Early opponents and unsympathetic observers of fundamentalism held that the clash was between the country and the city. The country and the city served both as symbols for the ideas that clashed in the modernist controversy and as symbols of the constituency for each side. The fundamentalists were caricatured as the country bumpkins; the modernists were portrayed as urbane and learned. Change in general and progress toward the things modernists wanted to bring about were more welcome in the city than in country. The notion of city against country had some truth to it, but not enough.

There was a clash of cultures. The materialistic culture of progress and scientific knowledge bastioned in the industrialized cities of the North loomed threatening over the agrarian and rural culture, the vestiges of a non-materialistic culture such as the culture of the South. Secularism, the religion of a materialistic culture, threatened orthodoxy. While the threat was faced as a theological threat, the sense existed that there was some sort of a cultural threat, that the culture and religion of modernity were allied. Correspondingly there was a sense that orthodoxy also had a cultural ally, the culture of the folk rather than the culture of the elites.

I shall argue that the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century can best be understood as the attempt to preserve orthodoxy by sheltering it in popular culture.* I shall demonstrate that the consensus of fundamentalism tried to preserve orthodoxy in popular culture at the expense of degrading orthodoxy and still losing the battle. To do that I contrast the three leading proponents that Marsden mentions (Machen, Sunday, and Bryan). Each one of these three men identified with the fundamentalist cause, but they identified differently. To understand these men, sort out their allegiances, and interpret their identification with fundamentalism I want to look at a speech they each delivered. For Bryan the speech was the last great speech of his career. For Sunday it was the sermons delivered at the height of his popularity and influence. For Machen it was an early speech, but one that defined his course through all his career.

*Do I maintain that folk and popular culture are the same? This reminds me of a quip by the famous Mr. Joel Zartman who when asked what was worse than folk culture gave the insanely hilarious reply, “I don’t know.” Back in 1973, of course, people might have been outraged, but we live in more enlightened times. Nowadays most people would just grin and turn back to their comic books.**

**This is reminiscent of an aphorism which the famous Mr. Joel Zartman was fond of: “Everything in moderation, especially folk culture.” The famous Mr. Joel Zartman was not very partial to genuine folk culture in the least. He wanted it mitigated or traduced in order to partake of it, if at all, for a very short time. The raw and undiluted form he found as palatable as chewing on a leather boot.***

***From this degenerative series of footnotes the reader may gather that something in the way of a comment on folk and popular culture is required. The great Nathan O. Hatch, in his triumphant work, never was subjected to such an indignity. In fact, never along the way has anybody other than the unmentioned Ken Myers ever deal with the phenomenon as such. One cannot, alas, in a serious work of this nature introduce a reference to Ken Myers’s book as an authority, for an authority it is not, for all that is spends a whole chapter on the Kaplan article. What one thinks one will do, is to have in hand the requisite information and then find where it is most pleasing to one’s instructors to have it introduced.****

****This is a lot of blogging for one day. I have to go quickly for I have four more chapters to cover before the end of February and three are longer. And as you have noticed, commentary on the latest Nick of Time is rather on the unentertaining end of the spectrum.

In The Democratization of American Christianity, Hatch argues that, “The democratization of Christianity . . . has less to do with the specifics of polity and governance and more with the incarnation of the church into popular culture.” His book shows how the years following the American Revolution and into the Second Great Awakening shaped American Christianity in ways that cast off the restraint of the past, moved away from traditional ecclesiastical institutions and high culture, and made for a new  “profound commitment” to the audience. During these years Christianity became a democratic phenomenon. This accounts for the populist appeal that Hatch argues is the “central force” in American religion.

    Carpenter’s book, Revive Us Again, might have been the sequel for Hatch’s. The same populist impulse that Hatch describes is seen in the reawakening of the years of consolidation and recovery that Carpenter tells. Carpenter contrasts fundamentalists with the orthodox and anti-modernist Missouri Synod Lutherans who objected not only to the eschatology of fundamentalists, but also to their “deemphasis of the sacraments” and “their interdenominational latitude.” He shows that fundamentalists were more than just orthodox Christianity, that they included the more pragmatic among orthodox Christians.

    Because fundamentalism had been mainstream before the Modernist Controversy, the memory and longing for a greater audience was still there after the controversy. It was a longing harbored by leaders not usually scholarly, who did not deal in ideas, who fostered Bible schools, and who wrote pamphlets instead of books. The story that Carpenter wants to tell is how these men regained their popularity in the decades following the Scopes Trial. The task was twofold: the fundamentalists had to rebuild their basic infrastructure of institutions, and they had to speak through the greater organs of mass communication. Carpenter shows how this task was accomplished by the hands and efforts of men frantic to seize any means for the propagation of the gospel. What it indicates is that, as with Finney, Moody, Sunday, and again with Graham, fundamentalism latched onto popular culture.

Although nothing has been published to date that commands the respect that Marsden’s book has, or that in any way challenges his understanding of fundamentalism as the most accurate, there have been several works which complement and enhance the understanding that Marsden provides.

    Several excellent works deal with fundamentalism but specialize in directions that move them outside of the scope of this thesis. Harriet A. Harris’s book Fundamentalism and Evangelicals demonstrates that both a high view of Scripture and a need to prove that high view were the elements of fundamentalism that the British and American varieties had in common. Harris wants to deal with the elements of fundamentalism still present in Evangelicalism and to challenge the evangelicals to recognize the fundamentalist mentality so that their position is as clear and consistent as it should be. Her work explains the philosophical root of the fundamentalist mind set. She establishes this in the empirical rationalism of Scottish Common Sense Realism. For the purpose of this thesis, her considerations are parallel, but not entirely to the point addressed here.

    Douglas W. Frank’s Less Than Conquerors is an attempt to demonstrate how evangelicals suffered by embracing Common Sense philosophy, dispensationalism, and the triumphalism of Victorious Life theology. Frank’s selective portrayal, while interesting in the details, is not convincing. His explanation of why people would embrace Common Sense philosophy, dispensationalism, or Victorious Life theology is neither sympathetic or plausible; he deals tendentiously.

    William Glass’s Strangers in Zion really does not begin to complement Marsden till Glass recounts events after 1920. Glass chronicles fundamentalism in the South, which travels on a different trajectory than fundamentalism in the North. Fundamentalism in the South was a different thing because religion in the South was a different thing from religion in the North. The essential supernaturalism of religion was not disputed in the South as soon as it was in the North.

    Barry Hankins argues that fundamentalism was introduced to the South by J. Frank Norris. Hankins insinuation that Norris was the origin of the insidious fundamentalism resurgent in the SBC today, strikes one as a protracted ad hominen argument. Even if Norris was the greatest single influence for fundamentalism in the South, it is hard to think of him as the precursor to men so committed to denominational co-operation.

    Less preposterous but also less interesting is Douglas Karl Abrams’ Selling the Old Time Religion which argues that even though fundamentalists rejected modernity they applied its mechanisms and methods to their task in a way that was sometimes careless. They preached against the popular evils using the popular methods, not any more shy of mass culture than the average American. “To their credit, fundamentalists utilized mass culture to spread and defend what was most important to them.” The fundamentalists’ ambiguous and generally favorable embrace of modern mass culture is something Abrams describes without censure. For him, the simple awareness that not every part of mass culture is untainted, and the concession that sometimes the fundamentalists used the things that were tainted, is enough. It is not an ambitious argument, although thoroughly researched.

Marsden associates dispensationalism with those who stood radically against (or radically indifferent to) culture; Arno C. Gabelein and I. M Haldeman were the leading examples. They did not believe that society would be fixed and withdrew from any effort but evangelism. Since Christ would return and set the world right, Christians should wait for the return of Christ. The Christian should not seek to save the world, but to evangelize the men of the world. This first approach, while not exactly a majority, represents fundamentalism in general, being the position that resulted from the lack of consensus. Marsden considers this approach a minority approach by 1910.

The second approach he associates with William Bell Riley. Riley represents a changing attitude, an emerging consensus that is uneasy with the more withdrawn view; it is the beginning of a movement toward greater involvement. Marsden remarks that this position was rather hard to pin down. The rise of the Bible institute is what impelled this early consensus to greater unity. In the early days, it was the Bible institute that most gave fundamentalism its coherence as a movement.

Marsden also points out the deficiencies in the curriculum of the new Bible institutes—a curriculum which was “less than a total endorsement of the disinterested study of the Western intellectual tradition.” He is quick to add that this only suggests an anti-cultural bias, and not an outright rejection of the things of intellect. The presence of an anti-cultural bias in turn suggests there was some continuity between the first approach and the second. The continuity consisted in a persistent reluctance to deal with culture.

The growing consensus (still the second approach) gradually became represented in the figure of Billy Sunday. Early in his career, Billy Sunday did not meet with a great deal of support, which Marsden attributes to a popular preference for a more Victorian formality. Sunday had none of this, but, as times changed, he did not need it. What Sunday did was more informal and decorous, but: “It was difficult . . . to argue with success.”

The third approach to Christianity and culture was found in William Jennings Bryan whose “religious interests . . . resembled his political ones.” Marsden believes that Bryan represented the “culturally dominant evangelical coalition” of the first quarter of the century. Bryan, so immensely popular, not only represents a fundamentalist approach to culture, but the popular attitude to culture in his time. At this point, if Marsden is right, there is an almost complete merging of fundamentalism with popular opinion.

“Bryan’s defense of Christianity was essentially pragmatic, resting on his concept of civilization . . . Bryan thus abandoned, in the spirit of popular American pragmatism, not only the fine points of theology but also any attempt to present a theoretical defense of Christianity and relied on the evidence of practical results in individuals and in nations.” Marsden notes that Bryan and Sunday held very similar positions with regard to Christianity and culture. This proximity of approach seen in the erosion of intellectual labor and the pragmatic attitude that Bryan and Sunday both represent, suggests a continuity between the second and third approaches.

To sum up: the first approach was mostly indifferent to culture; this gave way to the second approach which was biased against culture (which is a sort of indifference to its benefits); the third approach was pragmatically opportunistic toward culture (which is a sort of bias against its proper uses). What these three views have in common is the negligence of a proper consideration of culture.

The fourth approach that Marsden relates was exemplified by J. Gresham Machen. In Machen’s day, within the Presbyterian camp, following the trajectory of the New School, came the liberals with the modernist approach that subsumed orthodoxy to culture. In contrast to this Machen advocated the consecration of culture. He also stood in contrast to fundamentalists because he realized the need for fighting the intellectual battles–the battle of ideas–inside the academy, for he saw the outcome would spread outside the academy. He did not believe that an intellectual crisis could be separated from a cultural crisis. His desire was to address the crisis. Machen understood the value of culture: he did not remain indifferent toward it, he had no bias against it, and he found it too crucial to use in an opportunistic way.*

*Ibid., 135-138. Significantly, the names that Marsden keeps mentioning in this section, besides that of Machen, are those of Bryan and Sunday, who are also serve as contrasts to Machen. “[T]he New School party of the nineteenth century helped to open the door for the growth of Presbyterial liberalism. At the same time, however, a conservative version of the New School tradition of activist revivalism and patriotic social reform was carried into the fundamentalist era by such leaders as Bryan and Sunday” (136).

Fundamentalism exhibits three themes according to Marsden:

The first is a tendency to identify both with the establishment and with outsiders. The establishment was changing. The fundamentalists, reacting against this change, stood against the establishment. But in their political and social involvement fundamentalists still identified with the establishment. Marsden does not believe a “consistent ideology” will account for this, but that it must be regarded as a paradox.

The second paradox consists of an ambivalence toward the evangelical heritage. Why was it that fundamentalists looked to such an innovator as D. L. Moody while they claimed to preserve the old time religion? How did individualism and private interpretation come to play such a big part in the collective effort to save a civilization? Marsden points out the contrast between the individualism which he calls the pietist impulse and the organized and collective effort he ascribes to the Calvinist tradition.

The third paradox was evident in the tension that existed between trust and distrust of the intellect. “This involves the strong ambivalence that provides this book with its recurring motif.” Scottish Common Sense Realism, which had been the established doctrine of respectable science in the 19th century, was still advocated by most fundamentalists. It was considered outdated by the 1920’s.

Marsden is interested in these paradoxes because he believes that fundamentalism has been more than simply a reaction to the encroaching advance of secular civilization. And he believes that a theological definition of fundamentalism alone is not adequate, for this leaves too much tension; the paradoxes of fundamentalism are too obvious for either alternative alone to be adequate. How does one account for these things?

The answer this thesis argues is that the fundamentalism of the first quarter of the twentieth century represented the meeting of two incompatible streams. One of those streams was protestant orthodoxy: the fundamentalists stood for theological orthodoxy and therefore reacted against modernism. Modernism, however, did not represent merely a theological position, but a position that entailed a secular culture and the secularization of American culture. Likewise, the fundamentalist position sought to resist the culture of modernism, although not through conscious reflection. The fundamentalists were those who reacted by taking refuge in popular culture.

Marsden chronicles the change in attitude toward culture that the fundamentalists described as they became increasingly aware of the threat posed by modernism.

Originally, the opponents of fundamentalism understood fundamentalism to be the last remains of a passing way of life. That Marsden does not entirely dismiss the idea is evident when he says that fundamentalism “was militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism”. Marsden agrees with the modernists since both understand fundamentalism as clinging to the old and opposing the new.

Marsden also considers Sandeen’s suggestion that theology was at the heart of the fundamentalist movement. Marsden adds to millenarianism the doctrines of inerrancy and dispensationalism. The reason Marsden thinks Sandeen’s idea is not adequate is that it does not account for the whole. “This broader fundamentalism in turn had wider roots, cultural as well as theological and organizational.” Marsden wants to understand fundamentalism in terms that account for the culture that shaped it and also in terms of the culture which it shaped. Still, Marsden does not want to dismiss a theological understanding of fundamentalism.

**********

One does have to wonder whether it is right to distinguish out the particular doctrines of millenarianism, inerrancy and dispensationalism. I don’t have enough research to go into it, and it isn’t the point of the thesis, but for most of us these doctrines are not departures from orthodoxy: they are orthodoxy. They should have an effect on Christianity when they are elaborated more carefully, but not change its trajectory. I think Sandeen and Marsden both take these doctrines as something that changes the trajectory of a part of Christianity and contributes to fundamentalism. I would understand the development of the doctrine of inerrancy as the natural outcome of the concerted attacks on the Bible that were being sustained. Orthodoxy must always after affirm inerrancy; but these authors would hardly agree.

And I wonder if the emerging historical consciousness that I have read Lukacs hint at–and need to read more, some of which is the idea that Collingwood wrote about and was in the air before and in his day, for example: what he says about Hegel–had something to do with turning the mind toward viewing things in a way that made the dispensational approach come to light. I’m not thinking about a particular elaboration of dispensationalism, but the idea of thinking about Scripture synthetically more systematically and of locating oneself in an order that includes all of history. I wonder in a great deal of ignorance: I’m spinning together a light and unsubtle idea about dispensationalism and a very wispy thread of the thing I think Lukacs and Collingwood describe. Still, I wonder.

For a quarter of a century George M. Marsden’s book on fundamentalism has been the definitive work in this field of study. In his work, Marsden refines all the previous views, adding to them, and arranging the whole so that the parts make better sense together.

As an aside, the staying power of Marsden’s book makes it all the more formidable. When Oxford put out the new edition 25 years later, he spent a year (from what I can tell) adding on a new appendix the size of a ThM thesis. It is thoroughly researched (one feels silly pointing that out) and deals with the developments in the literature since the first edition. But it does not change the main part of the book itself. You can even use the same pagination for all but the last section–thanks to the thoughtful editors at Oxford who expanded the size of the page and of the font, and still saved the scholars an awful lot of work. For Marsden’s work to remain the way it has, in the world of scholarly research, is no mean feat. Whatever he has to say stands well the test of time.

Ernest R. Sandeen wrote because he thought the understanding of fundamentalism that prevailed was too limited; he wanted to expand it. This prevailing understanding, characteristic of the works of Cole and Furniss, took fundamentalism as the rural reaction to urban secularism, a reaction which culminated in the Scopes trial. Sandeen did not disagree with the prevailing understanding as long as it was not offered as an exhaustive definition.

In the social sources from which it drew its strength fundamentalism was closely related to the conflict between rural and urban cultures in America. Its popular leader was the agrarian W. J. Bryan; its rise coincided with the depression of agricultural values after the World War; it achieved little strength in the urban and industrial sections of the country but was active in many rural states. The opposing religious movement, modernism, was identified on the other hand with bourgeois culture, having its strength in the cities and in the churches supported by the urban middle classes.

Sandeen wanted a deeper explanation because he maintained that fundamentalism itself existed before and continued long after the controversies in the twenties. This observation sheds some light on the reason those who went before him were not able to define fundamentalism as clearly: they were not taking a wide enough scope of time; their view was limited, myopic.

For Sandeen, the statistical evidence was enough to overthrow the notion that the fundamentalists represented the rural resistance of an urban encroachment; the fundamentalists were not all from the farm. In fact, they were mainly city dwellers and carried on their greatest ministries in urban centers. Besides, he argued, they did not go away after the controversy as their enemies predicted. If fundamentalism was just a reaction to secularism culminating in the defeat at the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, why was it still around during the 1960′s? What distinguished fundamentalism as a lasting movement from the controversy in which it was so famously defeated? The crucial matter, for Sandeen, was theological: “For it is millenarianism which gave life and shape to the Fundamentalist movement.” Therefore, Sandeen examined the history of millenarianism in order to find the roots of fundamentalism.

While fundamentalists held to a different explanation, still the mainstream perception of fundamentalism, as rehearsed by Norman F. Furniss, continued in the vein of Cole. The difference was that Furniss exhibited more condescension. “Equally obvious with violence as a characteristic of the movement was ignorance, even illiteracy.” He treats the bygone battles less as battles of ideals and more as the confrontation of the enlightened against the ignorant. Fundamentalism, for Furniss, was the last of a battle already settled in the nineteenth century but still carried on by the desperate remnant of those who had not realized they were already vanquished.

As Sandeen argues, Furniss used selective evidence. Besides that, how can the cause of ignorance, illiteracy and violence, egotism and sentimentality, result in the concerted effort of a large group of people over the decades? These things may be characteristics and tendencies, but not the heart of the movement; these qualities do not combine to drive people, they destroy them. Furniss’ explanation leaves much to be desired.

While Cole’s thesis of the confrontation of cultures had been a little degraded, it was still the basic understanding with which Furniss operated. This approach was set aside in 1970 with the publication of Sandeen’s work.

Stewart G. Cole. wrote one of the first books about fundamentalism. For him, the confrontation between the modernists and the fundamentalists was a confrontation of cultures.* Cole wrote with undisguised sympathy for the modernists, and he wrote only five years after the Scopes monkey trial. The value of his work is that it gives us the view of somebody who was there when the events took place, even though he is too hostile to portray fundamentalism dispassionately.

When he wrote, “Two cultures clashed within the Christian church,”** Cole meant that the culture of secularism and progress ran against the old ways; in his view, the fundamentalists wanted to keep the world from moving forward. Cole understood fundamentalism as a reaction to the progress of civilization: fundamentalism reacted against the culture that fostered such progress. Whatever else Cole was saying, it is clear that he believed the argument to be more about culture than about theology.

*Stewart G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1963, 1931), xi, 30, 35, 40, 52, 53, 64, 321, 328, 337.

**Ibid., 64.

Ok, once again I’m having troubles with the documentation, or its location, or something. Apparently, the last sentence is coming across as a bold assertion. You can see all the citations in the first footnote (an egregious thing, but I’m anticipating what I still received). I think the solution might be to insert a quotation right before the last sentence.

Of course, the problem could be that the whole thing is so repetitive that is just seems like I’m spinning my wheels and this is what is creating the impression that I’m just making a bold assertion in the last sentence. I suppose I could boil it all down to one paragraph that just says: Cole was there, he was a modernist, for him it was all a conflict of cultures, quotation.

But I think there is a gap between the last sentence and the rest of it. I might add:

Cole was not so interested in meeting the theological objections of fundamentalists as he was in finding a psychological explanation for their peculiar insistence on dogma. “It is just as clear that doctrinaires were unable to maintain their beliefs unconditioned. Psychologically, a fundamental became such for them, because it bore a vital relation to some desired outcome in a controversial situation.” It was the situation, the inevitable* change taking place in the world that drove the unnaturally dogmatic use of doctrine, in Cole’s view. He does not understand the fundamentalists as men who arrive at the situation with the doctrine, but who react to the situation by grasping their doctrine like never before. And if he were able to change their attitude toward the situation, which was the real obstacle, the doctrine would melt away. In this way Cole shows that he understood the fundamental problem to be cultural, not theological.

*Oh evitable! It does strike one how much an assumption that ways must change is necessary for the perpetuation of the liberal outlook in general.

Does that make sense?

Fundamentalism has always claimed to be nothing more than the old time religion. Scholars have not found this claim entirely satisfactory and have written many books to explain fundamentalism better. Since the beginning fundamentalism has been seen as a thing of the past and tied to a past culture, a notion that led many to predict its demise even from the first. The idea that fundamentalism must somehow be understood by taking culture into account has persisted, for it is found throughout the literature. A survey of the literature will demonstrate not only the presence of this idea, but the refinement of the idea, over time.

I start out with a generalization, but I think a pretty good one. My thinking is that it really cannot be denied and that it would look really pathetic for anybody to need a footnote to support that kind of a generalization. Where else can you go to hear special music about “Give Me the Old Time Religion”? Who preaches more on the book of Jude? Anyway, I’m being asked for citations and I don’t want to start out with citations on the very first sentence. I’ll go out of may way to avoid it just as much as I’ll go out of my way to begin with the generalization because it is everything in the grand scheme of things. I think it is too much already that I have a footnote in the introductory paragraph; it is pedantical.

I have spend a lot of time on this paragraph, and it still seems to be giving me trouble, but it is the first paragraph so it is going to take some work. What I need is a way to state the first sentence without seeming to push too much.

Fundamentalism has always claimed to be nothing more than the old time religion.

As a generalization, the statement that fundamentalism is nothing more than the old time religion is a pretty good one.

See, that sounds like I’m quoting somebody who said that (or just congratulating myself like I did above) and it is bit too conversational for what I’m doing. But it is going in the direction I want to go. How to fix it?