Fundamentalism and American Culture
Fundamentalism
and American Culture
Second Edition
GEORGE M. MARSDEN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marsden, George M., 1939–
Fundamentalism and American culture / George M. Marsden.—2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and indexes.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530051-2; ISBN-10: 0-19-530051-3 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530047-5; ISBN-10: 0-19-530047-5 (paper)
1. Fundamentalism—United States. 2. Christianity and culture—United States. I. Title.
BT82.2.M37 2006
277.3’082—dc22
2005053920
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my students with thanks for all they have taught me
Preface to the Second Edition
Several days after the reelection of George W. Bush in November 2004, my editor, Cynthia Read, contacted me about updating Fundamentalism and American Culture in the light of recent events. I am delighted to do so. It is especially pleasing that this volume has remained in use for a quarter century and that its usefulness might be enhanced in this way.
Since the original seems to have stood well on its own as a point of departure for understanding the emergence of American fundamentalism, I have left that text intact as it was published in 1980. Subsequent scholarship has shown that there are many additional things I might have said and has pointed to limits in my angle of vision; nonetheless, this version of the story has apparently proven illuminating both to scholars and to general readers. I have been particularly gratified by the scores of people who over the years have told me that this book helped them immensely in understanding the religious community in which they grew up. So rather than tinkering with something that has served well, I have updated this edition by adding a substantial supplemental section. In it I have reflected on the fascinating question of what the differences and similarities are between the fundamentalism in America since the mid-1970s and the fundamentalism of the 1920s.
In some ways it may have been an advantage that I was able to draft most of the first edition of this book before fundamentalism had reemerged as a conspicuous part of American politics at the end of the 1970s. What I wrote was not driven by the sorts of political and cultural concerns that have dominated our views since then. In other respects writing in advance of these past several decades of fundamentalism in American life was a disadvantage; the recent events might have alerted me to dimensions of the movement that I did not see or think were especially important. In any case, I now have the opportunity to reflect on the comparison of the fundamentalisms of the two eras and have found that a most fruitful exercise.
Part Five, the result of that reflection, has been a communal exercise. First, I have learned a great deal from the many fine works on early fundamentalism that have appeared in the past twenty-five years. Second, I have depended on the large secondary literature interpreting recent American fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Finally, as I have worked through several drafts of this update I have been tremendously helped by the comments of many readers. Most of these have been my graduate students or former students who are better informed than I on many details of recent developments. I am also grateful to the history department of the University of Illinois for an opportunity to discuss a draft of this paper with them. Many thanks also for all the comments from the discussions in my graduate class on evangelicalism and fundamentalism, at the Colloquium on Religion and History at Notre Dame, and at the conference on this topic held at Michilinda Lodge in June 2005.
Those whom I wish to thank for written comments, or for particularly memorable verbal ones, include Thomas Bergler, James Bratt, Joel Carpenter, Cliff Christians, Jonathan DenHartog, Darren Dochuk, Raully Donahue, Danielle DuBois, Kristin Kobes DuMez, Timothy Gloege, Michael Hamilton, Thomas Kidd, Michael J. Lee, Kathryn Long, Patrick Q. Mason, Sarah Miglio, Richard J. Mouw, Kurt Peterson, Glen Ryland, Brett H. Smith, William Svelmoe, David Swartz, John G. Turner, Grant Wacker, and John Wigger. I am also grateful for many other comments from those whom I have neglected to mention here.
I wish once again to express my gratitude to the Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin foundation and to the McAnaney family for their generous support of the Francis A. McAnaney Chair in History at the University of Notre Dame. I am also grateful to my colleagues and to the staff of the Notre Dame history department, especially to John McGreevy, the current chair, for their ongoing support.
I also wish once again to thank the staff of Oxford University Press—Ruth Mannes, Director of Editorial, Design, and Production—especially Cynthia Read, who has worked with this book since its publishing beginnings and has contributed much to it.
As always my great personal debt is to Lucie, whose continuing loving friendship and support is invaluable. Everything I said about her in the Preface to the original addition remains true.
Preface (1980)
The scholar and the fool, as a colleague pointed out to a college “honors” convocation, are in Renaissance Christian imagery often equated. Anyone who has spent many days secluded on a project like the present volume can sympathize with such an identification. Though Christian scholars often find it difficult to be fools for Christ, we have at least as much aptitude as other scholars for simply being fools. We must be reminded, then, that there are many virtues greater than that of forsaking the world in order to write about it.
Yet this book, for all the isolation it has involved, is not solely academic or detached in its purpose. It is addressed not only to the scholarly community, but also to an audience of thoughtful Christians and other observers who are interested in a dispassionate analysis of the development of a significant Christian tradition in an American cultural setting. While I have attempted to assume a stance of detachment and to avoid using history as a tool for partisan debate, this study represents a definite point of view and set of interests. Since these give it direction, they are best revealed at the outset. This is an essay in distinctly Christian scholarship, an attempt to present a careful, honest, and critical evaluation of a tradition not far from my own. My sympathies may be described most succinctly by saying that I greatly admire two American scholar-theologians, Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr. In the theology of Edwards—especially his sense of the overwhelming love and beauty of God revealed in Christ, in Scripture, and constantl
y communicated through all creation—I see a starting point for the attempt to comprehend reality and to see our place in it. In the ethics of Niebuhr I find a way of understanding the pretensions, limits, and folly of even the most admirable human behavior. Particularly, his analysis reveals the inevitable ambiguities in Christians’ relationships to their culture.
These perspectives, especially those associated with Niebuhr, can be found implicitly throughout this study. “Culture” and the relationship of Christians to it are prominent concerns. By “culture” I usually have in mind the collection of beliefs, values, assumptions, commitments, and ideals expressed in a society through popular literary and artistic forms and embodied in its political, educational, and other institutions. In most cultures the prevailing formal religion has been an integral part of and support for the dominant beliefs, values, and institutions. Although this has been largely true in Western civilization during the long era of “Christendom,” the relationship of Christianity to Western culture has always been complex. Some Christian groups have equated culture with the “world” which must be shunned; others have virtually identified Christianity with the values and progress of culture. As H. Richard Niebuhr has pointed out in Christ and Culture (1951), there is a spectrum of middle positions which can claim ancient lineage. This perennial tension has been accentuated by the dramatic secularization of Western culture in recent centuries.
My interest in these issues led to the questions and themes that shape this study. The central question involves the degree to which the fundamentalist versions of evangelical Protestantism (as defined in the Introduction) were shaped by the American cultural experience. The question of fundamentalists' own attitudes toward American culture is closely related. My conclusion, which finds expression in a variety of specific ways, is that fundamentalists experienced profound ambivalence toward the surrounding culture. Perhaps the same might be said about almost any group. Yet the fundamentalist experience strikes me as unusual in at least one respect. These American Christians underwent a remarkable transformation in their relationship to the culture. Respectable “evangelicals” in the 1870s, by the 1920s they had become a laughingstock, ideological strangers in their own land. Their traditions, the ways they maintained them, and the ways they modified them are all understood better in the context of this collective uprooting.
This narrative is designed to serve as a general history of the rise of fundamentalism, but it has been shaped more by interest in analyzing the issues just mentioned than by desire to cover everything that happened in textbook fashion. Throughout I have attempted to choose a strikingly representative person, group, or event to illustrate a general phenomenon. This method is, I think, not widely advocated in academic disciplines other than history and the arts. In recent years two perceptive colleagues, one in philosophy and one in the social sciences, have spoken to me of their dismay concerning the historian’s procedure. They have argued that one cannot prove anything about general phenomena by picking out a few examples. They are right, of course. No matter how long or impressive or varied the footnotes, to a degree it must require an act of faith on the part of the reader to believe that the instances selected capture the true spirit of the endless information which bears on any subject and which the historian has presumably surveyed. Like many fascinating things, however, most of history is too complex to be susceptible either to genuinely comprehensive treatment or to definitive scientific analysis. In the final analysis it can be understood and illuminated only by sympathetic insight.
Christian scholarship is essentially a communal enterprise. I have written this book with a strong sense that it grows out of the brotherhood and sisterhood that make up the body of Christ. I am especially grateful to other scholars in that body at Calvin College. They have set high standards, shaped much of the tone, and suggested a good deal of whatever insight is found herein. My friends in the history department have been especially helpful in listening to and criticizing parts of the manuscript. This supporting community has extended to my neighborhood, which fortunately is not made up entirely of scholars and which includes academics who are not unrelievedly scholarly. Here I would thank Sandy and Dale Van Kley, Phyllis and Richard Mouw, and Karen and Peter De Vos (who also lent me study space in their home for several years).
Thanks are due also to my friends and colleagues at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and to its administration for their cooperation during the year of my stay there. They helped the progress of this work in many ways.
The administration and board of trustees of Calvin College have been generous in supporting this project, providing a sabbatical leave as well as time released from teaching. The librarians at Calvin, especially Conrad Bult, Peter De Klerk, Jo Duyst, and Stephen Lambers, have always been extremely helpful.
No formal acknowledgment can adequately convey my personal gratitude to another group of scholars who deserve considerable credit for this book. Joel Carpenter, Mark Noll, Harry Stout, and Grant Wacker all took a great deal of time from their own pressing schedules to read versions of the manuscript and to comment in detail. Donald Dayton and Richard Mouw each gave advice during the course of the enterprise, read the manuscript, and furnished important insights. Martin Marty also helped at crucial points. Cy Hulse and Barbara Thompson, each my research assistant for a year, provided sophisticated aid and insight. I am indebted also to C. Allyn Russell, whose fine work on this subject has preceded mine, and whose friendship, advice, and encouragement I have valued. He is the tennis champion among historians of fundamentalism.
I also wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for generous support during 1971–1972 when I began this project. I am indebted to the librarians of a number of institutions for their cooperation. I thank Jill Los and Nelle Tjapkes for typing the manuscript and Paul Stoub for helping with the illustrations.
I am grateful to many students of American culture and Christianity whose work and insights I have borrowed. My acknowledgments and comments appear in the notes, which are indexed to serve as a critical bibliography.
Most important is the support I have received from my family, Lucie, Gregory, and Brynn, three witty and enjoyable people who hardly ever complained about the time invested in this enterprise. Of Lucie it might be said, as Meredith wrote in Diana of the Crossways, “A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.” She has provided me with love, understanding. advice, and humor. I wish to thank her especially for her effort in beginning to read my earlier book, which was dedicated to her. This has inspired me to attempt a work in English prose interesting enough even for philosophers. But now I am back to foolish pretensions.
G. M.
Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan
March 21, 1980
Acknowledgments
Parts of Chapter XXV are a revision of parts of “Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon, A Comparison with English Evangelicalism,” Church History XLVI (June, 1977), pp. 215–32, © 1977, The American Society of Church History, reprinted with permission.
A portion of Chapter XXII closely follows a section of my “From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism: An Historical Analysis,” The Evangelicals, David Wells and John Woodbridge (eds.) (Nashville, Tennessee, 1975).
The illustrations by Clarence Larkin on pp. 52, 58–59, and 64–65 are reproduced with the permission of the Clarence Larkin Estate.
The illustrations from The King’s Business on pp. 154, 155, 157, 163, 209, and 213 are reproduced with the permission of Biola College, Inc.
The illustration on p. 218 is used by permission from the May issue of Moody Monthly. Copyright 1922, Moody Bible Institute of Chicago.
Gospel Hymns Nos. 1 to 6, Ira Sankey et al., eds. (New York, 1894), from which the hymn on p. 76 is reproduced, is republished by Da Capo Press, Inc., New York.
The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan, by himself and his wife Mary Baird Bryan (Philadelphia, 1925), from which the picture on p. 186 is taken,
is republished by Haskell House Publisher, Ltd., New York.
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
Before Fundamentalism
I. Evangelical America at the Brink of Crisis
II. The Paths Diverge
III. D. L. Moody and a New American Evangelism
PART TWO
The Shaping of a Coalition
This Age and the Millennium
IV. Prologue: The Paradox of Revivalist Fundamentalism
V. Two Revisions of Millennialism
VI. Dispensationalism and the Baconian Ideal
VII. History, Society, and the Church
Holiness
VIII. The Victorious Life
IX. The Social Dimensions of Holiness
X. “The Great Reversal,”
XI. Holiness and Fundamentalism
The Defense of the Faith
XII. Tremors of Controversy
XIII. Presbyterians and the Truth
XIV. The Fundamentals
Christianity and Culture
XV. Four Views Circa 1910
1. This Age Condemned: The Premillennial Extreme
2. The Central Tension
3. William Jennings Bryan: Christian Civilization Preserved
4. Transforming Culture by the Word
PART THREE
The Crucial Years: 1917-1925
XVI. World War I, Premillennialism, and American Fundamentalism: 1917–1918
XVII. Fundamentalism and the Cultural Crisis: 1919-1920
XVIII. The Fundamentalist Offensive on Two Fronts: 1920-1921
XIX. Would the Liberals Be Driven from the Denominations? 1922-1923, 171
XX. The Offensive Stalled and Breaking Apart: 1924-1925
XXI. Epilogue: Dislocation, Relocation, and Resurgence: 1925-1940
PART FOUR
Interpretations
XXII. Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon
Fundamentalism and American Culture Page 1