Fundamentalism & Evangelicalism

The Social Shift

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9.

To hell with the Twentieth Century!
—Billy Sunday, New York City, April 15, 1917

Ideas always precede movements. Movements (by which I mean large numbers of people sharing a common set of concerns and working together toward a common goal) grow out of ideas. As the idea turns into the movement, however, other ideas and influences get mixed in. The result is that movements rarely or never reflect purely the ideas that produced them.

The Fundamentalist Movement embodies the Fundamentalist idea only imperfectly. One of the most common mistakes in discussing Fundamentalism is to confuse the two, to speak of the movement as if it were the idea or vice versa. The idea of Fundamentalism (which we have not yet discussed) is certainly a component in the Fundamentalist movement, but Fundamentalism as a movement has also assimilated other ideas and ceded to other influences.

Attempting to tell the story of Fundamentalism, I have tried to describe some of the intellectual and social influences that shaped the early Fundamentalist movement. Fundamentalism emerged as an identifiable movement around 1920, but it came from and displayed the characteristics of an earlier American evangelicalism. I have suggested that this earlier evangelicalism was deeply influenced by at least three trends: Scottish Common Sense Realism, populism, and sentimentalism. Though not alone in succumbing to these influences, Fundamentalists certainly did evidence them.

My thesis has been that the early Fundamentalist movement was deeply influenced by Common Sense Realism, populism, and sentimentalism. Over the past several essays I have taken a digression, answering certain objections to this thesis. First, I tried to show how Common Sense Realism represented a metaphysical dream that differed substantively from the metaphysical dream of premodernity. Second, I tried to demonstrate how a genuinely historical-grammatical (literal) hermeneutic need not rely upon either Common Sense or populism. Finally, I attempted to explain the difference between congregational polity and that version of church democracy that grows out of American populism.

Because of these three influences, the Fundamentalist movement was never dedicated purely to defending the faith. To some extent, its defense of the faith always presumed and included a defense of the ideals of Common Sense, populism, and sentimentalism. In other words, the early Fundamentalists were men of their times, reflecting their own situatedness and displaying the concerns not only of historic Christianity but also of their own intellectual and social location.

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.”