Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

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  7

  THE LEGALISTIC BOOM

  Yet legalistic religion in America did not die out. Far from it. In the early nineteenth century, Jefferson had looked ahead and foreseen an America dominated by Unitarianism—and had been dead wrong. In the same way, as modernist Christians looked ahead after the Scopes trial, many foresaw a twentieth-century America dominated by mainline churches whose congregations and ministers had theological views much like Fosdick's. Yet what happened was something quite different. Yes, mainstream American culture did progress in a generally liberal direction during the century's middle decades, and the mainline churches went along for the ride. But that mainstream culture also became increasingly secularized, and as it did so, the mainline churches, especially the more liberal ones, declined steadily in both membership and influence.

  Meanwhile, far from the consciousness of most Americans, legalistic Christianity underwent a quiet boom. On the margins of society, out of the media spotlight, dispensationalism advanced apace, winning away from the mainline churches men and women who, intimidated by the modern world, wanted certitude, fixity, and strict guidance. If you perused major newspapers and newsmagazines during World War II, you might come away with the idea that Fosdick was the most popular minister in the United States; but if you actually went out into the country, you would soon discover that Fosdick's celebrity was minuscule compared to that of the fundamentalist preacher Charles E. Fuller, whose Old Fashioned Revival Hour was the nation's most popular radio program. That program's high ratings were especially remarkable owing to the fact that the national radio networks, under the influence of the mainline denominations that made up the Federal Council of Churches, denied fundamentalist preachers access to their airwaves, forcing Fuller to invent the idea of syndicating his programs to local stations. His example was followed by many other legalistic ministers.

  While fundamentalism flourished, so too did another form of religion that was then perceived as differing dramatically from it. Pentecostalism traces its modern history to New Year's Eve, 1900, when Charles F. Parham, a young Methodist minister in Topeka who had been seeking to recover the enthusiasm of the early church, placed his hands on a young woman's head and she began emitting sounds that neither of them understood. Parham spread the word. Soon many American ministers 'were claiming that they had recovered the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament, including prophecy, faith healing, and "speaking in tongues," or glossolalia. The Book of Acts described how on the day of Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection, the disciples "were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to talk in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them power of utterance." Accordingly this new kind of faith was called Pentecostalism; its distinguishing gifts were called charismatic, from the Greek word for gifts, charismata. At first Pentecostalism found its way into established congregations, mostly in Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness churches; soon, however, independent Pentecostal denominations—such as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)—came to be formed. Before long America had a huge subculture of Holy Rollers (as they were jocularly called) that was largely rural, underclass, and African-American, and thus virtually invisible to the white overclass and the mainstream media. So it remained until the 1960s, when an immense "charismatic renewal" saw Pentecostal practices spread to churches in virtually every denomination—Roman Catholics included—and to middle-class Americans of every race.

  Early in the century, Protestant fundamentalists looked upon Pentecostalists with suspicion as practitioners of a very different form of religion. Fundamentalism centered on fixed institutional doctrine, Pentecostalism on intense individual experience. Charismatic Christianity even has its own distinguishing rite, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is often accompanied by glossolalia. Yet over the decades the line between fundamentalism and Pentecostalism blurred. Today, as a result of the charismatic renewal, many fundamentalist and evangelical congregations incorporate charismatic gifts in their worship to some degree; meanwhile, the biblical literalism, clerical authoritarianism, and strict sexual morality of most Pentecostal churches make them, in many ways, indistinguishable from non-Pentecostal fundamentalist churches. Pentecostalism has, in short, become an integral part of the spectrum of American legalistic Christianity. Indeed, the man whose name is, in most American minds, a veritable synonym for Protestant fundamentalism—Pat Robertson—is a Pentecostalist; more than anyone else, Robertson is responsible for bringing fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, and conservative evangelicalism together into a single coherent movement.

  Why, in the twentieth century, did mainline churches dwindle and legalistic churches prosper? One reason: the advent of mass communications. Tent-meeting revivals had been a fact of rural life well into the first quarter of the century, and made national celebrities of people like Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson; as late as 1927, two years after the Scopes trial, Sinclair Lewis's novel Elmer Gantry took on the vulgarity, hypocrisy, and emotional manipulation practiced by tent-meeting evangelists. But radio rendered tent meetings obsolete; the mass audience that traveling evangelists had reached could now be addressed en masse by radio ministers like Charles E. Fuller. Fuller knew how to speak to that audience. He knew that the radio audience, like the tent-meeting crowds, didn't want to be helped to reflect intelligently on God and to attain a profound personal experience of the numinous; they wanted a preacher who set forth clearly what they had to do and say in order to be saved from hellfire. They also wanted to feel part of a group of people who believed the same things, shared the same values, and followed the same orders. (So it was that Pat Robertson, decades later, called his flagship TV program The 700 Club, the implication being that his viewers were not just sitting home alone but belonged to a club.) Fuller spoke to these people's needs, and he taught millions of them to think as he did about life, death, and the Almighty; they flocked, in turn, to local churches where ministers preached the gospel as he did, and when their sons expressed an interest in the ministry, they sent them to Fuller's own seminary. In later decades, televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts shaped American religious life in similar ways, feeding the growth of legalistic churches.

  Several observers have sought to explain why those churches grew while mainline churches shrank. Books like Dean M. Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing and Roger Finke and Rodney Stark's The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy are crowded with graphs showing the dramatic changes in membership numbers and charts detailing the connection between these numbers and other factors. Their conclusions are almost identical: As Kelley sums it up, strong churches tend to demand doctrinal absolutism ("we have the Truth and all others are in error"), behavioral conformity, unquestioning obedience, group solidarity and commitment, and a zeal to convert (but remain separate from) an evil and error-ridden world. Weak churches, meanwhile, respect diversity and individuality, encourage critical inquiry and dialogue with outsiders, and are characterized by indecision, laxity, indifference to evangelism, and a tendency to keep one's spiritual experience and insight to oneself. In short, to borrow the terminology of Finke and Stark's subtitle, legalistic churches are inclined to be "winners," and mainline churches are apt to be "losers." "Religious organizations," write Finke and Stark (the italics are theirs), "are stronger to the degree that they impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members." What makes for a strong church, then, is a strong framework—one that makes people feel safe and special, that provides unambiguous answers to all their questions, and that gives direction to them in every aspect of their lives, thoughts, and feelings. The flip side of this is that "to the degree that denominations rejected traditional doctrines and ceased to make serious demands on their followers, they ceased to prosper."

  By "prosper," of course, Finke and Stark mean "grew in numbers." They discuss the "winners and losers" in breathtakingly busine
sslike terms; their book is as fixated on the number of bodies in the pews as it is indifferent to the spiritual health of the souls inhabiting those bodies. They wax sarcastic about those in the mainline churches who suggest that "religion is not meaningfully reduced to membership counts" and that "what matters is what is in people's hearts (and presumably that is beyond measure)." You can almost hear the sneer in that parenthetical remark. Yet for serious Christians, there is something in the human heart that is beyond measure; that Finke and Stark can mock this idea reveals a great deal about the shallow materialist values that inform their study.

  What of the argument, advanced not only by Finke and Stark but by Kelley as well, that churches grow because they impose a stigma? This is absurd. Perhaps in the academic world that Finke and Stark inhabit (they teach sociology at Purdue and the University of Washington, respectively), being a Pentecostalist or a Southern Baptist fundamentalist, say, would carry some stigma. But among the underclass white southerners who make up the bulk of these churches' members, belonging to them doesn't impose a stigma at all. On the contrary, fundamentalist and Pentecostalist churches draw in members who feel that their own cultural values and prejudices have been stigmatized by a national culture that is too liberal and well-educated for their comfort. These churches offer such people the comfort of membership in a community that reflects their own discomfort with mainstream society. To the extent that they do feel a stigma for belonging to a certain church, the stigma is generally experienced positively, as a reminder that they are "saved" and that those who stigmatize them are "unsaved," and as a means of reinforcing their sense of solidarity with other members of their church. As we have seen, Protestant legalists routinely discuss their relations with the outside world in military terms, and indeed one of the psychological benefits of membership in a legalistic church is that one enjoys the positive aspects of being on the "right" side of a full-scale war (among them self-righteousness, unit cohesion, and black-and-white moral clarity) without most of the negative aspects.

  What about the suggestion that legalistic churches demand more sacrifice? That depends on what you mean by sacrifice. Legalistic Christians are generally willing to give their churches money and time. They are also willing to sacrifice their right—some of us would say their Christian obligation—to use their minds to figure out what is good and right and true. Many of them are willing to turn their lives upside down to evangelize in distant lands (but then, one of the reasons why people join such churches in the first place is that they are incapable of finding or creating meaning for themselves and desperately want another person or institution to change their lives and infuse them with meaning); but such people are not willing—and they are rarely asked—to sacrifice their prejudices and their "I'm saved and you're not" mentality. They're not willing to sacrifice their America Firstism, their support of segregation, their desire and admiration for material success, their enthusiasm for the military-industrial complex, their self-righteousness. What all the "successful" legalistic churches have in common, indeed, is that they cater to these attitudes and prejudices; if they asked people to give them up, they would be far less "successful."

  As noted, Finke and Stark flaunt their hard-nosed, practical worldliness—their horizontal orientation—and jeer at those who measure church success in more "vertical" ways. Yet they then turn around and equate the Southern Baptists' phenomenal growth in numbers with a supposed achievement on the vertical plane, equating the Baptist emphasis on doctrine with a "vivid otherworldliness" and connecting the mainline underemphasis on doctrine with this-worldliness. In fact, the connection works quite the other way: As Fosdick pointed out decades ago, the more elaborate and compulsory an official church doctrine, the more the individual's capacity for spiritual reflection and for true experience of the Absolute is stifled. Finke and Stark also contradict their argument that the strength of conservative churches lies in their spiritual emphasis when they cite, as a major reason for the decline of American Catholicism, the fact that priests and nuns no longer enjoy the "status and power" they once did. What could be less spiritual and more "horizontal" than this?

  Finke and Stark claim that as mainline churches became more liberal, their clergy grew more sophisticated and well-educated and worship was "shorn of mystery, miracle, and mysticism." The "active supernatural realm," they claim, was "replaced by abstractions concerning virtue"; "a message of conversion" gave way to "a message of erudition." At the same time, they say, church rules grew less demanding. As a result, these churches lost members to groups like the Baptists, who were more supernaturally oriented and who "made serious emotional, material, and social demands"; to be a Baptist or Methodist or (for that matter) a Catholic "was a far more serious undertaking than to be a Congregationalist or an Episcopalian." One of the outrageous implications here is that theological education and Christian faith are conflicting values—that the more theologically sophisticated one becomes, the more one's faith declines. Finke and Stark point out, for example, that the so-called traditionalism of Southern Baptist clergy is inversely proportional to their level of education. Of course, to examine these statistics and then attack education and defend "traditionalism," as Finke and Stark do, is deeply cynical; it amounts essentially to embracing the atheistic view that religion is not really true and that in order to stay religious, one has to remain ignorant and try not to think too hard.

  Finke and Stark speak up for hellfire sermons. For Baptists and Methodists, they argue, "the power of God was experienced as well as taught, and their message seldom excluded the topics of sin and salvation, or hellfire and redemption.. . . By contrast, the denominations of the colonial mainline offered a message that was literate and intellectual, but one that increasingly said less about salvation, hellfire, or the other principal themes of the Baptist and Methodist sermons." What Finke and Stark are suggesting here is remarkable: In their view, apparently, intellectually engaging sermons about a God of love don't lead to spiritual experience, while scare rhetoric about hellfire does. Can someone who thinks in this way ever have had a spiritual experience? Or do Finke and Stark share the view of many secular intellectuals that there is no such thing as a spiritual experience, that it is by definition something that happens only to the ignorant and gullible? Finke and Stark speak approvingly of the "high octane faith" of members of sects that preach hellfire; this, they say, is what brings in the faithful and creates zealots. But does it create true disciples of Christ? This is a question in which Finke and Stark apparently have no interest whatsoever. They refer with what seems complete approval to the late-nineteenth-century Landmarkian movement among Southern Baptists, which drew sharp lines between saved "authentic Christians" (Baptists) and unsaved false Christians (everyone else), and they speak disapprovingly of Methodists and Northern Baptists who during this same period were becoming more inclusive in their theology, shifting emphasis from a God of wrath to a God of love.

  Finke and Stark automatically assume that because people are flocking to legalistic churches, those churches are doing something right and the mainline churches are doing something wrong. When they speak of "the essential good health of rural churches" in the 1920s, they mean simply that those churches had a lot of members. That most such churches were, among other things, fiercely racist goes unmentioned. And the question of what Jesus would make of those churches goes unasked. Finke and Stark do not acknowledge that many people are drawn to legalistic churches for reasons that have nothing to do with an experience of God and with the love of Jesus; they do not acknowledge that in an aggressively horizontal, unreflective mass culture, churches that encourage individual spiritual exploration and reflection, that challenge people's self-centeredness by promoting outreach to the poor, and that preach a gospel of unselfish love will often lose out to churches that offer easy and purportedly certain answers to life's difficult questions, that cater to people's solipsism, and that offer members the opportunity to say to their neighbors, "I'm going to heaven and you're
going to hell." Finke and Stark quote with enthusiasm the Jewish scholar Will Herberg's argument that the Roman Catholic Church "must take its stand against the world, against the age, against the spirit of the age—because the world and the age are always, to a degree, to an important degree, in rebellion against God." This is an oft-heard argument from conservative Protestants and traditional Catholics. But the question is: In which ways is the age (that is, the secular culture) rebelling against God? In which ways is the church rebelling against God while the secular culture does his work? Too often in recent generations, the secular culture has effected changes that institutional churches have at first resisted and then, much too late, recognized as positive developments.

  The point here, apropos of Kelley's and Finke and Stark's arguments, is simple. The question should not be, "How can we fill our churches?" It should be, "How can we make churches, society, and people more truly Christian?" If a novel by a hack writer sells more copies than a novel by a great literary artist, that doesn't mean that the artist should try to write more like the hack; it means that the mass audience needs to have its taste improved. Similarly, if millions of Americans flock to legalistic churches, it doesn't mean that the mainline churches should imitate those churches; it means that American culture is in desperate spiritual straits and that we need to do something about this if we want our children to live in a spiritually healthy culture.

  Arguing that the Social Gospel lost out to legalism because "people went to church in search of salvation, not social service," Finke and Stark add that the Social Gospelers "seemed to have nearly forgotten about religion altogether." That depends, of course, on what one means by religion. What the Social Gospelers meant by religion was what Jesus had meant by it when he told the parable of the good Samaritan. He did not intend to found an institution to which people could go selfishly, week after week, in order to have their ticket to the afterlife stamped and to dwell fondly on the thought that outsiders would be consigned to hellfire; rather, he sought to inspire in the hearts of people a love for those outsiders that would express itself not in Bible-thumping evangelism but in selfless action. That's a momentous challenge. The mainline churches, to the extent that they issued that challenge in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, lost members to the churches that welcomed, and indeed encouraged, ignorance and self-concern. Legalistic Christianity triumphed, in short, not because it demanded more of believers but because, at the pro-foundest level, it demanded far less.