Some of the newer emphases among conversionist evangelicals, including self-styled fundamentalists, have reflected recent American preoccupations with the psychological and the relational. The most truly fundamentalist of these have been authoritarian. Bill Gothard’s widely followed Basic Youth Conflict and Basic Life Principle seminars, for instance, teach biblically based male headship and a chain of command for church and family. While such hierarchical teachings had most impact in providing discipline for private and family life, they also had potential to be transformed into overt politics. James Dobson, a PhD in child psychology who first became widely known for his 1970 book. Dare to Discipline, provides the classic example. Originating in a holiness tradition, Dobson and his many-faceted Focus on the Family, founded in 1977, soon became one of the most influential forces in the fundamentalistic culture wars, promoting increasingly partisan political views. Other psychologically oriented conservative evangelical movements were both less fundamentalistic and less openly political. One of the largest movements of the 1990s was Promise Keepers, founded by University of Colorado head football coach Bill McCartney. Though criticized as anti-feminist, the major goals of this all male interracial movement were to promote greater spirituality and commitment among men and to help men to act more responsibly and lovingly as husbands and fathers. After a series of massive rallies that attracted national attention for a few years, it settled into a lower-key ongoing ministry.
When looking at relational teachings of recent evangelicalism, including major pentecostal and charismatic strands, one not only again finds countless varieties, but many of them appear to be a characteristically modern American to the degree that their appeal involves the promise of a contemporary form of self-fulfillment. Most religious movements, of course, offer spiritual self-fulfillment, whether by finding true meaning, losing oneself in God, or dedicating oneself to a community. These are still primary motifs in recent evangelicalism. At the same time, however, it is at least arguable that the movement also includes significant elements that are not so much protests against consumer culture as manifestations of it. Although the conservative political rhetoric and the strictly authoritarian branches of the movement echo the ideals of the Protestant work ethic of self-denial more characteristic of the producer economy of industrialism of the nineteenth century, they compete with other promises of the material good life, so ubiquitous in a consumer economy. Granted, there are aspects of the consumerist creed of self-fulfillment and self-indulgence that virtually all evangelical groups decisively reject, especially entertainments and ideologies that make nearly unrestrained sexual freedom and accompanying permissive lifestyles as an essential part of the good life and self-realization.66 Nonetheless, there are not many other material aspects of the American dream that most adherents are expected to give up. Rather, it is usually assumed, and sometimes advertised, that the comforts of the suburbs, ability to vacation in exotic places, and economic security may well be added benefits of “seeking first the kingdom of God.” It is true that evangelicals give considerable amounts to charities and that their spiritual commitments and stewardship often limit participation in the more extreme excesses of American material indulgence. Nonetheless, one also finds, as most notoriously in the giant televangelist ministries of Jim and Tammy Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts of the 1980s, perplexing mixes of the spiritual and the materialistic. Even aside from the influences of large-scale religious marketing, in most cases the difference between the behavior of many ordinary evangelicals and that of most other Americans is not at all dramatic.67 Furthermore, in this “therapeutic age,” Christian bookstores are filled with a vast literature on the superiority of spiritual means for everything from a better sex life, to overcoming depression, to achieving weight loss.68 Fundamentalistic evangelicals’ emphasis on conservative politics as a means of working for a secure and prosperous America are of a piece with this emphasis on this-worldly comforts, even while they also preach the otherworldly message that eternity depends on one’s relation to Christ and that the true Christian must give up the pleasures of the world.69
Comparing this world of the Christian good life to that of fundamentalists and pentecostals of the 1920s suggests a shift away from a culture in which there was more emphasis on self-resignation and self-sacrifice to a culture in which this-worldly self-fulfillment is a more prominent theme. Although one can find anticipations of the culture of Christianity as an attractive lifestyle in the revivalist religion of the 1920s, and some fundamentalists were well-to-do promoters of modern commerce, it was far more common than it is today that fundamentalists and their pentecostal and holiness cousins were to be set apart, often by the way they were dressed. Women particularly were expected to signal their spiritual commitments by not using makeup and by dressing plainly and modestly in contrast to the fashionable consumerist styles of the day.70 True discipleship was supposed to involve self-sacrifice, as in giving up worldly amusements, strictly observing the Sabbath, and performing sacrificial service. Sermons more often emphasized the joys of the next world as an explicit alternative to success as the world counted such things. In the 1920s if one was looking for a message that Christianity was the key to this worldly accomplishment and self-fulfillment and to being a responsible citizen, it was more likely to be heard from liberal preachers in mainline Protestant churches, the very clergy whom fundamentalists so strongly opposed.71
Much of the difference between the conservative evangelicals of the two eras is related to social class and location. While evangelicalism has always drawn from the whole spectrum of social classes, in recent decades it has flourished especially in the suburbs, as many mega-churches there attest. In this suburbanized setting, the affluence and aspirations to affluence have been unprecedented. Many of the standards of luxury in consumer culture prove nearly irresistible, so it is not surprising that, while the old Gospel of salvation in Christ and a life of discipline and service still speaks to people who are needy in many respects, it sometimes is most popular when it seems also to promise also an economically and psychologically fulfilling lifestyle.
THE LARGER PICTURE
This whole picture of evangelicalism and fundamentalism of recent decades as displaying stronger affinities to the American mainstream than it did in the 1920s suggests some larger patterns. The fundamentalism of the 1920s was one outgrowth of the evangelicalism that in the mid-nineteenth century had been among the major formative forces in American life. In a sense, then, the movement is returning to some of its deepest roots in a tradition that always had a custodial as well as a sectarian dimension. As in the early nineteenth century, when it opposed Enlightenment secularism, it thrives on opposition to modernizing trends. In the early twentieth century the progressive liberalism and modernism seemed inexorably moving to take over the dominant culture. Fundamentalism had an aspect of the desperation of those making a last stand for a dying civilization. By the end of the twentieth century, however, contrary to almost all predictions, fundamentalists had regained at least a self-image of being closer to the sort of relationship to the mainstream that they had held in the nineteenth century. That is not to say that they that they were living comfortably with the mainstream. Rather, as Christian Smith has pointed out in American Evangelicals: Embattled and Thriving and as was also true in the nineteenth century, evangelicalism is especially vigorous when it is closely connected with the cultural mainstream yet maintains a sense of being culturally embattled against it. It is a symbiotic relationship that invigorates just because one is so unhappy about it.
The politicization of fundamentalistic evangelicalism in recent decades and its unexpected resilience as a political force points to another larger story in American culture, the weakening of the progressive modern scientific liberal consensus that seemed to be building in the first half of the twentieth centuary. That was an era of national and cultural consolidation that had been going on since at least the Civil War. By the 1920s that national consolidation (wh
ich was resisted in much of the South and in many ethno-religious communities) had entered a predominantly secular stage. During that era most mainstream liberal observers believed that, if the totalitarian extremes could be avoided, it was virtually inevitable that modern scientifically based ideals would bring most people, formerly divided by pre-scientific faiths, together on the basis of universally valid principles. On that basis, many wise commentators predicted that fundamentalism would fade as the nation became more urbanized and universal education advanced. Such predictions proved wrong on two counts. First they underestimated fundamentalist and evangelical staying power even during the hey-day of progressive liberalism. Second, the even bigger story is that they overestimated the ability of science and progressive democratic ideas to provide a coherent and compelling alternative.
To make a long story short, at the end of this era of faith in science and progressive consensus, the countercultural upheaval of the 1960s intervened. Rather than arriving at cultural accord, the culture fragmented. Multiculturalism meant that the old white male establishment could no longer presume to speak for all right-thinking people. Post-modern intellectual motifs that flourished after the 1960s underscored cultural relativism with a vengeance. Science itself lost much of its cultural authority, even among intellectuals, as the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions attested. More important for our purpose, the divisions of the cultural establishment over Vietnam and the stridency of the counterculture, including radical feminists, gays, and champions of the new sexual freedom, undercut the moral authority of progressive scientific liberalism for many working class and middle class Americans.
If we can generalize very broadly, the old progressive liberal side of the culture was saddled with the problems inherent in the pragmatism on which it had largely relied since the New Deal. Pragmatism is a wonderful cultural broker when it can draw on shared moral capital, but it does not provide much means for generating moral ideals of its own or for adjudicating among contending moral claims. When numerous goals and interest groups each presents the principles of its cause as self-evident, as they have done in the post-1960s era, how does the pragmatist choose among them? When the popular media of a consumer economy unrelentingly promote a culture of free choice and self-indulgence as the keys to the good life, how does pragmatism find a moral basis for alternatives? Even if there may be an argument that pragmatic liberalism is preferable to any of the truly ideological alternatives, its inability to generate a widely compelling larger moral vision left a sense of moral disarray that the Religious Right rushed in to try to correct. Not coincidentally, the fact that the secular left wing of the pragmatic liberal establishment had been particularly aggressive in attempting to eliminate distinctive religious voices from public life helped spark the counterattack.72
William Allen White once observed of William Jennings Bryan that he was always right in political prognosis and always wrong in prescription.73 The same might be applied to much of fundamentalistic politics of the past thirty years. Even those who most dislike the Religious Right and its simple either-or choices might recognize that it has been responding to a real crisis in a culture that has lost its moral compass—or, more precisely, finds itself with too many competing moral compasses. Perhaps most tellingly, the fundamentalistic attacks and their anger itself have pointed to a structural flaw in the attempt to shape society by a liberal pragmatism. “Inclusive pluralism” has been a working principle for prag-matists, one that can bridge the divide between liberals and post-modernists. Yet that principle of inclusion has also served to inhibit the religious expressions in the public domain of many sectarian groups who are not inclusive pluralists.74 Sometimes such inhibiting has not been so much ideologically motivated as determined by the practical necessities of diverse peoples working together in public settings. Whatever the sources of these problems, so long as they are not resolved it is not altogether surprising that deeply committed people who claim some of the oldest American Protestant heritages should have responded by reasserting—sometimes with far more success than anyone would have predicted in the mid-1960s—their influence in the public sphere.
It is far easier, of course, to identify these peculiar features of American culture than to suggest an effective remedy. A safe bet, however, is that the simplistic and polarizing proposals of alarmists on either the secular left or the Religious Right are more likely to inflame the social tension rather than to provide a cure. One might hope that historical perspective might at least help persons on both sides of these issues to step back and try to assess them in their larger contexts. The cultural conflicts are not simply products of the machinations of the warped minds of one’s opponents, but rather reflect deeply embedded cultural patterns. These patterns will need to be understood and taken into account by those who are looking for non-polarizing solutions to the problems of living together peacefully.
AFTERWORD
History and Fundamentalism
As we have seen, the question of history was central to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Should Christianity and the Bible be viewed through the lens of cultural development, or should culture be viewed through the lens of Scripture? The fundamentalists and the modernists shared a common assumption on this point. Each assumed that the abandonment, or at least substantial redefinition, of traditional Christian teaching concerning God’s acts in history was implicit in the modern historical method which explained events in terms of natural cultural forces.
This assumption concerning history, which was at the heart of the old controversy, seems to me incorrect. It is basic Christian doctrine that there is an awesome distance between God and his creation, and yet that God nevertheless enters human history and acts in actual historical circumstances. The awareness that God acts in history in ways that we can only know in the context of our culturally determined experience should be central to a Christian understanding of history. Yet the Christian must not lose sight of the premise that, just as in the Incarnation Christ’s humanity does not compromise his divinity, so the reality of God’s other work in history, going well beyond what we might explain as natural phenomena, is not compromised by the fact that it is culturally defined.
The history of Christianity reveals a perplexing mixture of divine and human factors. As Richard Lovelace has said, this history, when viewed without a proper awareness of the spiritual forces involved, “is as confusing as a football game in which half the players are invisible.”1 The present work, an analysis of cultural influences on religious belief, is a study of things visible. As such it must necessarily reflect more than a little sympathy with the modern mode of explanation in terms of natural historical causation. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that such sympathy is incompatible with, or even antagonistic to, a view of history in which God as revealed in Scripture is the dominant force, and in which other unseen spiritual forces are contending. I find that a Christian view of history is clarified if one considers reality as more or less like the world portrayed in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. We live in the midst of contests between great and mysterious spiritual forces, which we understand only imperfectly and whose true dimensions we only occasionally glimpse. Yet, frail as we are, we do play a role in this history, on the side either of the powers of light or of the powers of darkness. It is crucially important then, that, by God’s grace, we keep our wits about us and discern the vast difference between the real forces for good and the powers of darkness disguised as angels of light.2
Such a larger vision is, I think, the proper context for understanding the historian’s modest task of trying to identify the formative cultural elements that have either properly shaped or distorted our understanding of God and his revelation. Since God’s work appears to us in historical circumstances where imperfect humans are major agents, the actions of the Holy Spirit in the church are always intertwined with culturally conditioned factors. The theologian’s task is to try to establish from Scripture criteria for
determining what in the history of the church is truly the work of the Spirit. The Christian historian takes an opposite, although complementary, approach. While he must keep in mind certain theological criteria, he may refrain from explicit judgments on what is properly Christian while he concentrates on observable cultural forces. By identifying these forces, he provides material which individuals of various theological persuasions may use to help distinguish God’s genuine work from practices that have no greater authority than the customs or ways of thinking of a particular time and place.3 How one judges any religious phenomenon will, however, depend more on one’s theological stance than on one’s identification of the historical conditions in which it arose.
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