Joel Carpenter
Revive Us Again
The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism
Oxford University Press, 384 pp., $ 30
As conventional wisdom had it at the time, Protestant fundamentalism was dead by the end of the 1920s. The fundamentalists -- so labeled because of their passionate defense of what they considered the "fundamentals" of Christianity (such as the divinity of Christ, his virgin birth and bodily resurrection, and other miraculous elements in the biblical record) -- had struggled for several decades against "modernizing" tendencies in mainline Protestantism, and they had at last lost the battle. Their efforts to gain control of denominational seminaries and missionary agencies had failed, and one of their most visible champions, William Jennings Bryan, had suffered humiliation in the infamous Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925.
But somehow, twenty years later, the fundamentalist cause turned out to have stayed very much alive. The most obvious sign of its vitality was the emerging career of the young evangelist Billy Graham, who conducted much- publicized rallies in Los Angeles and Boston in 1949 and 1950. Several prominent athletes, Hollywood personalities, and even organized-crime figures announced their conversions to evangelical Christianity, and William Randolph Hearst issued to his newspapers one of his last and most famous edicts -- reading, in its entirety: "Puff Graham."
What happened between 1930 and 1950 to bring about this utterly unpredicted revival of fundamentalism's fortunes? In his new study, Revive Us Again, Joel Carpenter offers a compelling and convincing narrative of those two decades. Picking up where George Marsden left off in his magisterial 1980 study, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925, Carpenter's book deserves to join Marsden's on any short list of major works in American religious history.
Like Marsden, Carpenter sees fundamentalists as full of "paradoxical tensions," not the least of which is their understanding of their place in American culture. Deeply embedded in the fundamentalists' collective psyche is the Puritan notion of America as divinely appointed among the nations. But the nineteenth-century crisis over Darwin -- together with the (not unrelated) increase in the influence of secularism in American public life -- reared a strong sense of cultural transition that, as Marsden argued, was not unlike an immigrant experience: a migration not of themselves but of the world around them, until evangelical Protestants in the twentieth century felt themselves gradually and mysteriously transported from the holy land of America, the New Israel, to the accursed land of America, the New Babylon.
The battles against theological modernism during the first years of this century only served to reinforce this mood of cultural pessimism. Having lost the struggle for their own mainline denominations, the fundamentalists came to see themselves even in the larger culture as a "remnant": the faithful minority who possessed "prophetic" knowledge of the world's descent into doom and certain damnation. The only hope for the future was the ushering in of a supernaturally initiated millennial Kingdom, and in the meantime the faithful remnant must concentrate on the spiritual rescue of the lost and the spiritual nurture of the faithful.
Much of Carpenter's narrative focuses on the intricate subculture the fundamentalists constructed to implement their mission. Even while the secularizing elites smugly assumed that "the old-time religion" was a thing of the past, the fundamentalists were building a massive network of independent organizations: youth ministries, evangelizing teams, Bible institutes, seminaries, missionary agencies, summer Bible conferences, Bible distribution societies, and so on. These organizations were theologically eclectic: advocates of the "Old Princeton" brand of Presbyterian Calvinism, for instance, managed to cooperate both with the relatively atheological pragmatists (who thought the only important thing was to "get the message out" ) and with the strictest dispensational theologians (who held the utter necessity for a theologically correct "Bible prophecy" form of faith). This subculture proved surprisingly transdenominational, with participants representing the newer independent "Bible churches" as well as pockets of conservatism within the more established bodies of fundamentalism.
During the first half of the twentieth century -- while the fundamentalists were building their grassroots networks -- the mainline Protestant bodies seemed content to maintain the more traditional denominational patterns they had won from the fundamentalists in the battles over modernism: Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Methodist, etc. Their own efforts at creating interdenominational organizations aimed primarily at creating high-level "national councils of churches" -- far less meaningful and, it would turn out, less powerful than the fundamentalists' local networks. (When it comes down to getting ordinary church folks from different denominations actually to cooperate in common projects, Billy Graham's crusades and the evangelical Gideon Bible-distribution projects are far more "ecumenical" than most mainline denominational projects that carry that label.)
In all of this, the liberals proved oblivious to the fact that they were being outflanked by the backwoods theological opponents they thought they had defeated long before. As Carpenter puts it, although the process was not very visible for several decades, the fundamentalists were helping to create "a major shift among the basic institutional carriers of American religious life. " The results are quite obvious today: the mainline "denominations have been losing members, income, and influence while special-purpose, non- denominational religious agencies have grown, multiplied, and taken on increasing importance in shaping and carrying people's religious identity." Carpenter underscores the irony in this situation. Forced by the Protestant establishment to move to the margins, the fundamentalists guaranteed their own survival by initiating "a trend that has led to the weakening of the most central and powerful corporate expressions of American religion."
Most scholars and social commentators missed these dynamics, and they still fail to comprehend similar developments today. The common pattern, for example, of treating the Promise Keepers simply as a throwback to patriarchy ignores the fact that it is an important transdenominational religious movement that utilizes a powerful grassroots religious communications system. A key weakness in the reigning perspective on such things, Carpenter argues, is the unquestioned assumption that "modernization always produces secularization." To challenge this presupposition is to consider the possibility that fundamentalism is in fact one very successful strategy for adapting to modernity. Fundamentalists have never failed to take advantage of the new: Carpenter provides much evidence of their creative use of radio broadcasting, and a similar story can also be told of more recent ventures in "televangelism."
Such use of new technologies to spread old religion is not so much an irony of fundamentalism as an astonishingly clear illustration of its paradoxical tensions. When fundamentalists feel marginalized, they draw upon a rich store of theological and spiritual resources for interpreting their social location in "remnant" terms. But they never really lose the deep hope that they might somehow rescue the culture itself. "Revival" is always at least a distant possibility in the fundamentalist scheme, and at the first hint of an opportunity to exercise cultural influence, the revivalist motif again becomes dominant -- with a concomitant retrieval of those "chosen nation" themes that had been suppressed during more pessimistic times. In giving us a better understanding of the complexities of fundamentalists' cultural self- understanding, Carpenter provides some helpful insights into the American experience as such.
The provost at the evangelical Calvin College in Michigan, Carpenter is a reliable and insightful guide to these shiftings, and he is candid about his own affection for fundamentalism. He looks at the movement from the perspective of an evangelical who wants to honor its strengths while exploring its weaknesses. And in making his case he is not afraid to aim a few critical arrows at his fellow "post-fundamentalist" evangelicals.
The attitude of "post-fundamentalism" has been around for some time -- a sort of imagining among certain evangelicals that their own prior generations of theologians and churchgoers have become an embarrassment to them. In the 1950s, for instance, Edward John Carnell -- a leader among the "new evangelicals" who chided their fundamentalist forebears for anti- intellectualism and "other-worldliness" -- labeled fundamentalism "orthodoxy gone cultic" and spoke disparagingly of the pettiness of the movement's attitudes and legalisms.
What Carpenter rightly sees is an element naivete embodied in such criticisms, whether made in the 1950s or today. All religious movements that accomplish something important are necessarily "cultic," and Carnell and his colleagues failed to acknowledge that in their efforts to improve on what the older fundamentalists had done, they were making use of the very subculture that they were attempting to alter. "Fundamentalism was often intellectually lame, provincial, petty, mean-spirited, stultifying and manipulative," as Carpenter puts it, "but it could be enabling and energizing as well, and by the 1940s it had produced a restive and visionary younger generation."
Revive Us Again reminds us that those "who chide a prior generation for not seeing its own foibles and limitations should know that some day their descendants will say the same of them." But Carpenter is not content simply to have us tolerate the fundamentalists' shortcomings without also recognizing their very real strengths.
They nurtured, he tells us, "their own visions of duty and opportunity. They were able to create close-knit and supportive fellowships. They had plenty of outlets for inventiveness and entrepreneurial expansion, and they enjoyed life-changing religious experiences that came to them in forms and language they had fashioned."
In a time when "fundamentalist" is often used as a convenient vilification by those who take delight in disparaging any strong religious conviction, Carpenter gives us reason to hope that the fundamentalists will have many more reawakenings.
To lose their passionate witness would be, for those of us who believe in such things, an inestimable injury to the health of our immortal souls. But it would also be, regardless of one's religious beliefs, a terrible hurt to the soul of America -- that nation called to righteousness, that city on a hill, that almost chosen people.
Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.