SPECIAL SECTION

After Fundamentalism

It has become fashionable to claim, as a B&C reader recently wrote (Letters, Sept./Oct.), that "the term 'fundamentalist' is today no more than a code word that has little descriptive content." I can't help wondering if the people who make such claims have ever spent a Sunday in a fundamentalist church, or listened to the radio late at night on the way across Texas.

Yes, the term is often used with a sneer, but it need not be, and neither the manner in which certain people abuse it nor the endless arguments over its precise boundaries can alter the historical reality of fundamentalism as a religious movement—one that has had an enormous impact on the character of American evangelicalism.

The four essays that follow consider this legacy from diverse perspectives. George Marsden contrasts the world of 1947—when evangelicalism and fundamentalism were not yet clearly differentiated—with the world of 1997. Bruce Hindmarsh reviews Joel Carpenter's history of fundamentalism from the debacle of the 1920s to the beginnings of Billy Graham's ministry. Alister McGrath recounts the vital role of J. I. Packer in "the battle for the Bible" that threatened to divide the church in the 1970s. And Doug Frank argues that evangelicals are crippled by a rigidity of thought inherited from fundamentalism. "Just as it stultifies genuine love," Frank writes, "the command economy of evangelical rationalism stultifies genuine thought."

After fundamentalism? Or still wrestling with it?

-JW

1947

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Imagine a time when no one you knew had a television. You were far more likely to know someone who lived on a farm than in a mass-produced suburb. Travel by train was much more common than by plane. Interstate highways were two lanes, and most cars were black. The South was solidly Democratic, not quite sure it wanted to be in the Union, and not air-conditioned. Most Americans took racial segregation for granted and enjoyed laughing together at Amos 'n Andy. The "better" neighborhoods and country clubs banned Jews as a matter of course. Asian Americans were exotic. A woman in a leading profession was a novelty.

Looking back at a time when all these things were taken for granted, it may be difficult for evangelical Christians today to imagine the world of their counterparts in 1947, when Fuller Theological Seminary was founded. In addition to sharing all the above attitudes, evangelicals in the immediate postwar years were still very much shaped by the culture of nineteenth-century revivalism. They were set apart by prohibitions of the classic vices of the barroom and the city: drinking, smoking, dancing, card-playing, and theater or movie attendance. They had built their own subculture of revival, where they sang gospel songs of Ira D. Sankey or Fanny J. Crosby and learned of the preeminent duty to witness. They had also been shaped by fundamentalism. They knew their dispensational charts, and they opposed Protestant modernists. They had an intense distrust of Catholics. Like most Americans, they feared communism and valued American freedoms. They worried about the bomb, but were glad that only "we" had it. They viewed America as sin-ridden and, if revival did not come, condemned; yet they were enthusiastic patriots.

In the wider American culture, the agenda shaped by World War II dominated public debate. Forsaking traditional isolationism, Americans suddenly found themselves at the center of world affairs. How should they lead? What basis did the free world have for rebuilding civilization? What answers did it have to communism? Was there a moral basis for rebuilding Western civilization and reshaping the world in its image? Or was secular science the best hope?

In these debates, so far as the mainstream culture was concerned, the heirs to revivalist fundamentalism did not exist. Mainstream Protestants or ex-Protestants controlled American culture. Catholics were too large a block to be ignored, but after the war mainline Protestant hostility to Catholicism reached a peak. The shapers of a unified America were deeply opposed to sectarianism, large or small. They regarded sectarian Protestants as leftovers from the past whose primitive religious styles would disappear once the march of science and technology brought their rural enclaves into the cultural mainstream.

Fundamentalists, despite their numbers, could thus be dismissed or ignored. Charles and Grace Fuller maintained an audience of some 15 to 20 million in this golden age of radio and were among the best-known people in America, yet they seldom received major coverage from the secular press. In his 1946 publication, Religion in America, Dean Willard L. Sperry of Harvard Divinity School confidently announced "the passing of the religious revival from the American scene," explaining that Billy Sunday, who flourished in the World War I era, had represented "the final degeneration of what had been one of our major religious institutions." 1

Despite their invisibility in the cultural mainstream, the heirs to fundamentalism nourished grand ambitions. Fuller Seminary cofounder Harold Ockenga published an article in 1947 asking, "Can Fundamentalists Win America?" Taking his title from a series of anti-Catholic articles in the Christian Century, "Can Catholicism Win America?," Ockenga was addressing fellow "fundamentalists," whom he scolded for being too divisive. Only with a broader unity, such as represented by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), founded in 1942, was there hope for a fundamentalist comeback. Ockenga held out the seemingly fantastic hope that evangelicals could once again become a major force in American life. At the Fuller Seminary opening, he preached on "The Challenge to the Christian Culture of the West," calling for the rebuilding of Western civilization on evangelical Protestant principles.

Such rhetoric seemed farfetched, because the heirs to fundamentalism had neither political power nor cultural influence. Most of the coalition had given up on politics. Dispensational premillennialism was at the height of its influence. World affairs were interesting primarily as they pointed to fulfillments of prophecies that pointed toward Jesus' imminent return. Carl McIntire, a rival of Ockenga and antagonist of Fuller Seminary, preached politics on the radio, but as an alarmist warning to "come out and be separate," not as the basis for political organization. Carl F. H. Henry, of the original Fuller faculty, published his Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947, calling for evangelical social transformation. Later it was recognized as a landmark; but at the time, few paid attention.

One of the most difficult things for evangelicals today to understand about 1947 is that "fundamentalism" and "evangelicalism" were not yet differentiated. Although Ockenga preferred the term evangelical, that term was still used as a self-description by some liberal Protestants and was not in wide use as a synonym for conservative. Fundamentalist, though having pejorative overtones in the wider culture, was the better recognized term for the broad coalition of conservative revivalist Protestants who emerged from the controversies of the 1920s. True, Ockenga had been feuding with the bombastic McIntire for a number of years, but other lines were not yet clearly drawn. Bob Jones, Sr., had been an officer in the NAE. During Fuller Seminary's first year, Carl Henry invited Jones to speak in the chapel. The evangelist came and delivered a fiery warning against intellectual pride. The break was impending, and soon separatism would be a test for most "fundamentalists." Nonetheless, in 1947 Henry and Jones thought of themselves as in the same camp.

The "fundamentalist" coalition had always had two sides. All fundamentalists opposed modernist theology and various "worldly" trends they associated with modernity. For some the warfare against such enemies became their most conspicuous identifier. But fundamentalists also insisted on preaching the gospel. Revivalism was the best hope for iniquitous America, and missions were the only hope for the world. Many in the antimodernist coalition, such as Ockenga and Charles E. Fuller, felt that fundamentalist contentiousness was hurting their witness. While they kept their doctrinal guard up higher than most evangelicals would be comfortable with today, they still accentuated the positive. They did not want to lose touch with the American culture they had to reclaim.

While the prospects for this little-known movement looked bleak in 1947, there were some reasons for visionaries to hold out hope. Joel Carpenter's fine new study, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, describes a post-World War II movement that, despite its endemic contentiousness, was brimming with vitality. During the war, youth rallies, notably those associated with Youth for Christ, had been an immense success. The war opened up unprecedented opportunities for American missions and provided a new world consciousness. National revival, the one resource left to the movement, was at least imaginable. The times were ripe. Ockenga and his associates prayed for a new Jonathan Edwards who could combine revival with intellect. Lacking that, they hoped at least that their seminary could provide some intellectual backbone for popular evangelism. Charles Fuller already gave them national visibility. When two years later Billy Graham emerged from the Youth for Christ movement, they found a youthful prophet who could engage the American Nineveh.

1997

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So much has changed in evangelicalism since those pretelevision, pre-Graham days that we can only highlight the

major differences.

The most striking is the astonishing success of the renewed evangelicalism that grew out of the old fundamentalist coalition. Today's evangelical coalition is better known and more influential than the inclusivist old-line ecumenical Protestantism. When was the last time you heard about the National Council of Churches? The older denominational allegiances have faded, and even within the old-line churches, evangelical voices are gaining strength. Wheaton College faculty are increasingly featured in the pages of the Christian Century. Liberal Protestant leadership has done poorly in convincing the younger generation that church is necessary if religion is defined essentially as liberal morality. Evangelicalism in the meantime has become increasingly visible. Today one is not surprised to learn of evangelical prayer in a congressional caucus or in an NFL pregame huddle. It's way OK.

This success was not mapped out at any central headquarters. It was not the result of plans by Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, or even Billy Graham, although these national leaders and others made significant contributions. Rather, it resulted from the efforts of thousands of individuals, with often conflicting but ultimately complementary visions, who built myriad ministries. The evangelical ascendancy was a remarkable work of God, but also a triumph of American free enterprise. In ecclesiastical terms, it was the triumph of the parachurch and local churches over the old denominations. A parachurch institution such as Fuller Seminary was in an excellent position to catch this wave. While institutional wave catching requires skilled leadership, which Fuller Seminary got from David Allan Hubbard, it should not be mistaken for creating the wave.

This success has been marked by the triumph of the positive revivalist dimensions of the old fundamentalism over its defensive sectarian tendencies. Joel Carpenter points out that fundamentalism was by far the most influential evangelical movement of the 1925-50 era. Few evangelicals escaped the influences of the embattled sensibilities that the contests with modernism brought. While something of that heritage remains within evangelicalism today, the recent decades, says Carpenter, have seen the increasing influence of the charismatic-Pentecostal style. In 1947, Pentecostalism was still on the obscure cultural margins, even among most evangelicals. The charismatic movement had not yet been born. Today, not only have these movements experienced vast growth, but their successes have inspired comparable styles even among many who do not share charismatic doctrines. One can see this in styles of worship, in the ubiquitous praise songs and overhead projectors. Preaching is still in a revival mode, but has turned toward an upbeat emphasis on the believer's experience and its life-changing benefits in everyday relationships.

While such shifts within evangelicalism are noteworthy, even more remarkable is the way in which evangelicals have renegotiated their relationship to mainstream American culture. Carpenter observes that midcentury fundamentalists maintained a "finely tuned sense of alienation from the cultural mainstream." They did not reject the American economic system and its rewards, and they were most loyal patriots, but they had a strong sense of being cultural outsiders. Their strict behavioral codes, their dispensationalism, their strict doctrinalism all reinforced their sense of difference.

Today there is still a well-orchestrated sense of alienation from the cultural mainstream, but the tuning is in a much different key. On this point, we will be best helped by a study by evangelical sociologist Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, forthcoming next year. Based on in-depth interviews with self-identified American evangelicals, Smith finds that evangelicals still define themselves as different from the cultural mainstream. While they are notably orthodox in their affirmations of fundamental evangelical doctrines, they are seldom doctrinally militant. Concern over the inerrancy of Scripture, for instance, which played such an important role in intraevangelical and fundamentalist battles during the first 30 years of Fuller Seminary's history, is seldom offered as a group boundary marker. Most of the old behavior prohibitions no longer define group identity. Instead, political concerns, focused on issues of family and sexuality, have arisen dramatically as group identifiers. Of course, there are many exceptions and variations on these themes. Yet, in astonishing contrast to 50 years ago, evangelicals are considerably more likely to see politics as an important expression of faith than are more liberal Protestants.

Evangelicals today still wrestle with the question of what makes them different, but they do so increasingly as cultural insiders. Their newfound political influence is related to their rising economic status. Many of them are affluent, college-educated suburbanites, hardly distinguishable from other Americans of their class. They are much more likely to talk about relationships and self-fulfillment than about sin and self-denial. Aside from politics, they typically have difficulty saying what makes them different, other than that they aspire to be honest, decent, caring, and patriotic Americans. On many such issues, they seem to espouse about the same sorts of values that might be expressed in the chit-chat on the local news.

For Christians, success is fraught with dangers, especially the danger of transforming Christianity into a narcissistic humanism. Much of the message of evangelicalism today is oriented toward self-fulfillment: success in relationships, success in marriage, success in business, success in living the good life, success in political action, success in physical healing. As good as all these things may be, we need to stop and ask, on the one hand, how much are we being shaped by late-twentieth-century American values and, on the other, how much is this powerful Christian movement contributing to a genuine reformation of our priorities in the light of God's Word?

It may well be that evangelicals today are no more compromised by their culture than were their forebears in the fundamentalist era. In retrospect, we can see that Christians in every age make huge tradeoffs, all too often letting the culture define the gospel rather than the gospel reshape the culture. If true Christianity is found only among radical followers of Jesus' teachings who have turned away from every cultural idol, then Christianity is a vastly smaller movement than most of us imagine. Radical Christianity is also, thank God, a revelation of God's grace for the undeserving. That gives us hope, but it still does not let us off the hook regarding Jesus' commands for discipleship. In every era, as in every individual life, we must take stock to see where we really are and what reformation may be demanded of us.

If history has any lesson for us in this regard, it is that the church is often most healthy when it is at odds with the culture's standards. That does not mean that we have to renounce the evangelical successes of the past 50 years, but it suggests that we should view them as an occasion for chastening self-examination as much as for celebration.

George M. Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. This article first appeared in slightly different form in Fuller Theological Seminary's Theology, News and Notes.

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1. Even today, the invisibility of revivalist evangelicals in the mainstream lens has not been entirely overcome. Martin Marty, who points out Dean Sperry's quaint assessments in his own admirably comprehensive history, Modern American Religion, Vol. 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 (University of Chicago Press, 1996), nonetheless mentions Charles E. Fuller only in a subordinate clause as cofounder of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 18