Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  For American Protestant fundamentalism, then, the decades after the Scopes trial were a period not of stagnation but of revivals, youth rallies, and rampant church growth, virtually all of which took place below the radar of the mainstream media. Yet this was also a period of serious internal tensions in the fundamentalist camp. In the early 1940s fundamentalism began to separate into two distinct movements, one of which, by the late 1950s, had retained the label of fundamentalism and the other of which had come to be known as the New Evangelicalism. The fundamentalists, most of them dispensational premillennial-ists, and most belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention, believed in the total inerrancy of the Bible and also believed in keeping apart from the mainstream culture and the mainline denominations. The New Evangelicals, having been influenced to some extent by modernist theology, allowed for some degree of interaction with the mainstream culture and even for membership in mainline denominations; some but not all of them rejected biblical inerrancy. Each party had its own institutions: The fundamentalists had the American Council of Churches, founded in 1941, which encouraged separation from the mainline denominations; the New Evangelicals had the less-separatist National Association of Evangelicals, founded a year later. Perhaps even more important, the New Evangelicals had a young man named Billy Graham, a minister in the evangelical Youth for Christ movement whose 1949 Los Angeles rally made him the nation's most famous evangelist. Marsden observes that during the 1950s and 1960s it was easy to tell whether someone was a fundamentalist or a New Evangelical: All you had to do was ask what he or she thought of Billy Graham. To this day, fundamentalists despise Graham as a sellout because he affirms the value of Catholic and Jewish faith; to a true Protestant fundamentalist, of course, Catholics and Jews are destined for hell.

  In his definitive history of Fuller Theological Seminary, which was founded in 1947 in Pasadena by the fundamentalist Charles E. Fuller but which eventually became the flagship seminary of the New Evangelicalism, Marsden vividly depicts an institution whose self-contradictions and outright absurdities reflect those of the movement it represented (though this is not a point that Marsden seeks to underscore). Consider the case of Harold Ockenga, the institution's first president and a founder of the National Association of Evangelicals, who refused to abandon biblical inerrancy. His explanation for this refusal: not that the Bible is inerrant, but that once you abandon inerrancy, you're on a slippery slope to utter apostasy. For Ockenga, in other words, holding fast to inerrancy was a matter not of embracing truth over falsity but of choosing to remain moored to a rigid doctrine rather than risking the open sea. Ockenga's position is astonishing for the questions it raises about the nature of the New Evangelicals' faith and fears, not to mention about the nature of what it means to be an educator in a subculture where certain orthodoxies cannot be questioned and certain thoughts cannot be uttered.

  This paradox haunted the New Evangelicalism. On the one hand, the leading lights at Fuller longed for respectability and prestige— which, to them, meant being taken seriously by the most distinguished mainline seminaries and theologians in America and Europe. Yet to be taken seriously by those institutions and individuals—which Fuller, in good evangelical fashion, claimed to regard as secularist and apostate, and which in return tended to look down on evangelicalism as primitive and anti-intellectual—meant having something fresh to say about the nature of God and faith, and this almost inevitably entailed violating the narrow bounds of acceptable evangelical doctrine.

  Virtually every crisis that plagued Fuller during its early decades seems to have flowed out of this paradox. In 1949, seeking to enhance the school's reputation, Fuller's administration hired a distinguished Hungarian theologian named Bela Vassady Yet when Vassady published an article that year calling for "one church" in "one world," his Fuller colleagues panicked, because, as Marsden writes, these concepts were "linked in the fundamentalist mind ... as signs of the approach of the empire of Antichrist and his allies." Vassady soon left Fuller. Likewise, when Fuller professor Carl Henry published a book, The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism, accusing the fundamentalist movement of having a "harsh temperament" and a "spirit of lovelessness and strife," and when Fuller's second president, Edward J. Carnell, issued a pamphlet that placed the love of God and one's neighbor above all other laws, firestorms resulted. "To ears attuned to the rhetoric of fundamentalism," writes Marsden, "such talk of love and tolerance smacked of modernism." Carnell's fundamentalist colleague Charles J. Wood-bridge responded to his pamphlet by angrily accusing him of "sweet, forgiving appeasement toward heretics"—that is, mainline Protestants.

  At the heart of the New Evangelicalism, plainly, was a tension between the Church of Love and the Church of Law. Woodbridge charged that the New Evangelicalism emphasized "love, not doctrine" and thundered that this emphasis made it "the worst menace that has confronted the church since the time of Luther." To many mainline Protestants who viewed the New Evangelicalism from the other direction, by contrast, the fact that a place like Fuller compelled its faculty to sign rigidly formulated declarations of belief, and fired those who refused, suggested that the movement was far more about doctrine than about love. Indeed, to many mainline Protestants, there seemed little difference between the fundamentalists and New Evangelicals (who eventually came to be called simply evangelicals).

  In Marsden's account, the administrators and teachers at Fuller during its first several decades were eager to make mainline Protestants see the difference between themselves and fundamentalists. They wanted Fuller to be recognized as a serious educational institution that pursued the truth and rejected fundamentalism. In reality, however, education at Fuller took a backseat to orthodoxy, for the school's faculty were allowed to pursue the truth only so far. In theory, teachers and students were encouraged to study the Bible honestly and freely; yet when they did so, they saw things there that they weren't free to admit honestly to seeing. To that extent, their religion was not a truth but a lie. The ways in which professors of integrity dealt with this morally and spiritually challenging situation recall the stories about Soviet writers and professors who sought to placate institutional ideology while continuing to write and teach as much as possible of the truth as they saw it.

  Ironically, the hero of Marsden's history of Fuller turns out to be Charles E. Fuller's son Daniel, who had studied theology at Princeton and whose insistence that the school acknowledge scriptural error eventually won the day. Ockenga's indignant response to young Fuller—"Well, what are we going to do then? Dan Fuller thinks the Bible is just full of errors"—is almost touching in its display of insecurity in the face of truth. For too many legalistic Christians, this kind of insecure, embattled clinging to a set of tenets that one knows on some level to be untrue is the substance of faith, and any departure from it is a plunge into the abyss. Ockenga and many of his colleagues were haunted by a situation that Marsden sums up tidily: "Beginning with the gradual slippage of Harvard into Unitarianism, the past two hundred years had seen an endless repetition of the same story. Most of America's greatest academic institutions had been founded by conservative Bible-believing evangelicals. But nearly every one of these schools had eventually fallen to the onslaughts of theological liberalism, and then to outright secularism. Except in a few cases, such as Wheaton College or Moody Bible Institute, where conservatives had kept the tightest control on innovation, their efforts at institution building had proved futile." Marsden might instead have spoken of control on thinking—for it is thinking that poses the greatest danger to legalistic "institution building."

  While evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism expanded rapidly and clashed with one another during the century's middle decades, the mainline American religious establishment either ignored these developments or viewed them with condescension. The Episcopal and Presbyterian leaders in their New York offices and glorious downtown churches simply couldn't take seriously the ragtag little independent houses of worship that were springing up in pl
aces like Kentucky and Arkansas. In the same way, the distinguished theologians who taught Ivy League graduates at the eminent mainline seminaries couldn't take very seriously the fundamentalist Bible institutes like Moody, or even the evangelical seminaries like Fuller, most of whose professors had little or no reputation as scholars and most of whose students were ill-educated rural youngsters. What would those mainline church leaders have said if someone had told them that in a few decades their own churches would be challenged for cultural dominance—if not utterly dwarfed—by churches led by those sometime youngsters?

  When I was a boy in the early 1970s, spending summers in my mother's South Carolina hometown, I met some white kids who had recently withdrawn from public school and begun attending a new private academy. They explained the switch: Their public schools had been integrated by Supreme Court order, and their parents were sending them to this new institution in order to protect them from attending school with "niggers." Thus did I witness the birth of the Religious Right.

  In recent years, Religious Right leaders have suggested that their movement grew out of discontent with the 1963 Supreme Court decision against compulsory prayers in public schools. Yet Ralph Reed himself admits that "the greatest spark of the [Religious Right] movement was not abortion but an attempt by the Carter-appointed head of the Internal Revenue Service to require Christian and parochial schools and academies to prove that they were not established to preserve segregation or they would risk losing their tax-exempt status. . . . For conservative evangelicals it was nothing less than a declaration of war on their schools, their churches, and their children." Reed is being disingenuous here, for anyone who spent any amount of time in the South then knows that a whole network of private schools sprang up after the Supreme Court ordered public-school integration; the only reason for these private schools' existence was to serve white parents who didn't want their children going to school with blacks. Jimmy Carter, as a southerner, knew very well that this was the case. That his action was the main impetus for today's Religious Right political movement says a great deal about where that movement's head and heart really are. Not to mince words, the Religious Right didn't grow out of a love for God and one's neighbor—it grew out of racism, pure and simple.

  Even as government actions on education were propelling legalistic Protestants into political involvement, a bizarre book by a man named Hal Lindsey was reshaping many of the same people's religion around the notion of biblical prophecy.

  In the summer of 1996, I went to several New York City libraries in search of a copy of that book, The Late Great Planet Earth. This immensely influential work, which has been a touchstone for legalistic Protestants since its publication in 1970, always turned out to be missing from the collection. Later that summer I was staying with friends at a rented Georgia beach house when I looked up to see a battered copy of Lindsey's book staring out at me from the shelves.

  I should not have been surprised: The Late Great Planet Earth is a book you should go looking for not in New York City libraries but in Southern homes. This isn't a volume that has gathered dust in libraries; it's something that's been read—widely, religiously, and with fanatical credulity. Marsden records that although the book was never on the New York Times best-seller list, it was in fact the number one best-selling book in the United States during the 1970s. The fact that it never appeared on the Times list—which is based on sales in "general" bookstores, not "Christian" bookstores—only underlines the width of the gulf between the mainstream culture reflected in the Times and the huge nonmainstream culture for whom Lindsey's book was, quite literally, a revelation. (Though none of the large bookstores that I canvassed in New York City carried Lindsey's book, I eventually bought my own copy at a small "Christian" bookstore in Cumming, Georgia, which had several copies in stock.)

  I was thrilled to find Lindsey's book on the shelves of that beach house. Dusting it off, I took it down from the shelf, carried it out to the beach, and sat down to read it next to one of the friends I was staying with, who had once been a fundamentalist. When she saw the book, she let out a shriek. "Where did you find that?"

  I told her. "Have you read it?" I asked.

  "Of course I read it, we all did! Yuck! Just don't set it down anywhere near me."

  It didn't take long for me to understand her reaction. If Scofield, in his Reference Bible, had interpreted a number of supposedly prophetic biblical passages to suggest a certain outline of the End Times, Hal Lindsey brought further specifics to this outline and showed a new generation of fundamentalists how various current events represented (according to him) a fulfillment of some of the biblical prophecies Scofield had identified and how, in the next few years, world history would play itself out in such a way as to complete the fulfillment of Scofield's End Times scenario. The Late Great Planet Earth became a veritable second Bible in many fundamentalist homes.

  Why was it so popular? After one has begun reading Lindsey's introduction, the answer doesn't take long to form itself. The introduction begins with a lament about the chaos of contemporary American society. What can we do about this chaos? "On one side," Lindsey says, "we hear that the answer to our dilemma is education. Build bigger and better schools, hire more teachers, develop a smarter generation. Has the academic community found the answers? There are many students who are dissatisfied with being told that the sole purpose of education is to develop inquiring minds. They want to find some of the answers to their questions—solid answers, a certain direction." Those "solid answers," he says, can be found in the Bible, which he describes as a work of prophecy containing "clear and unmistakable prophetic signs."

  Already, in these opening sentences, several of the book's key attributes—and the secrets of its popularity—are in plain view. One is its extreme anti-intellectualism. Consistently, Lindsey pounds home the message that the important truths of life cannot be discovered through education, scientific experimentation, and objective critical analysis, but rather through predictions by seers who have demonstrated their premonitory prowess. Over and over again, Lindsey makes the point that people with fancy educations don't know the things that really matter and that they are dangerous because they lead others astray.

  Another striking attribute here is Lindsey's emphasis on certitude. Lindsey knows his audience: They don't want ambiguous information and ideas that they are obliged to think about; they want clear-cut answers. Lindsey provides them, and with breathtaking audacity. Words such as certain, sure, solid, clear, and unmistakable abound.

  Something else that is obvious early on in Lindsey's book is its narrow understanding of the word prophecy. Christians have long understood prophecy to be a special quality of spirituality and courage; theologians speak of the prophetic obedience of Saint Francis, who knew that the institutional church was misguided in some ways, and who on occasion respectfully defied its authority out of a desire to lead it closer to the truth. The vulgar notion of a prophet as merely a fortune-teller or seer of the kind featured nowadays in supermarket tabloids has nothing to do with the traditional Christian concept of prophecy and everything to do with the contemporary American infatuation with astrology, magic tricks, psychic readings, and the like. Yes, the Old Testament prophets occasionally predicted that certain events—whether messianic or cataclysmic—would occur at some time in the future, and the Gospel writers adjusted elements of the story of Jesus so that they would seem to be fulfillments of some of those predictions. Yet this kind of prognostication was always only a minor element of the prophetic role, and no one ever interpreted those prophecies in the extremely specific way that Lindsey does. Being a prophet in biblical times was not about forecasting future events but about being close to God and helping God's people to feel closer to him. In the true biblical sense, the prophets of the twentieth-century Christian world are not people like Jeane Dixon of National Enquirer fame but people like Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu—people who, often in tension with
established church authority, have spoken bravely and inspiringly of what it means and doesn't mean to be a Christian and have shown by their example what posture Christians should take toward the established order.

  Lindsey by contrast, depicts biblical prophecy in an outrageously crude manner. Dipping into the scriptures, he cites examples of prognostications that turned out to be true, congratulating one Old Testament prophet for his "Accurate Short-Range Prophecy" and saying that the prophet Micaiah earned "a straight 'A' in prophetic marksmanship." By making forecasts that turned out to be true, Lindsey says, these and other prophets "passed the test—summa cum laude." Chief among these forecasts, he emphasizes, were those concerning the Messiah. If the Jews had attended properly to their prophets' messianic predictions, they would easily have recognized Jesus as their savior. Yet they paid insufficient attention to those predictions and consequently rejected their Messiah. As a result, "for almost 2000 years the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have wandered around the earth with no country of their own, in constant fear of persecution and death."