Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism

Digression One: Really?

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Over several essays I have been attempting to describe the intellectual and social influences that were operating within the early fundamentalist movement. One of the earliest essays offered an overview of Scottish Common Sense Realism in which I suggested that most early Fundamentalists (among others) absorbed this philosophy from their intellectual milieu. Furthermore, I argued that Common Sense Realism had a definite and rather negative effect upon Fundamentalism.

Numbers of people have written to inform me of my several mistakes. The first is supposed to be that Common Sense Realism isn’t really anything new because people have always made their real decisions on the basis of common sense. The second is that Common Sense Realism could not have affected early Fundamentalists all that much because they were Biblicists and not philosophers. The third is that the effects of Common Sense Realism cannot be as dire as I hinted.

In the present essay I wish to respond only to the first objection. The second really requires no response except to refer the reader to the rather substantial literature on the subject.¹ The third merits a separate discussion.

Is it true ordinary people (as opposed to philosophers) have always acted on the basis of common sense? One fellow in particular was quite definite. “If you see a cow in a field,” he said, “You can just point to it and say, ‘That’s a cow.’” As far as he was concerned, this is just common sense, and it describes the way that people have always thought and acted.

No.

Fundamentalism as Defined by Fundamentalists

In 1920 Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Northern Baptist paper The Watchman-Examiner, coined the word “Fundamentalists” to describe those “who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal” against theological liberalism. Laws’ definition of Fundamentalism was essentially theological, concerned with preserving orthodox doctrine. Yet within sixty years Fundamentalism had become a word to describe religious extremism of every kind. Fundamentalism is no longer a label for only orthodox American Protestants; today, Islamic terrorists, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Hindu extremists are all considered Fundamentalists by the popular media, academics, and even many religious historians. “Fundamentalism” has become a catch-all term for any religious “dangerous other.”

Fundamentalism as Defined by Modernists

Unsurprisingly, theological modernists in the 1920s and 30s contested the meaning of Fundamentalism. Rather than seeing Fundamentalists as heroic preservers of sound doctrine, modernists accused Fundamentalists of being narrow-minded, backward pedants who obstinately refused to update Christianity to reflect modern times. In his famous 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Harry Emerson Fosdick, modernist pastor of New York’s First Presbyterian Church, argued that “we must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.” Modernists believed that Fundamentalism was a movement at the cultural margins of early twentieth century America. Thus Fosdick had noted that the strength of Fundamentalism lay in the “Middle West.” The 1925 Scopes Trial, and the coverage of the trial by influential Northeastern reporters like H. L. Mencken, encouraged this perception of Fundamentalism. So despite the fact that Fundamentalism was actually a predominately middle class, urban movement, H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1937 entry on “Fundamentalism” in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (vol 5, New York City: MacMillan) declared that “in the social sources from which it drew its strength Fundamentalism was closely related to the conflict between rural and urban cultures in America.” Niebuhr believed that it was modernism that found “its strength in the cities and in the churches supported by the urban middle classes.”

Fundamentalism and Sentimentalism

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

The evangelical mixture from which Fundamentalism developed made serious concessions to populism. Charles Finney took those concessions to an extreme by patterning the inner ministry of the church after the worlds of commerce, politics, and entertainment. Finney made these adaptations at the precise moment when popular culture was coming into existence. The result was that the predecessors of Fundamentalism invested heavily in adapting their Christianity to popular culture. Fundamentalism inherited this link with popular culture and has perpetuated it rather consistently through the years.

Popular culture came into its own during the Victorian-Edwardian era.¹ It provided a channel through which Victorian influences began to affect the lived Christianity of most American evangelicals, and consequently of the Fundamentalists who came after them. While Fundamentalists have not been alone in attempting to assimilate popular culture into Christianity, they have been among the foremost.

One of the main characteristics of Victorian popular culture was its sentimentalism. Victorians did not invent sentimentalism, but they made it a significant aspect of their mental and emotional furniture. As the predecessors of Fundamentalism absorbed Victorian popular culture, they imported its sentimentalism into their Christianity.²

Sentimentalism is more than simple overindulgence in emotion. It is a combination of two factors. First, it attaches the wrong degree or kind of emotion to an object. Second, it pursues emotion for the sake of the emotion itself.

Fundamentalism and Populism

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Prior to Thomas Reid and Scottish Common Sense Realism, people typically recognized a distinction between appearances (whether understood as perceptions, phenomena, or, in Locke’s case, ideas) and reality. From antiquity until the late Middle Ages, this distinction had produced two effects upon the way that most people thought about reality. First, they reckoned that whatever reality they encountered had to be interpreted—and not everyone was in an equally good position to do the interpreting. Second, they believed that reality possessed dimensions of meaning or significance that stretched well beyond sensory awareness. Grasping those levels of meaning was also something that not everyone was equally qualified to do.

Common Sense Realists denied the distinction between appearance and reality. They insisted that perceiving subjects have direct and unmediated access to reality itself. Consequently, reality does not need to be interpreted—it is as it appears to be. This move had the effect of placing every person on an equal footing for understanding any aspect of reality.

As presented by people like Reid and Dugald Stewart, Common Sense Realism was a responsible if misguided academic option. Ironically, however, many of the people who appropriated and applied Reid’s conclusions would not have been capable of understanding his arguments. Chief among them were Americans.

Even before Reid, Americans had begun to affirm the competence of the ordinary person in all matters. This perspective is called populism. The harshness of the American frontier and the necessity of individual accomplishment tended to negate aristocratic influences. The sense that they were starting anew gave Americans an antipathy toward traditions. The arrival of Common Sense Realism confirmed the populist prejudice and opened the throttle for its acceleration. This process continued throughout the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian periods.