorious Christ, p. 14.

  23. The continuing Keswick ties are indicated by Henry W. Frost, Director for North America of the China Inland Mission, “Consecration,” The Fundamentals X (c. 1914), pp. 79–88.

  24. Nelson Hodges Hart, “The True and the False: The World of an Emerging Evangelical Protestant Fundamentalism in America, 1890–1920,” Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1976, pp. 63–86, has a helpful discussion of evangelical missions activities and attitudes.

  25. Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming (New York, 1979), pp. 65–81, has a very helpful discussion of the relation of premillennialism to missions.

  26. James Edwin Orr, The Flaming Tongue: The Impact of Twentieth Century Revivals (Chicago, 1973).

  27. Editorial, “The Keswick Conference,” The Presbyterian 87 (May 3, 1917), p. 6, and vol. 87 (1917) passim. Among Baptist conservatives, the influential president of Rochester Theological Seminary, A. H. Strong, apparently was sympathetic to Keswick views; see Benjamin B. Warfield, Perfectionism II (New York, 1931), p. 564.

  28. Review of Lewis Sperry Chafer, He That is Spiritual (New York, 1918), Princeton Theological Review XVII (April, 1919), pp. 322–27.

  29. Warfield, “‘The Victorious Life’” (1918), Perfectionism II, pp. 600–10; cf. review of Chafer, p. 323.

  30. W. H. Griffith Thomas, “The Victorious Life,” Bibliotheca Sacra LXXVI (July, 1919), pp. 267–68 and (October, 1919), pp. 455–67. Quotation is from p. 465.

  31. See, for instance, Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light” (sermon) (1734).

  32. Keswick teachings reflected some of the intellectual traits found in dispensationalism. (1) It involved a heightened emphasis on the supernatural, picturing the individual as caught in a struggle between a very personal deity and a personal devil. (2) It tended to eliminate ambiguities. People were either “spiritual” or “carnal;” there was no middle ground nor the ambiguities of a life of struggle between constantly conflicting tendencies. (3) It involved a tendency to interpret some Biblical phrases literally. For example, Trumbull says, “At last I realized that Jesus Christ was actually and literally within me…. My body was His, my mind was His, my spirit His … Jesus Christ had constituted Himself my life—not as a figure of speech, remember, but as a literal actual fact….” Quoted from “The Life that Wins” (tract) in Warfield’s “‘The Victorious Life,’” p. 595 (cf. pp. 598–99 on A. B. Simpson’s literalism regarding divine healing). Both dispensationalism and Keswick were pessimistic about the state of the organized church, seeing it as insufficiently spiritual.

  33. Ecumenical Missionary Conference, New York 1900, I (New York, 1900), p. 364.

  XII. Tremors of Controversy

  1. Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977), provides an excellent account of this background.

  2. William B. Riley, A. C. Dixon, Curtis Lee Laws, John Roach Straton, J. C. Massee, J. Gresham Machen, and J. Franklin Norris came from the South. Robert Elwood Wenger, “Social Thought in American Fundamentalism 1918–1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1973, pp. 57–72, which looks into this subject carefully, presents a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that fundamentalism in the 1920s had its greatest numerical strength, both in leadership and following, in the Middle-Atlantic and the East-North-Central states, with moderate strength in the rest of the mid-West, in California, and Texas. The South, especially the deep South, was very sparsely represented. In a survey of forty fundamentalist leaders Wenger finds six from the South-Atlantic states south of the Mason-Dixon Line; but only one remained in this part of the South.

  3. Southern Methodists, with a strong emphasis on the religion of the heart, subsequently had some room for theological liberalism.

  4. Pope A. Duncan, “Crawford Howell Toy: Heresy at Louisville,” American Religious Heretics: Formal and Informal Trials, George H. Shriver, ed. (Nashville, 1966), pp. 56–88, provides information on both Toy and Whitsitt.

  5. Ernest
Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, Volume II, 1861–1890 (Richmond, 1973), pp. 442–90.

  6. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill, 1977), and E. Brookes Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture 1795–1860 (Durham, 1978), present considerable material on these themes in Southern thought.

  7. In 1877 James F. Merriam, of the famous publishing family, was refused installation by a Congregationalist council in Massachusetts for maintaining that the question of future punishment was “open.” Frank Hugh Foster, The Modern Movement in American Theology (New York, 1939), pp. 16–23.

  8. Daniel Day Williams, The Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology (Morningside Heights, N. Y., 1941).

  9. Robert E. Chiles, Theological Transition in American Methodism: 1790–1935 (New York, 1965), pp. 37–75, gives a helpful survey. On the trials see Harmon L. Smith, “Borden Parker Bowne: Heresy at Boston,” American Religious Heretics, pp. 148–87.

  10. Hugh M. Jansen, Jr., “Algernon Sidney Crapsey: Heresy at Rochester,” American Religious Heretics, pp. 188–224. The small Reformed Episcopal Church, founded in 1873, had some affinities to fundamentalism; see Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb, 111., 1971), pp. 183–92.

  11. Wenger, “Social Thought,” p. 54, shows 55 percent of leading fundamentalists from these denominations, with 30 percent from the (Northern) Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and 25 percent from the Northern Baptist Convention. No other denomination had nearly comparable representation.

  12. Norman H. Maring, “Baptists and Changing Views of the Bible, 1865–1918,” Foundations I (July, 1958), pp. 53–75, and (October, 1958), pp. 32–61. Cf. Roland Nelson, “Fundamentalism in the Northern Baptist Convention,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1964.