Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  Equally sophisticated is the analysis of Christian Smith in American Evangelicals and Christian America. Based on survey data and interviews from the mid-1990s, he concludes that 11.2% of the American population self-identify as “evangelical” and another 12.8% self-identify as “fundamentalist,” counting only churchgoing Protestants. Including these, a total of 29% of the American population can be classified as “conservative Protestant,” Christian America, pp. 16–17. One problem with self-identification is that “fundamentalist” is the more familiar term and by this method self-identified fundamentalists are slightly less conservative than self-identified evangelicals (suggesting the “fundamentalist” population is more likely to include misidentifications). Smith also points out that the populations of these groups is not as monolithic on political issues as their most vocal spokespersons might suggest, see Part 5, note 5, above.

  Many African-American Christians qualify as evangelical in terms of their belief, but the term is seldom applied to them due to the segregationist heritage which kept most African-Americans from identifying with the “evangelical” movement. While some African-Americans are militant regarding conservative doctrinal or cultural issues, “fundamentalist” has seldom been a self-designation and relatively few have identified with the conservative Republican politics that dominate recent fundamentalism. See Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York, 2000).

  12. David Edwin Harrell, All Things Are Possible: the Healing and Charismatic Revivals in America (Bloomington, IN, 1975) and Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington, IN, 1985).

  13. Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana, IL, 1993). On world patterns see, for instance, David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (London, 2002) and Philip Jenkins, The New Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, 2002).

  14. Since drafting this I have seen Paul Harvey’s Freedom’s Coming: Religion Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, 2005), which provides the best account of this transition. The fact that Harvey has a sentence almost identical to the above provides reassuring confirmation. Harvey writes (p. 248): “It was no accident that religious conservative came to national prominence following the demise of race as the central issue of southern life. Underlying their political movements were philosophical positions that updated venerable defense of social order as necessary for a properly ordered society.” Elsewhere (p. 219) he succinctly puts it that “the terrain of battle in the southern culture wars had shifted, in effect, from race to gender.” These insights seem to me very helpful but at the same time to hide some parts of the picture that are more immediately parts of the specifically religious heritage and not reducible to hierarchy or gender. The popularity of creation science is the clearest example. Furthermore, the prominence of concerns over abortion, end-of-life issues, gay rights, pornography, and sexual permissiveness, although including elements concerning hierarchy and gender, also reflect some other longstanding Christian concerns.

  Some will argue that racism remained the primary sub-text for the Religious Right even after the era of civil rights battles. Doubtless racism did remain a significant issue, but it is far too simplistic to reduce to that factor the major motivation for a movement with so many dimensions. Many conservative evangelical movements, moreover, made a point of integrating their ministries, even when they had very small African-American constituencies to draw from. My point is that southerners could not be heard on other issues until the civil rights issues were settled in formal ways.

  15. Cf. Chapter XII, note 2, above, on the northern predominance of explicit fundamentalist organization.

  16. William Glass, Strangers in Zion: Fundamentalists in the South, 1900–1950 (Macon, GA, 2001). Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington, KY, 1996); Mark Taylot Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens GA, 1996); Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC, 1997).

  17. Grant Wacker, “Uneasy in Zion: Evangelicals in Postmodern Society,” in Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, 1984), pp. 17–28.

  18. Edward J. Larson, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York, 1997). In effect the Scopes Trial was part of the triumph of anti-evolution in the South, since some anti-evolution laws remained in place and during the next decades biological evolution was seldom taught in public schools, even in the North.

  19. Quoted in Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton, 2000), p. 22. During the 1980 election Bob Jones, Jr. and Bob Jones III criticized Falwell for politicizing the Gospel via the Moral Majority. Jeffrey Haddon and Charles E. Swann, Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism (Reading, MA, 1981), p. 155. In 2000 Bob Jones III invited George W. Bush to campaign on the campus of Bob Jones University.

  20. Darren Dochuk, “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Southernization of Southern California, 1935–1969,” PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2005, p. 11, citing James N. Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed,” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995), p. 112. My interpretation in this section is heavily indebted to Dochuk’s impressive work.

  21. See Dochuk, “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt,” pp. 18–33. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 102–117, provides an overview. On California see also Linda McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001).

  22. Such experiences are, of course, not confined to peoples who have emigrated to America relatively recently. Many early fundamentalists appear to have been people of many sorts who were attempting to preserve religious and social ideals reminiscent of small-town America in the face of modernizing urban culture. Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 9–11, provides a nice overview of what we know of the social locations of early fundamentalists.

  23. Many smaller southern denominations and northern ethno-religious groups divided into comparable wings, although the controversies in the three mentioned provide particularly close parallels.

  24. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York, 1995), pp. 92–106, provides a helpful overview of these developments. As Dochuk, “From Sun Belt to Bible Belt” and McGirr, Suburban Warriors, show however, in Southern California the line between religion and direct political mobilization was blurring.

  25. Anne C. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U. S. Military (Baton Rouge, 1996).

  26. See, for instance, Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1997).

  27. Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday (New York, 1931) was the classic work that put fundamentalism in that context, although H. L. Mencken et al. had already firmly established that image.

  28. Betty DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis, 1990) is especially to be commended for pointing out the continuities between first-wave and second-wave fundamentalists on the above issues and others. She goes so far as to claim, however, that “It was not so much traditional theology they were defending as it was traditional gender ideology.” (p. 141) That surely overstates the case, but still the point is well taken. Theology cannot be entirely separated from its cultural embeddedness, including factors of gender, race, class, and nationality. Margaret Lambert Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, 1993), also provides an excellent account of fundamentalist views of women and gender within fundamentalism, See also Janette Hassey, No Time for Silence: Evangelical Women in
Public Ministry around the Turn of the Century (Grand Rapids, 1986). Michael Hamilton, “Women, Public Ministry, and American Fundamentalism, 1920–1950,” Religion and American Culture 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 172–196, points out that fundamentalist women were more influential in practice than in theory and did not differ from mainline Protestant women as is often supposed. James Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (New York, 2004) confirms that pattern in his study of fundamentalist women in a small church in the 1980s.

  29. DeBerg, Ungodly Women, p. 51.

  30. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, pp. 98–99.

  31. John G. Turner, “Selling Jesus to Modern America: Campus Crusade for Christ, Evangelical Culture, and Conservative Politics,” PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2005, pp. 286–331. In the 1980s and 1990s Bright became less fundamentalistic in his theology. For instance, he allowed pentecostals and charismatics on the staff of Campus Crusade and was generally more open to other evangelical perspectives. Ibid., pp. 449–454.

  32. Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron DeHart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (New York, 1990), pp. 222–225. William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, (New York, 1996), pp. 162–167.

  33. Martin, With God on Our Side, pp. 148–178. Disillusion with Carter’s White House Conferences on the Family was a major source of disaffection.

  34. Martin, With God on Our Side, pp. 168–220. esp. pp. 172–73, and 212.

  35. Quentin Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion (Grand Rapids, 1991), provides a helpful overview.

  36. Scott Flipse, “Below-the-Belt Politics: Protestant Evangelicals, Abortion, and the Foundation of the New Religious Right,” pp. 127–141. In David Farber and Jeff Roche, eds., The Conservative Sixties (New York, 2003). For earlier views see DeBerg, Ungodly Women, p. 115.

  37. Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville, KY, 1994) provides an insightful analysis of these developments which are here summarized very broadly.

  38. Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2002). Nancy Taton Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern, Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990). The split in the Southern Baptist Convention, however, should underscore the point that fundamentalistic attitudes of recent decades have not involved only cultural-political fundamentalism. Rather concerns over the inerrancy of Scripture and about trends away from traditional evangelical doctrines and emphases have been genuine concerns for many militant conservative. Often, though these were connected with cultural issues, for instance, many conservatives opposed women’s ordination as inconsistent with taking the inerrancy of Scripture seriously.

  The split from the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern Presbyterian) in 1973 to form the Presbyterian Church in America more closely followed the pattern and example of J. Gresham Machen in separating from the larger denomination over concerns about toleration of liberalism and a pending merger with the northern Presbyterian Church in the USA.

  39. This follows the interpretation of Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, 1988).

  40. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Shall We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, NJ, 1976).

  41. On the raising of Schaeffer’s consciousness regarding abortion see Martin, With God on Our Side, pp. 193–94.

  42. Francis A. Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Old Tappan, NJ, 1979). On the raising of Schaeffer’s consciousness regarding abortion see Martin, With God on Our Side, pp. 193–94. Tim LaHaye remarked to the author in an informal conversation that Schaeffer was crucial to alerting him to the abortion issue. Cf. LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ, 1980), p. 69.

  43. LaHaye, Battle for the Mind, pp. 181–82.

  44. For a fuller analysis of this see Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, 1991), pp. 153–181.

  45. I have been aided by the 2004 graduate paper of Danielle DuBois on “Home Schooling,” which documents these points especially in the writings of Michael Farris, as in his Future of Homeschooling (Washington, D.C., 1997).

  46. This standard teaching, which tends to gloss over the anomaly that “Christian” America included racially based slavery, has been among the reasons that the Religious Right has had relatively little appeal to African-Americans who are evangelical in other ways. Turner, “Selling Jesus to Modern America,” pp. 425–427, shows that this issue strained relationships between Campus Crusade and some African-Americans. In 2005 the National Summit: Race to Unity organized a video critical of the Christian America theme for a convention of African-American pastors.

  47. For instance, Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Grand Rapids, 1977), which argues for a providential role for America, was a best-selling account and widely used in Christian schools. For a far less popular critique of such views, including Francis Schaeffer’s somewhat more subtle version, see Mark A. Noll, Nathan O Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs, 1989 [1983]).

  48. Martin, With God on Our Side, 226–237.

  49. Jerry Falwell, Listen America (New York, 1980), pp. 251–252; 258.

  50. Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (New York, 1996), pp. 15–16.

  51. Hal Lindsey (with C. C. Carlson), The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, 1970), 183–185. In his Introduction (n. p.) he listed politics as among the false solutions offered to human problems, even though, he added in passing, “electing honest, intelligent men to positions of leadership” was “terribly important.” Number in print is from Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophetic Belief in American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 5. Interview quotations, “The Great Cosmic Countdown: Hal Lindsey on the Future,” Eternity (January 1977), p. 21, quoted in Boyer, Time Shall be No More, p. 299. By way of contrast, in Lindsey’s best-selling The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (New York, 1981), he was very strongly nationalistic and anti-Soviet and argued that the “Bible supports building a powerful military force,” p. 157, as quoted in Boyer, Time Shall be No More, p. 145.

  52. Francis Schaeffer shared some assumptions with Rushdoony but did not envision a future Christian civilization and was careful to reject suggestions of theocracy. In 1981 Schaeffer, not long before his death, published The Christian Manifesto, a work that Michael Lienesch in his careful study of the literature of the religious right, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), p. 177, describes as “the single most significant statement of Christian conservative political thinking.” In his Manifesto Schaeffer provided not only a resounding call to arms, but also a rationale for why politics was OK and Christians should resist the tyranny of government-sponsored secularism. At L’Abri Fellowship in the 1960s, visitors were encouraged to listen to Schaeffer’s taped expositions of Rushdoony’s views, especially on the antithesis between secular and biblical worldviews. Both men were influenced by Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary, although Van Til’s views of the antithesis between Christianity and all sorts of secularism were theological and not political. On the connection of Schaeffer and Rushdoony see also Diamond, Roads to Dominion, pp. 246–49.

  53. Lienesch, Redeeming America, provides extensive coverage of these themes in Robertson’s writings. See also David Edwin Harrell, Jr., Pat Robertson: A Personal, Religious, and Political Portrait (1987). Boyer, When Time Shall be no More, p. 241, concludes that “few prophetic popularizers embraced Robertson’s politicized postmillennialism.”

  54. Newsweek Cover Story “The New Prophets of Revelation,” May 16, 2004, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3668484/site/newsweek.

  55. Timothy P. Weber, Living
in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1925 (New York, 1979).

  56. This is a somewhat different from the valid observation of Grant Wacker in Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2001) that early pentecostals (and by implication almost all evangelicals) are pragmatists as well as principled biblicists, so that virtually any belief may be temporarily ignored in the light of sufficiently pressing practical considerations. It is also not the same as saying that fundamentalists do not consistently apply their avowed principles such as following the Bible in all of life or in doing what Jesus would do. My point is that, in addition, some beliefs in a belief system are less central than others and are hence more likely to be ignored in certain circumstances. For instance, specific prophetic claims, which are used to bolster the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, can be abandoned, while the doctrine of inerrancy (however flexible in how it may be interpreted) remains.

  57. Other exceptions are more rare. James Watt, President Reagan’s secretary of the interior, was widely reputed to be unfriendly to the environment in part because of his belief that Jesus would return soon. In his testimony before the House Interior Committee in February 1981 he said, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is, we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.” As quoted Planet Jackson Hole, http://www.planetjh.com/, in a March 2,2005 posting. Journalist Bill Moyers’s widely cited and criticized 2004 misquotation: “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” for which he eventually apologized, reflected common perceptions of critics as to Watt’s meaning.

  In another exception, Jerry Falwell, who urged an aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy in the 1980s, argued that we did not need to fear an imminent nuclear holocaust that would destroy the world, since the prophesied end-time events had not yet happened. Falwell, “Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Christ” (1983), cited in Boyer, When Time Shall be No More, p. 137. Boyer, idem., contrasts this view, however, to Falwell’s statement as late as 1980 which follows the more common premillennial prediction (as in Hal Lindsey’s work) of an imminent nuclear war with the USSR.