Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  21. Ronald Nelson, “Fundamentalism and the Northern Baptist Convention,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1964.

  22. Dollar, History, 162–72.

  23. Bruce L. Shelley, A History of Conservative Baptists (Wheaton, 1971); Dollar, History, pp. 226–33. John W. Foster, Four Northwest Fundamentalists (Portland, Ore., 1975), illustrates some of the differences among fundamentalist leaders on separation.

  24. Foster, Northwest, provides a number of examples. Paul A. Carter, Another Part of the Twenties (New York, 1977), p. 51, points out that fundamentalists, while losing on the national level, could quite plausibly claim to be winning on the local level.

  25. Joel A. Carpenter, “A Shelter in the Time of Storm: Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929–1942,” ms., cf., Church History (March, 1980). Carpenter documents the activities described above. See also Dollar, History, esp. pp. 213–62, and Louis Gasper, The Fundamentalist Movement (The Hague, 1963).

  26. Statistics from Carpenter, “Shelter.”

  27. Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York, 1976), provides some good examples of fundamentalist transformations in Holiness groups. Edith Lydia Waldvogel, “The ‘Overcoming Life’: A Study in the Reformed Evangelical Origins of Pentecostalism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1977, points out some of the affinities between the traditions. Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited (New York, 1979), shows fundamentalist influence on Pentecostals.

  28. Milton L. Rudnick, Fundamentalism and the Missouri Synod: A Historical Study of Their Interaction and Mutual Influence (St. Louis, 1966). Joseph H. Hall, “The Controversy over Fundamentalism in the Christian Reformed Church, 1915–1966,” Th.D. dissertation, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, 1974.

  29. Stanley Nussbaum, “You Must be Born Again,” a study of the Evangelical Mennonite Church, unpublished manuscript, 1976, portrays a classic case of a transformation from an Anabaptist to a fundamentalist Protestantism. Other examples of such groups are found in the lists of denominational affiliates of the National Association of Evangelicals and the American Council of Christian Churches, in Gasper, Fundamentalist Movement, pp. 38–39.

  30. One clear instance is schism from the Reformed Church of America and the formation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of the Calvary Undenominational congregation, led in 1929 by Martin R. DeHaan, a prominent fundamentalist radio preacher. See James R. Adair, M. R. DeHaan: The Man and His Ministry (Grand Rapids, 1969), pp. 79–89. DeHaan’s congregation attracted Dutch-Americans from several denominational backgrounds. I thank Herbert J. Brinks for this and other suggestions of fundamentalism’s attractiveness to Dutch-Americans. On the larger subject, see Timothy L. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review LXXXIII (December, 1978), pp. 1155–85.

  31. Ernest R. Sandeen, “Fundamentalism and American Identity,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 387 (January, 1970), pp. 56–65, develops the idea of “parallelism” in post-1920s fundamentalism.

  32. See Dollar, History, for best examples.

  XXII. Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon

  1. Stewart G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (New York, 1931), p. xi.

  2. H. Richard Niebuhr, “Fundamentalism,” Encylopedia of Social Sciences, vol. VI (New York, 1937), pp. 526–27. Niebuhr originally formulated this interpretation in The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1929). Later in life he repudiated such exclusively sociological explanations. Examples of the rural-urban theme in two standard histories are, William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914–1932 (Chicago, 1958), p. 223, and George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation: 1920–1960 (New York, 1965), p. 28.

  3. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962), p. 121.

  4. McLoughlin does note, however, that they did embody aspects of pietist and political conservative traditions that are permanent aspects of the American way of life. “Is there a Third Force in Christendom?” Daedalus XCVI (Winter, 1967), p. 45 and pp. 43–68, passim.

  5. William E. Hordern, A Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology, rev. ed. (New York, 1968 [1955]), p. 69.

  6. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, Lefferts A. Loetscher, American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, Vol. II, 1820–1960 (New York, 1963), pp. 316–17.

  7. Willard Gatewood’s works, Preachers, Pedagogues and Politicians (Chapel Hill, 1966) and Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution, Gatewood, ed. (Nashville, 1969), are important contributions to this trend. See also the discussion of Paul A. Carter’s works in Chapter XXIII below. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), exemplifies this balance in a most significant text.

  8. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago, 1970), p. 9; quotation from “Fundamentalism and the American Identity,” The Annals 387 (January, 1970), pp. 63–64.

  9. “Toward a Historical Interpretation of the Origins of Fundamentalism,” Church History XXXVI (March, 1967), p. 67.

  10. “American Identity,” Annals 387, p. 59; cf. Roots, p. xix.

  11. Roots, pp. 247–69.

  12. Cf. George M. Marsden, “Defining Fundamentalism,” Christian Scholar’s Review I (Winter, 1971), pp. 141–51, and Sandeen’s reply, Christian Scholar’s Review I (Spring, 1971), pp. 227–32. LeRoy Moore, Jr., “Another Look at Fundamentalism: A Response to Ernest R. Sandeen,” Church History XXXVII (June, 1968), pp. 195–202, offers a critique similar to my own.

  13. Moore, “Another Look,” Church History XXXVII, p. 195.

  14. An excellent study of differences in patterns of Americanization within a single ethnic group, even among those with similar immigrant experiences, is found in Herbert J. Brinks, “Ethnicity and Denominationalism: The Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of America,” paper delivered at the Trinity College conference on “The Shaping of American Christianity,” April 18, 1979.

  The degree to which aspects of fundamentalism had ethnic social bases is indicated by the fact that the staunchest support for Princeton theology in the early twentieth century still came from persons of Scotch-Irish heritage. When Machen, in turn, split from Princeton, he found like-minded allies from the Christian Reformed Church, an American alliance of separatist Dutch groups.

  15. Albert H. Newman, “Recent Changes in Theology of Baptists,” The American Journal of Theology X (1906), pp. 600–609, made essentially this point at the time.

  16. Sandeen, Roots, esp. pp. ix–xix. Robert E. Wenger, “Social Thought in American Fundamentalism, 1918–1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1973, pp. 51–75. It is possible, of course, to argue that living in a city does not necessarily make one “urban” since city dwellers may hold on to rural attitudes of their earlier days.

  17. Walter Edmund Warren Ellis, “Social and Religious Factors in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Schisms among Baptists in North America 1895–1934,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1974. Ellis finds similar and significant patterns of difference in four detailed studies of local schisms: that involving William B. Riley’s church in Minneapolis, around 1900; the schism at T. T. Shield’s church in Toronto in the 1920s; a “non-urban” schism in the First Baptist Church of Indiana, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s; and a similar split in the First Baptist Church in “non-urban” Orilla, Ontario. Ellis presents scattered evidence that these patterns were more general, which there is every reason to expect they would be.

  18. William R. Hutchison, “Cultural Strain and American Protestantism,” American Historical Review LXXVI (April, 1971), pp. 386–411, which compares liberal and conservative religious leaders. Ellis, “Social and Religious,” pp. 52–95, suggests similar conclusions in comparing specifically fundamentalists (as opposed to Hutchison’s broader category of religious conservatives) to liberals. Ellis points out that fundamentalists seldom had any socially est
ablished lineage. Also the support of many fundamentalists for Bible institutes suggests their willingness to have a less educated ministry. At the same time, however, they seemed to have valued higher education.

  19. These observations are based especially on Ellis, “Social and Religious,” who says that “Fundamentalism fostered a revival among young persons of lower-middle-class backgrounds who were subject to socio-economic strains,” p. iv. Confirmation of the somewhat unsettled lower-middle-class, non-professional, status of disporportionately many (although far from all) fundamentalists is provided in Sam Wanner, “Requested Re-evaluation: Wealthy Street Baptist Church Retrospectively Re-examined,” senior seminar thesis, Calvin College, 1974. Wanner shows that this Grand Rapids church, which in 1909 led an early schism of dispensationalist churches in Michigan from the Northern Baptist Convention, in the late nineteenth century drew from a rapidly changing suburban neighborhood of a wide variety of social classes, but predominantly non-professional. The church always remained more modestly middle-class socially than its elite parent church, Fountain Street Baptist, which by 1909 had become the center of Baptist liberalism in the city.

  20. Ellis documents this very thoroughly, pp. 192–210. A similar pattern appears in the urban cases he examines in Minneapolis and Toronto. Also the Baptist case in Indiana, Pa., is strikingly similar to a Presbyterian schism in the 1930s in Middletown, Pa., where I was raised. In that case a new pastor, Robert S. Marsden, from Westminster Theological Seminary, came to town in 1930, built up the church, drawing especially from the young and the laboring classes, and in 1936 led a schism mostly of such recent members to form an Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Business and professional people from the older families of the town as a rule remained in the First Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As in the case of the Baptists in Indiana, these people seem not to have been especially liberal in theology so much as not interested in doctrinal debate or in making religion into a disruptive issue. The schism caused some social resentment and petty ostracism of the one established family to join it, that into which the leader of the exodus had married. My own interests in the relationship of fundamentalism to American culture undoubtedly arise from growing up in such a setting.

  21. This interpretation disagrees considerably with that of Ellis, who sees more significance in the social forces than I see warrant for. Ellis suggests that fundamentalists were “locals” and non-fundamentalists “cosmopolitans,” e.g., p. 56. This, however, is not so clearly the case. The fundamentalists, after all, demanded involvement in the larger national controversies. In a sense, in cases such as this, the non-fundamentalists appear to be the real conservatives and the fundamentalists the innovators. In fact the civil courts (though perhaps predisposed to favor the social establishment) ruled this way in settling the property case in favor of the non-fundamentalists, p. 200. A further point is that in a setting such as this the rural/urban interpretation is quite inappropriate, cf. note 16, above.

  22. Wenger, “Social Thought,” pp. 294–314, lists forty “Prominent Fundamentalists, 1918–1933.” Their names are: Biederwolf, Boddis, Burrell, Buswell, Chafer, Conrad, Craig, Dixon, Gaebelein, Goodchild, Gray, Haldeman, Horsch, Kennedy, Keyser, Kyle, Laws, Macartney, Machen, Magoun, Massee, Mathews, Munhall, Norris, Pettingill, Philpott, Price, Rader, Riley, Rimmer, Rood, Shields, Shuler, Sloan, Straton, Thomas, Torrey, Trumbull, Tucker, Wilson.

  23. Of Wenger’s forty, five were born in England or Germany, a figure similar to that found among modernists of the era, ibid., p. 58.

  24. Timothy L. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review LXXXIII (December, 1978), pp. 1155–85, gives a particularly illuminating account of the dynamic role of religion in defining new immigrant identity and subcultures.

  25. There are, of course, many exceptions to such broad generalizations. Two well-known essays in which points such as these are made are Oscar Handlin, “The Immigrant in American Politics,” in David F. Bowers, ed., Foreign Influences in American Life (Princeton, 1944), pp. 84–98, and Milton Gordon, “Assimilation in America: Theory and Reality,” Daedalus (Spring, 1961), pp. 263–85.

  26. Military imagery pervades fundamentalist literature in the 1920s. A good example is T. T. Shields, “The Necessity of Declaring War on Modernism,” (pamphlet), an address delivered in New York City in 1925. “For myself,” says Shields, “I have resigned from the diplomatic service and have joined the army in the field,” p. 11.

  27. E. T. Cassel, “The King’s Business” (copyright, 1902), Great Revival Hymns, Homer Rodeheaver and B. D. Ackley, eds. (New York, 1911). Themes of wanderers in unfriendly lands were already common in the gospel hymns of the Sankey era, so their significance probably should not be taken too literally. Cf. Sandra Sizer, Gospel Hymns and Social Religion (Philadelphia, 1978), pp. 29, 140. One evidence, however, of the role of such a hymn is that it appears in the 1934 edition of the Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist group whose theology had little emphasis on such themes, but who had experienced immigration from the Netherlands. Significantly, this song was absent from the 1959 edition. James D. Bratt, in an entertaining and perceptive Ph.D. dissertation, “Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: The History of a Conservative Subculture,” Yale, 1978, points out that military imagery was common in defining the Dutch-American’s relation to American culture, although their thought was never dominated by the categories of the fundamentalist-modernist debates, pp. 414–17. Joseph H. Hall, “The Controversy over Fundamentalism in the Christian Reformed Church 1915–1966,” Ph.D. dissertation, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, presents a more detailed account of the very ambivalent relationships of this group to American fundamentalism.

  XXIII. Fundamentalism as a Political Phenomenon

  1. Editorial “The Capitalists and the Premillenarians,” Christian Century XXXVIII (April 14, 1921), p. 3.

  2. (London, 1925), p. 161. Norman F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918–1931 (New Haven, 1954), p. 27, cites this and three other quotations to the same effect.

  3. Paul A. Carter, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in the American Protestant Churches 1920–1940 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954), pp. 47–49. McLoughlin, on the other hand, did not suggest that political issues were primary, even if prominent.

  4. Carter, “The Fundamentalist Defense of the Faith,” Change and Continuity in 20th-century America: the 1920’s, John Braeman et al, eds. (Columbus, Ohio, 1968), pp. 193, 212. In my opinion, this article is one of the best analyses of fundamentalism.

  5. Robert E. Wenger, “Social Thought in American Fundamentalism, 1918–1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1973, pp. 286, 290–91.

  6. Carter, “Fundamentalist Defense,” makes exactly this point. Wenger, on the basis of what seems to me to be fragments of evidence of fundamentalist work for progressive social legislation, suggests that some balance was maintained through the 1920s; e.g., “Social Thought,” p. 237. I can not find a significant amount of such evidence compared with the innumerable fundamentalist attacks on social reform as associated with the Social Gospel, which seems to have reduced vastly their enthusiasm for such projects. Wenger himself presents much evidence on fundamentalist anti-liberal political views.

  7. Examples of fundamentalist American patriotism are found in Wenger, “Social Thought,” e.g., pp. 118–20, 129, 158. My impression from these and other samplings is that strongly patriotic sentiments became more common after about 1926.

  8. Carter, “Fundamentalist Defense,” p. 196.

  9. Wenger, “Social Thought,” pp. 167–76, on Roman Catholicism, and pp. 241–49, on prohibition.

  10. Here J. Gresham Machen, who defended political individualism with the same relentless logic that he employed for conservative theology, is a striking exception. See C. Allyn Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 146–50.

  11. Editorial “Will Christian Taxpayers Stand for This?” Moody
Monthly XXIII (May, 1923), p. 409.

  12. Riley, “Socialism in Our Schools” (pamphlet), Minneapolis, n. d. [1923]). Cf. Riley in King’s Business XIV (October, 1923). The same number contains the first really alarmist editorial on communism in the King’s Business. Cf. also Riley’s statement, “The Product of Evolution Theory is Bestial Bolshevism,” in “The Theory of Evolution—Does it Tend to Anarchy?” (pamphlet) (n. p., n. d.). Cf. editorial Our Hope XXX (October, 1923), pp. 204–5, which had kept up a steady anti-communist barrage since World War I. Willard B. Gatewood, ed., Controversy in the Twenties (Nashville, 1969), p. 24, cites similar quotations.

  13. R. S. Beal, “The Eternal Searchlight Turned on Modern Socialism,” The Christian Fundamentals in School and Church VIII (January, 1926), pp. 44–45. William B. Riley was editor.

  14. Riley, “Protocols and Communism” (pamphlet), (n. p., n. d. [1934]), p. 17. Cf. “Painting America Red” (pamphlet) (Wichita, Kansas: Defender Tract Club, n. d. [1939]). Riley did attack Hitler in “Hitlerism or the Philosophy of Evolution in Action” (pamphlet) (n. p., n. d. [1941–1942?]). The Protocols were given wide circulation in the early 1920s by Henry Ford’s Deerborn Independent. Cf. the ambivalent response, blaming the Protocols on the Roman Catholics (!), Charles C. Cook, “The International Jew,” The King’s Business XII (Nov., 1921), pp. 1084–88.

  15. Wenger, “Social Thought,” pp. 176–92. David A. Rausch, Zionism within Early American Fundamentalism, 1878–1918: A Convergence of Two Traditions (New York, 1979), presents a very positive picture of early fundamentalist Zionism and tends to minimize suggestions of later anti-Semitism. However, fundamentalists between the wars could be both pro-Zionist and somewhat anti-Semitic, favoring the return of the Jews to Israel, which would lead eventually to their conversion; yet in the meantime especially distrusting apostate Jews. Rausch points out that Gaebelein in Our Hope deplored Jewish persecutions in Europe and was appalled by the Holocaust, “OUR HOPE: An American Fundamentalist Journal and the Holocaust, 1837–1945,” Fides et Historia CXII (Spring, 1980), pp. 89–103.