While in Oxford for the last two years on a research fellowship, I took a perverse delight on occasion in introducing myself in the Senior Common Room of my college, while sherry glasses tinkled before dinner, as a visiting scholar from a Bible college in small-town Saskatchewan with roots in Protestant fundamentalism. I was curious to see where the conversation might go after that. Not far. Indeed, fundamentalism is one of those terms loaded with stereotypes, a term that still connotes more than it denotes, despite the welter of finely tuned academic studies of the phenomenon.

I suspect that my colleagues at Oxford were working with a hazy notion of fundamentalism as something like what Richard Niebuhr described in an influential article on the movement in 1931—a doomed reaction of isolated and rural Americans against educated, urban elites. Mix with that a few modern images of machine gun-toting Shi'ite terrorists from the Middle East and the stereotype is complete. In a superb Ph.D. thesis, Michael Hamilton has described how from the 1920s until the early 1960s, scholars (like Niebuhr) viewed Protestant fundamentalism in Hobbesian terms. Its life would be nasty, brutish, and short. Long on caricature and short on exposition, this liberal view of fundamentalism is still influential. Hamilton notes that the "new liberals," while agreeing that fundamentalism is nasty and brutish, only regret that its life has not been short.

Thus a term originating in debates among American Baptists in the 1920s has become a key category in comparative religious studies. Parallels are drawn between American Protestant fundamentalists and militant religious traditionalists elsewhere in the world. This approach is taken, for example, in the massive multivolume Fundamentalism Project, edited by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, and popularized in the pbs series The Glory and the Power in 1992. Here is where the hazy image of the Arab extremist merges with the hell-fire, histrionic Protestant evangelist. Fundamentalism is widely used in the media with this generic sense of religiously inspired nativism. To borrow a metaphor from C. S. Lewis, this is the kind of phenomenological approach that observes the similarities between different ships as they weigh anchor, unfurl sails, catch the wind, and leave harbor, but that often takes little account of the very different destinations to which the ships are bound and the distinctive freight on board.

Another line of interpretation takes the freight and destination more seriously and treats American fundamentalism as a primarily religious protest movement, not simply a social reaction to modernity. This close reading of the movement is best exemplified by Ernest Sandeen's The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970) and George Marsden's classic, Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980). The strength of this school (which Hamilton calls the "conservative school" in contrast to the liberals; the echo of perennial political debates may be slightly misleading) has been its ability to reconstruct the whole intellectual world of the fundamentalists in context and to provide a convincing account of the origins and precursors of the movement.

Revive Us Again: The Reawakening

of American Fundamentalism

By Joel Carpenter

Oxford University Press

317 pp.; $25

Joel Carpenter's new book, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, builds on and extends the work of the "conservative school." He picks up where Marsden leaves off, in 1925, the year of the Scopes Monkey Trial debacle. But if Marsden and Sandeen looked more at what went on in fundamentalists' heads, Carpenter watches their feet pretty closely—where they go, what they do, with whom they do it, and so on. He is less interested in the reactionary side of fundamentalism (the militant mentalité) than in the reasons for their astonishing success. For while mainline denominations were singing the funeral dirge for fundamentalism in the 1930s, fundamentalism was in fact prospering, and, ironically, it was the mainline churches that were beginning their slow and steady hemorrhage in membership and morale.

The structure of Carpenter's book is provided by a strong narrative. He follows the story of Protestant fundamentalists as they withdrew into the American wilderness in the 1930s and '40s after having disappeared from notice in the media and lost influence in mainline denominations and public institutions. And then he tells the story of their recovery.

What happened during those years? Carpenter uses the experience of Donald Grey Barnhouse, a leading fundamentalist in Philadelphia, to illustrate the process of stigmatization that took fundamentalists into the wilderness. In 1932 Barnhouse was first censured by his presbytery for publicly criticizing the views of other Presbyterian ministers, and he then had his Sunday vespers radio broadcast yanked off CBS as part of a network-wide policy to silence sectarian religious broadcasters. Barnhouse's writings showed how much all this had stung. Increasingly, he called his readers to take up the opprobrium of following Christ in a wicked and perverse generation.

A major debate recurred during these years about whether fundamentalists were called to reform the church from within or to withdraw from the older denominations. Carpenter shows that increasingly a kind of de facto separatism occurred as a growing network of independent fundamentalist ministries became the focus of unity and identity for fundamentalists. Places like Moody Bible Institute or Wheaton College, with their allied ministries, could serve their alumni as a virtual denominational surrogate. Such organizations socialized generations of young people in the peculiar mores of fundamentalism. Sexual chastity, modesty in dress, and abstinence from alcoholic drink, coarse talk, dancing, and the theater—all of this enshrined an almost nostalgic ideal of clean-cut wholesomeness over against the fads of modern city life. Alongside the prohibitions were positive expectations of domestic piety, such as family prayer and Bible reading, and the firm but tenderhearted rearing of children.

Carpenter has an exceptional ability to place fundamentalist practice in context and to set it in relief against other traditions. He does this, for example, with the place of the Bible within the culture of fundamentalism:

A motto plaque or needlepoint sampler with a biblical phrase on it in one's home functioned much like an icon, crucifix, or phylactery. It was a visual reminder of spiritual truth, a badge of separation, and an act of witness to a culture whose aphorisms and images were increasingly secular.

Again, "going forward" at a meeting to make a public commitment to Christ is, for Carpenter, the "fundamentalist sacrament"; he compares this with the moment of epiclesis in the Catholic Mass, or the experience of speaking in tongues for Pentecostals—the point at which one expects a powerful sense of the holy. The "separated life" of the fundamentalists was also to be the "higher life." Carpenter sensitively expounds this ideal as a genuine religious aesthetic. By an act of consecration (again, usually "going forward"), one offered oneself to do whatever God demanded. In practice, this implied the willingness to accept a missionary call, since single missionary service overseas was a symbol of supreme surrender. This ideal was, in fact, the source of much of the energy for the expansive, mission-driven side of fundamentalism.

The "coming out" of fundamentalists provides the second half of Carpenter's story. Fundamentalists wanted another great awakening that would revive the church's integrity and power and restore the nation's religious character. Shut out of elite circles of intellectual discourse, fundamentalists learned to get the public's attention by direct appeal through the more populist media. Writes Carpenter:

Fundamentalists and other evangelicals were fashioning a contemporary religious style by making extensive use of the popular arts and the mass media: advertising, popular music and entertainment, broadcast journalism, and radio broadcasting itself. They were retooling revivalism … [and in so doing] regained the jaded public's attention and began their return from the margins of American public life.

Again there is an irony here that Carpenter highlights: antimodernist crusaders were using the latest techniques and styles to spread their old-time faith. Really, this irony structures the whole story of fundamentalist withdrawal and recovery during these years. The tendency to pull away from the world was continually qualified by the urgent desire to tell that same world about Jesus. The National Association of Evangelicals was formed in the early 1940s. By drawing together revivalist, pietist, and doctrinally conservative Protestants of many sorts, the NAE would help give rise eventually to the idea that "evangelicals" were a positive coalition, to be distinguished from militant fundamentalism. But it was not the headquarters of an organized campaign. It was rather a signal of a certain kind of impulse abroad among fundamentalists.

The Youth for Christ movement was another similar and more visible signal. In a largely forgotten but remarkable phenomenon, hundreds of thousands of young people attended weekly youth rallies in cities and towns across the nation by the end of World War II. On Memorial Day in 1945, some 70,000 people gathered in Soldier Field in Chicago for an open-air pageant. The rally was covered by the Chicago papers, the wire services, and Newsweek magazine. Remarks Carpenter, "Not since the Scopes trial had evangelical Christianity received such coverage, and this time most of it was friendly."

Alongside this youth movement was a heightened enthusiasm for foreign missions. While InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) was stimulating interest in missions on university campuses, Christian colleges were seeing an unprecedented student concern for foreign fields of service. Some one hundred members of the class of 1950 at Wheaton College, a quarter of all graduates, became missionaries. By the early 1950s, a quarter of the world's Protestant missionary force consisted of various sorts of conservative evangelicals from Canada and the United States. By the late 1940s, there was also a small group of fundamentalists who were eager to reform the movement intellectually. A coterie of more than a dozen fundamentalists was drawn to Harvard to earn doctorates in the mid-to-late forties. All were stirred by the vision of a "historic Christianity" that had more breadth and depth than the sectarian piety they had inherited. This vision came together with the formation of Fuller Theological Seminary, but the same impulse could be seen in the formation of the Evangelical Theological Society in 1949 and the emphasis upon Christian intellectual renewal within IVCF.

Panevangelical cooperation, the Youth for Christ movement, foreign missions enterprise, renewed intellectual activity—all of this was involved in the fundamentalist recovery. But the climax of Carpenter's narrative comes with the rise of Billy Graham and the national sensation created by his eight-week campaign in Los Angeles in September 1949. It was attended by a third of a million people. Time, Life, the Associated Press, the International News Service, and two London newspapers all took note. Carpenter shows the way in which Graham's ministry grew out of the impressive infrastructure for revivalist activity and the morale that fundamentalists had been building for years. "After years of alienation," Carpenter writes, "the fundamentalists, at least the more moderate and mannerly ones, were back."

Had the great national revival they hoped for come? It may be that such a dream was unrealistic in the fragmented, frenetic, and pluriform culture of midcentury America, but the new revivalism had nevertheless carved out a public space for itself.

Carpenter highlights a few conclusions. First, he stresses that fundamentalism should be seen as an episode in a longer evangelical story. Just as there was a Methodist era and a Holiness era within American evangelicalism, so there has been a "Fundamentalist era," in which the prevailing tone of the movement was taken from cultural strategies and adaptations of the fundamentalist leaders.

Second, fundamentalism flourished within the secular structure of American society. This setting did not so much inhibit religiosity (as secularization theorists argue) as make it possible for entrepreneurial movements to win a hearing, a following, and, eventually, a measure of respectability. Moreover, by pioneering the parachurch way of organizing religious life, fundamentalists hastened the demise of the whole denominational system.

Carpenter's parting shot is a summary of the paradoxical character of fundamentalism:

Fundamentalists could be deeply alienated from the mainstream of American culture while still yearning to engage that culture for the sake of the gospel. They could be profoundly sectarian in their desire to "come out and be separate" from secular society and liberal Protestantism, while on the other hand they spearheaded a powerful ecumenical impulse, based on a common commitment to spiritual renewal and evangelism. They could be petty and legalistic in their demands on each other's beliefs and behavior … . At the same time, however, the close communities that fundamentalists created gave millions of ordinary Americans the fellowship, moral accountability, and sense of direction they craved.

Easier to caricature than to describe, fundamentalism has held many ideals in tension. The fundamentalists had a frightful vision of the last days but also a more realistic outlook on their times than their liberal compatriots. They held fervently to the hope of both rapture and revival. They could be profoundly anti-intellectual but sustained a deep reverence for God's truth, which led some younger members to become scholars. They stood for old-time religion but used mass marketing and the mass media like no other religious persuasion. And they could be both self-righteous and self-mortifying.

This is an important book, bristling with insights into "Fundamentalism and American Culture" (to coin a phrase). But its insights are into fundamentalism and American culture. A number of recent studies have reconstructed the whole international network of which American fundamentalism was a part. Ian Rennie, for example, has shown how deep the British roots were to fundamentalism in Canada and America, and that fundamentalism was by no means simply an American export. David Elliot has traced the career of a number of fundamentalists whose identity and activity straddled the Canadian-American border, such as A. B. Simpson and P. W. Philpott.1 The fundamentalist era in evangelicalism was, in fact, a North Atlantic phenomenon (and Australia should be included as well).

Nonetheless, Carpenter's book is one of the best we have on fundamentalism. He reminds us that, while it is tempting to vilify fundamentalists, they represent a genuine religious tradition whose staying power and influence demand serious attention. Perhaps even, someday, before dinner in the common room of my Oxford college.

Bruce Hindmarsh is professor of church history and historical theology at Briercrest Biblical Seminary in Caronport, Saskatchewan, Canada. He is the author most recently of John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (Oxford University Press).

1. Ian Rennie, "Fundamentalism and the Varieties of North Atlantic Evangelicalism," in Evangelicalism, edited by Mark Noll, David Bebbington, and George Rawlyk (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 333-50; David Elliot, "Knowing No Borders: Canadian Contributions to American Fundamentalism," in Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States, edited by George Rawlyk and Mark Noll (McGill-Queens University Press, 1994), pp. 349-74.

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 20