University of Virginia Library

Ch 6: Legitimizing the Movement

The New Englanders are a People of God Settled in those which were once the Devil's Territories, and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his possession.

--Cotton Mather(1692)

The "big picture" of evangelicals-and-fundamentalists-turned-political cannot start with the Washington for Jesus rally in 1980 or the Moral Majority in 1979. Most journalists and commentators make that mistake. They stop short of looking beyond the immediate scene to answer the question: Where did all this activism come from?

The fact is that the roots of the cultural revolution now underway, including televangelism, are sunk deep in the history of belief, specifically the belief that America is a special nation holding a covenant with God, with dominion as the payoff for faithfully honoring it.

The American quest for dominion actually began in another land across the ocean, in the hands of the English Puritans. The Puritan "Awakening" during the early 1600s was a movement aimed at "purifying" and reforming the Church of England.

But, as often happens in history, within a generation the Puritans had become more revolutionaries than reformers within their own society. They held the heretical view that the Bible alone was absolutely authoritative, an assumption that potentially undermined im-

---

97

portent customs and traditions of the Anglican Church. What they found in the Bible was even more heretical still. They believed that an individual could communicate directly with God and that the power of the Almighty could transform the hearts of individuals.

This doctrine "privatized" religion, making it a personal matter between the individual and God. The authority of any religious leader or church lost ground because, in the final analysis, only the individual could say what claims God made on his or her behavior. The impact of this was not sudden but, over the long haul, it has been the most radical doctrinal transformation in the history of Christendom. Indeed, the effects of the privatization of faith are still unfolding.

The Puritans also believed in the possibility of radical social transformation and the creation of God's Kingdom on Earth. [1] They were stern Calvinists, believing that some among them were "saints" exclusively predestined by God for salvation. Worldly success accrued to those who enjoyed the blessed status of being foreordained for the Kingdom of God. They viewed thrift, diligence, and hard work as virtues; by practicing them, they frequently did prosper.

These budding capitalists were mavericks in a society yet to emerge fully from an older economic and spiritual order of things. The English Crown was politically unstable and increasingly intolerant of this growing, influential set of misfits. So, fleeing persecution or the threat of persecution, the Puritans found their way to North America in great numbers.

By 1640, approximately 60,000 Puritans had settled in the colonies, principally in New England but also southward along the Eastern Seaboard. Such a large influx had a profound influence on these fragile societies. By virtue of sheer numbers as well as aggressive beliefs, the Puritans overran other religious perspectives and made millennial Calvinism the dominant theology in the colonies for nearly a century. They gave the new land its core culture, with the idea of a special covenant with God at its heart. [2] They also contributed a value that would have enduring importance for later generations of Americans: freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.

In tracing the story of God's covenant with America, the concept of awakening is critical. For awakenings are signposts of Americans' repeated attempts to rework their understanding of the covenant-to make it "fit" their circumstances-and the terms under which they

---

98

must live up to it. Revivals merely reach the already converted, recommitting individual souls but breaking little new ground outside a narrow spiritual community. Awakenings, on the other hand, reshape whole civilizations and alter history. They touch great numbers, changing their most fundamental understanding of culture and their visions of where society is, or should be, headed. Revivals last a specified length of time; awakenings may take a generation or more to work themselves out.

In the mid-1700s the colonies experienced what historians call the First Great Awakening, a phenomenon that not only revised the entire notion of covenant that the Puritans had transplanted here, but also created the necessary cultural foundation for the American Revolution a generation later.

By the early 1700s the colonies had lost much of their religious vitality. This was an era when church membership was definitely a matter of social class, when wealthier families owned private pews toward the front of the church while their poorer brethren sat or had to stand in the back. These churches conducted a staid, reserved, formal style of worship, fine for the refined but inappropriate for the common man and those who lived farther inland on the expanding frontier.

Most urban dwellers did not belong to these upper-class congregations. In fact, historians estimate only about 4 percent of the colonial population was churchgoing. Many living on farms simply had no church within reachable distance. In short, a very significant proportion of the population, regardless of their tastes or perceived religious needs, went unchurched.

What precipitated the awakening was the arrival in 1739 of dynamic British evangelist George Whitefield. An Anglican-turned-Methodist, Whitefield captivated audiences with his charismatic, energetic preaching style. More important than his style, however, was his message. Whitefield preached Arminianism, the belief in human reason and free will to choose the grace of redemption offered by Christ, rather than predestination.

Other notable clergymen, among them Jonathan Edwards, quickly adopted the idea that no one was either irrevocably damned to hell or guaranteed salvation. Many older Puritan and Congregational

---

99

churches regarded the emotional, "evangelical" preachers with contempt and horror, but their influence spread like wildfire nonetheless. From New England to Georgia, thousands converted to this "new light" on the Gospel message.

There were good reasons for its popularity. In many ways the "new light" was a message whose time had come. It had gradually become apparent to many that predestination simply was not compatible with the vast opportunities of the frontier. Glum Calvinist fatalism rang a hollow note in the middle of the burgeoning, energetic environment of the prospering colonies.

Part of the problem with the doctrine of predestination was its pessimistic premillennialism.

Millennialism generally refers to the expectation that Christ will return (soon or at some future time) to battle the forces of Satan at Armageddon, rule the world for a thousand years, and hold a final judgment of all souls. Premillennialists believe that this world is hopelessly corrupt and depraved beyond redemption, so that only Christ's imminent return can rescue it from Satan's clutches. Postmillennialists, alternatively, believe that Christians must create a foundation or early transformation before Christ can return to rule for the millennium.

Arminianism, on the other hand, was quite comfortable with its secular counterpart of opportunity and achievement. Dominion and empire-building struck many as closely tied to individualism and egalitarianism. The Puritans may have first kindled the thought that the Kingdom of God could actually be built on the North American continent, but they had no monopoly on it.

The First Great Awakening reshaped religious values and ideas not simply because its dynamic preachers appealed to less-educated colonists. More important, this cultural transformation democratized the Puritans' old exclusionary covenant, and in so doing it wiped away assumptions about predestination. Dominion became the promise for all who would enter into a righteous covenant with God, not just for some members of some sects.

The awakening had dimensions beyond religion. It created the conditions for nation- building and political revolution in two ways. First, the awakening offered the colonies a new set of values and hopes that

---

100

rose above any local boundaries or religious groups. George Whitefield's ecumenical message would give the young Republic an important source of cultural unity to transcend regional differences. [3]

Second, the personal conversion experience had important political spillover. Historian R. C. Gordon-McCutchan calls this "the irony of evangelical history," that men and women trying to cope with personal or spiritual problems by turning to an "inner" religion of personal transformation can be led to engage in social upheaval and revolution. The "rebirth" of conversion loosens their ties to the older order; indeed, new spirituality may even alienate them from it. Intense religious experiences often prime people for other changes as well. [4]

In fact, the optimism and sense of empowerment that the First Great Awakening brought to many individuals eventually created a sense of postmillennial destiny, a feeling that improvement was possible, not just of individuals but even of society. It was heady stuff. Suddenly the tables turned. The covenant now rested on the efforts of Americans and no longer on a passive, predestined elect.

Man's obligations to the Deity, in covenant terms, were rethought. Now they called him to reach out into the world-to build a better society, to resist evil, to overthrow tyranny. This theological idea- that men and women were the masters of their own fates-is probably the most important and yet underappreciated idea in American history.

Thus, the secular consequence of the First Great Awakening was the creation of a new political philosophy that became the basis for legitimizing the young Republic. But make no mistake: While these values were ecumenical and nondenominational, they were never secular. They emerged in an overtly biblical context. In the Arminian scheme of things, God's Providence may have included all Americans, but it was still His. Even with the First Amendment s formal neutrality in not "establishing" any particular religion, there was a popular consensus that the Republic rested on a divinely based, Old Testament style covenant. Despite its growing tolerance of diverse religious faiths, writes historian Paul Johnson, America embraced religious freedom "in the spirit not of secularism but of piety." [5]

The terms of the covenant, newly refashioned by the generation that fought the Revolution, promised dominion for all in return for honoring the fatherhood and authority of God. Americans emerged

---

101

from the Revolution with strengthened confidence, having beaten the mightiest empire in the world. As they began their conquest of a continent, their new understanding of covenant was both a powerful motivator and a justifier. Providence and democracy proved a powerful mixture. Together they spelled Manifest Destiny.

In the early nineteenth century, the young American nation embarked on a literal dominion quest. It had, of course, powerful economic interests pushing its boundaries ever westward. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 opened up a vast area for exploration and settlement. Later, the Minnesota Territory offered rich farmlands and orefields. In the years to come, improved transportation and communications- particularly the transcontinental railroad and the telegraph-made economic opportunities mushroom. The continent seemed to have an unlimited capacity to absorb pioneers, homesteaders, and entrepreneurs.

And through it all, dominion served as the conscious rationale, for both the government and the public, for pacifying and settling the expanding frontier regions. Dominion excused a great many wrongs. For example, Indian resistance to being forced off tribal lands was answered by the Indian Removal Bill of 1830, a quasi- official military policy of extermination, and the vigilante activities of white pioneers. The "savages" were "in the way" of America's white, Christian destiny.

Politicians were quick to voice the Deity's support for this empirebuilding. Echoing Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather's sentiments from well over a century before, Senator Thomas Hart Benton claimed that it was "according to the intentions of the CREATOR" that whites had exclusive use of the land. Governor William Henry Harrison, for his part, rejected the idea that America was meant to be "the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a larger population." [6]

However transparently self- serving such statements seem to our modern ears, there was a powerful religious belief behind them, for in the early 1800s, and lasting until midcentury, a Second Great Awakening occurred. And this awakening was every bit as sweeping and revolutionary as its predecessor.

The Second Great Awakening came at a time when the young Republic was experiencing great strains on the fragile loyalties of its member states. There were obvious divisions of geography and eco-

---

102

nomics, such as between the industrial-mercantile North and the largely agricultural South. The two-party political system was emerging, in part from the conflict between those who wanted to preserve taxsupported state churches and those who were trying to disestablish them. There was also interreligious conflict. Despite the First Amendment's pragmatic attempt to contain such frictions, numerous sectarian groups still vied for converts and ran up against more established churches.

The Second Great Awakening began as a series of evangelical revivals in the Appalachian frontier region. Its style and message in many ways resembled those of the First Great Awakening: emotional, pietistic, millennial. And, like its predecessor, this awakening did more than simply save souls. It helped forge a sense of national direction and unity through its emphasis on covenant.

Preachers and evangelists helped bring the order and discipline of Christian ethics to a violent, often lawless frontier. But just as the conversions and camp meetings took hold because they met the needs of many unchurched rural folk, the same movement returned to the cities, where it addressed a different malaise: the sins of disorganization and national confusion about the nation's destiny. There, for example, New England preachers such as Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, and Nathaniel W. Taylor delivered sermons reminding Christians of the terms of the covenant and calling for national repentance as the price for regaining dominion. Young lawyer Charles Grandison Finney underwent a dramatic conversion experience and went on to preach to enormous crowds in the major cities of his day, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

In sheer numbers, the extent of the Second Great Awakening was colossal. One estimate has it that while in 1800 only one in fifteen Americans was a church member, by 1850 one in seven belonged to a church.' But a more telling sign of its impact is in the resulting influence of the concept of dominion.

Preachers raised the quest for dominion to a near idolatrous level and created the creed of providential "Americanism" that still characterizes the New Christian Right. God's grace in the New World was seen as having a specific purpose: to reform and establish a Christian nation, then to evangelize the world. Americans believed themselves to be uniquely raised up for this task.

---

103

The Second Great Awakening merged a growing sense of national identity with postmillennial evangelical Christianity. The results were explosive in two ways. First, the dominion quest was carried directly from the pulpits into the streets. Those caught up in this awakening invested enormous energy in social reform as the fulfillment and extension of the Christian message. Evangelicals plunged themselves into attacking the growing problems of urban society, such as poverty and slum conditions, prostitution, family desertion and orphans, alcoholism, brutal prisons, and women's rights.

Abolition in particular became the crusade of many evangelical reformists. Evangelicals and evangelical institutions such as Oberlin College became leaders in the "underground railroad."

Second, the goals of dominion shifted for the first time from simply building a Christian nation on the North American continent to carrying the quest around the world. Nationalism and Christ's Great Commission to carry his message "unto all the nations of the earth" became fused. America had a mission beyond itself.

A host of benevolent societies, often interdenominational, sprang up to evangelize the world: the Home and Foreign Mission Society, founded in 1812; the American Bible Society in 1816; the African Colonization Society in 1817; and the American Tract Society in 1825. When American Indians proved less than receptive to missionaries, the latter redirected their sights and aimed for more exotic locales in Africa and the Far East.

Thus, the generation of the Second Great Awakening reworked the covenant theme once again. God's grace was still free for the choosing, but America was to be the vessel for carrying it to the world. Christians were to have dominion, and Christian America was to spread Christianity. The political and economic motives for pushing back the frontier took on a sacred meaning, variously called Manifest Destiny, Providence, or Divine Mandate. It was at once a crusade, a mission, a quest. Dominion was to be Americans' heritage as long as they observed the new terms of covenant.

It is paradoxical that the idea of covenant/dominion has been both the anchor of continuity in American culture and the agent of substantial change. The two Great Awakenings reworked Americans' understanding of their covenant with God, each time altering it to conform better to their own historical circumstances. Yet whatever the

---

104

twists and fluctuations, the core idea of covenant was always there. Since the First Great Awakening, dominion had been closely interwoven with postmillennialism. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, however, something significant happened. There appeared a rent in the fabric of the covenant message, splitting it into two competing visions-a liberal or modernist quasi-postmillennial version and a conservative premillennial version.

The first version of covenant hearkened to the reformist optimism of the nineteenth century as well as the liberal tradition of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment in Europe. The second version was the product of several factors, especially a growing pessimism about the future and the inability of literalist Bible believers to make this world conform to their faith.

Evangelicals were split into these two broad camps for years to come. In the process there was a critical, though not fatal, dampening of enthusiasm about the covenant and dominion.

A number of factors contributed to the decline in popularity of postmillennial evangelical theology and the rise of premillennialism. Among them were inescapable sociological forces, such as the immense influx of non-Protestant/non-Christian/non-Anglo- Saxon immigrants and the accompanying labor unrest, which became blurred for some with fears of anarchists and Bolsheviks. The sheer scale of industrialization and urbanization, with the problems of substandard housing, pollution, poverty, unemployment and crime "overwhelmed the capabilities" of the previous era's call for private philanthropy through the churches. [7] The social reform "naturally" flowing from personal salvation and reformation, which Charles Finney's generation had called for, seemed discouragingly remote to many evangelicals.

Theological factors also undermined postmillennial confidence in dominion. Science had become a prestigious, unstoppable machine rolling over every form of superstition or resistant tradition, and many evangelicals struggled unsuccessfully (or unconvincingly) to reconcile scientific discoveries with a literal biblical faith. Darwin's theory of evolution was the prime culprit. But there were also the naturalistic sciences of psychology and psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, which explained the human condition quite handily without any reference to biblical Christianity, even asserting the relativity of such religious beliefs. A new science of biblical scholarship-the so-called

---

105

"higher criticism"-that drew heavily on linguistics, archaeology, and history began to disseminate from Europe. This new school of interpretation argued against a naive, verbatim acceptance of English translations of the Bible, redefining (or even excluding) certain traditionally accepted authorships of its various books and putting miracles into symbolic and historical contexts rather than accepting them at face value.

These were some of the forces that collectively came to be termed "modernism" and that turned many evangelicals toward premillennialism.

One other significant event is critical to understanding the decline of postmillennialism among evangelicals. World War I politicized evangelicals. Some realized that not to support the war branded them as unpatriotic or even sympathetic to the enemy and gradually became its staunchest supporters. Billy Sunday was a highly visible example. Initially skeptical about America's entry into the war, he later became a complete chauvinist. Germany had fallen into decadence and barbarism because "higher criticism" of the Bible and evolutionary theory had undermined that nation's religion and culture, according to his logic. Premillennial pessimism, which had kept many of his contemporaries at arm's length from worldly affairs, was now being overshadowed by the pressing need to preserve America as a Christian bastion against the corrosion of modernism. "If you turn hell upside down," Sunday once cried, "you will find 'Made in Germany' stamped on the bottom!" [8]

"The war to end all wars" produced slaughter and destruction beyond any in human history. For some evangelicals, it made the dominion dream seem permanently out of reach. They turned instead to cryptic biblical prophecy, often within the dispensationalist scheme of John Nelson Darby, who implied that earthly reform was impossible. Only Christ's imminent return would set in motion a cleansing force of sufficient magnitude to vanquish wickedness and restore virtue to the populations of the earth. While these evangelists still paid lip service to the notion that there remained some chance Americans would repent and rededicate themselves to the principles of a "Christian nation," they held out little hope that the increasingly urbanized, diversified populace would do so any time soon.

Of course, not all evangelicals exchanged their postmillennial ex-

---

106

pectations for premillennialist pessimism and spent their remaining days decrying modernism. Instead, some embraced it, faithfully persisting in the prophetic quest for social reform that was the mandate of the Second Great Awakening-too faithfully, as they were to be accused when many of them began to believe that man, through personal effort and good works, can achieve his own salvation. These were the liberal evangelicals who followed the path known as the Social Gospel.

Social Gospel clergy and laity alike understood their role to be antistatus quo in many ways. They became champions of women, children, workers, and the underprivileged. Some Social Gospelers, notably Walter Rauschenbusch, Jesse H. Jones, and William D. P. Bliss, became so radical as to embrace socialism, claiming that Jesus and his twelve disciples were history's original Socialists. They responded to criticism by charging that some Protestant evangelicals had become narrowly preoccupied with simple soul-winning revivalism.

Many in the movement embraced the new discipline of sociology. As one scholar has observed, "Prominent among the students of the first [American] sociologists were clergy and other religionists filled with a sense of mission to reshape the social structure along the ethical lines sketched by Jesus." Not only were Social Gospelers leading authors and journal editors in the field, but at seminaries and divinity schools the Social Gospel movement was sometimes referred to as "Christian Sociology." [9]

Yet, as the premillennialists suspected, many of the Social Gospel's fellow travelers, whatever their reformist goals, were hardly committed to Christian evangelism. A study of academics conducted by psychologist James Leuba in 1914 found that only 29 percent of the sociologists in his sample even believed in God, and among the discipline's leaders only 19 percent were believers. [10]

Premillennial evangelicals identified the Social Gospelers with modernism, theological liberalism, and sometimes even anticapitalist collectivism. Social Gospelers also stood for ecumenicism at a time when many evangelicals pursued separation from, rather than accommodation to, the urban, secular society. Thus, in 1908 they founded the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the precursor of the modern National Council of Churches. The Social Gospelers put as much or more stock in the liberal arts/humanistic tradition than in

---

107

the ability to recite thousands of Bible verses by memory, and they refused to trace every social ill to some problem of personal sin.

The sins they did address- such as greed, political corruption, and the myopia of smug personal piety in an age of real deprivation and suffering- were not always the same as those for which more conservative evangelicals, with their legacy of frontier vices such as cardplaying and dancing, felt concern.

In fact, American evangelical Christianity had arrived at a crossroads at the beginning of the twentieth century. Conservative evangelists such as Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday had, in some sense, "sold out" to big business interests. Their premillennialist tendencies were useful for quashing reformist sentiment among the masses, but basically these evangelicals were uncomfortable with the modern world. It was filled with too many forces they feared and did not understand.

The liberal Social Gospelers, on the other hand, successfully accommodated, both theologically and socially, and their denominations went on to become the mainline groups that within another decade or so lost most of their evangelical fervor. In the process, ironically, they also abandoned much of the quest for dominion, since dominion involved more than simply building a good and just society; it entailed a special spiritual covenant with a biblical deity. Although they never completely gave up dominion, as a driving force it became dormant and largely untapped.

Thus it was solely the conservative premillennialist evangelicals who clung to the dominion theme and who, while it lay suspended, preserved the lifestyle, commitment, and spiritual fervor that would relaunch it in the years following World War II.

As the proportion of Americans who were evangelicals began to shrink, those who still identified with the tradition had to choose between one of two options: to join the Social Gospel (and eventually lose many of their evangelical characteristics), or to fall back with the noncompromising wing that rejected the demon of modernism. This second option became a social movement generally referred to as fundamentalism, a loose alliance of antimodernist evangelicals.

The movement took its name from a series of ninety articles, published in twelve volumes beginning in 1910, called The Fundamentals. Financed by two businessmen-brothers, Lyman and Milton Stewart,

---

108

the articles were written by leading conservative evangelicals to defend biblical inerrancy and attack higher criticism. " Defensive and strident in tone, the essays were sharply critical of modernists, Roman Catholics, and various other Christian sects (e.g., Mormons). More than 3 million copies of these booklets were ultimately distributed free to pastors, evangelists, and theology students in America.

Although academics and ministers in mainline denominations largely ignored the series, it clearly expressed a need felt by conservative evangelicals to close ranks and reassert the boundaries of orthodoxy. This in itself was an open admission that evangelical; could no longer assume the general acceptance of their beliefs.

Fundamentalism became identified with a particular narrow worldview that was militantly separatist in rejecting modernism. Among its specific traits were anti-intellectualism and biblical literalism; emphasis on individual piety; superpatriotism; conservative (rural) lifestyle practices that were often raised to the level of biblical commandments.

Many of the authors of The Fundamentals were evangelicals who had battled modernism in their universities and seminaries, then left to form or join parallel conservative institutions. J. Gresham Machen, who left Princeton Theological Seminary to found Westminister Theological Seminary in 1929, was one. Charles Hodge, who also taught conservative Christianity at Princeton, once even boasted, "I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this seminary. [11]

In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, historian Donald Dayton observed that the evangelicals' suspicion of higher education had grown as the nineteenth century progressed. Before the Civil War, revivalists founded liberal arts colleges; after it, they established Bible schools, many of which remained unaccredited. Some institutions changed their identities. Colleges that would later be regarded as bastions of fundamentalism, such as Wheaton College at Wheaton, Illinois, were founded in a different day by postmillennialists who heard a spiritual call to social reform. [12]

This unabashed anti- intellectualism among even fundamentalist writers had its populist counterpart in Billy Sunday's coarse preaching style. It became the earmark of the entire movement in the public mind, particularly after the press coverage of the Scopes trial. If ever there was a knock-down-drag-out fight between fundamentalist Christians and the forces of secularism, second only to the battle of Ar-

---

109

mageddon prophesied in Revelation, it occurred a little more than sixty years ago in that Dayton, Tennessee, courtroom.

The issues in the case were crystal clear. John T. Scopes, a substitute high school biology teacher, had taught from a text that featured an evolutionary perspective, thus violating a Tennessee law that forbade teaching "any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man." As a result, Scopes was put on trial in 1925 and achieved instant immortality in the history of American church-state relations.

Tennessee's pro-creationist law was a product of concerns from many directions. Many state legislators no doubt had been hard put to make sense of rapid scientific and social changes challenging the small-town rural values they cherished. Others, such as Georgia state legislator Hal Wimberly, acted out of the sort of smug know-nothingism for which fundamentalists were rapidly becoming notorious. Arguing that same year against a bill to allow counties, school districts, and municipalities in Georgia to maintain public libraries either through taxes or donations, Wimberly said,

The public library bill in Georgia failed that year.

In the state of Tennessee, at fundamentalists' urgings, William Jennings Bryan, three times the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president and a popular evangelical orator, was enlisted to lead the prosecution's attack. The defense chose Clarence Darrow, an agnostic and one of the most famous trial lawyers in American history.

For eleven sweltering July days, spectators and the press were treated to a classic confrontation. Dayton swarmed with sympathetic religionists holding camp meetings and prayer fests, hard-drinking and cynical journalists (including the master iconoclast, H. L. Mencken), and expert witnesses from the country's most prestigious universities. The trial ostensibly was about one young teacher's alleged violation of law. It proved to be a watershed event in American history.

Far from reviewing Scopes's actions (which, incidentally, were not

---

110

contested by anyone), the entire subculture of fundamentalism was placed on trial, along with William Jennings Bryan, who took the witness stand at Darrow's request. Darrow goaded Bryan as a selfstyled expert on the Bible, demanding that he reconcile a literalist interpretation of Scripture with apparent contradictions and ambiguities. By probing for explanations of miraculous biblical events in scientific and rationalist terms, Darrow entangled Bryan in a web of implausibility and illogic.

In the end, Scopes was found guilty of violating the pro-creationist law, but, in what turned out to be one of the great ironies of American history, the trial was a debacle for fundamentalism. Fundamentalists were ridiculed by the liberal press, which delighted in portraying them as backwater fools comically battling the inexorable forces of modernity. The trial signaled the end of an era. Premillennialist, inerrantist, biblical literalists no longer had any significant clout or credibility.

Modernism versus fundamentalism was the driving tension in American religion during the first three decades of this century. It split seminaries and churches and created new denominations. Not all Christians who identified with the fundamentalists retreated into sectarian groups, however. Many remained within the mainline liberal denominations as a sort of Fifth Column, organizing their own newsletters, committees, and lay organizations and supporting outside "parachurch" evangelistic/mission societies representing their personal viewpoints. [14] But they fellowshipped in a distinctly sub- rosa fashion. They knew they had become outsiders.

The more aggressive, frustrated fundamentalists withdrew rather like a defeated army, rejecting modern society and awaiting the "last days" in grim but fervent premillennialist style.

Historians refer to many of the turn-of-the-century events as The Great Reversal. But it was more than evangelicalism's decline from being the most popular form of Christianity in America. The Great Reversal also saw the notions of covenant and dominion-with their motivating sentiments of Christian nation and personal repentance- go into exile. Patriotism kept the covenant theme alive, barely, but the liberals had lost the spiritual aspects of their reformist zeal, while the pessimism of premillennialists kept it fairly well subdued.

With the dormancy of the covenant/dominion themes, the evan-

---

111

gelicals-turned- fundamentalists essentially reversed their view of social reform, abandoning it to the Social Gospelers and other evangelicals-turned-liberals. Thus, the evangelical phenomenon had come full circle since the earliest days of the First Great Awakening and the glory days of the Second.

Liberals had won the modernist battle. Moreover, they controlled the media, the major educational institutions (public and private), and the Protestant denominations that fit comfortably with each.

When liberals did acknowledge the persistence of the covenant theme, they treated it like some atavistic beast, lumping it together with the largely aberrant doctrines of ultra-right-wingers, "Jewish conspiracy" advocates, Nazi sympathizers, and jingoist fanatics. Figures in the 1930s and 1940s such as William Dudley Pelley, Gerald B. Winrod, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who made up the "Old Christian Right," mixed crank politics with fundamentalism. They wallowed in sensationalist publicity and outraged liberals. Their association with fundamentalism added to the derision heaped on it and thereby helped distract the critics from seeing what was really happening.

Fundamentalism may have been hurt by the mainstream backlash after the Scopes disaster, but its wounds were not fatal. True, many leaders and followers became disillusioned and lost interest in further locking horns with modernists. Some coalitions of fundamentalists fell apart. Separatist factions became even more world-rejecting, while those who remained within the major denominations felt ever more marginal.

That liberals consistently ignored or discounted the movement's diverse activities after the 1920s was evidence of a colossal case of wishful thinking and selective perception. They knew only of the separatist fundamentalists who became ever more rigid, hostile, and uncompromisingly culture-denying. But many fundamentalists were still torn between resisting modern culture and feeling driven to convert that culture and its people to Christ. Rather than rejecting the modern world or hiding out in some quiet corner of a mainline denomination, many followers of the movement felt they had a third choice.

They could redirect their support to a wide assortment of parachurch activities that had always been the "core" of fundamentalism outside the established denominations, churches, and seminaries. These were

---

112

the older networks of Bible schools, missions, conferences, and publications (such as newsletters and magazines). Fundamentalists also created new interdenominational groups that would proselytize with only the conservative message they wanted.

These parachurch organizations generally were run by moderates who did not espouse the strict negativism of the separatists. They were willing to stay in this world, with all its flaws, and use its own tools for evangelism. Ironically, these fundamentalist groups prospered in terms of membership and financial support during the 1930s and 1940s at the same time that the mainline denominations began gradually to decline.

Historian Joel Carpenter, in an important series of articles, has explored this little- known history. [15] He notes that The Sunday School Times (a fundamentalist magazine) listed more than fifty Bible colleges and schools, mostly in major U.S. cities, in 1930. Another thirty-five schools were started up in the next ten years, and in the following decade (1940-50), sixty additional schools were begun.

The Moody Bible Institute, the "great-granddaddy" of them all, became the model: It trained pastors, evangelists, and Sunday school superintendents, and published a wide assortment of literature (from magazines and books to tracts). Subscriptions to its flagship publication, The Moody Monthly, increased by 13,000 during the 1930s to more than 40,000 in 1940. By its fortieth anniversary in 1934, the Moody Press had published more than 57 million items.

The institute had its own radio station and taped programs for other stations. The Moody Bible Institute Extension Department held weekend Bible conferences in 500 nearby churches during 1936. The institute had over 15,000 contributors in 1937 and an equal number enrolled in its correspondence school.

Soon conservative Christians had a wide variety of regular publications tailored just for them. Various Bible schools and institutes published their own magazines, such as the Philadelphia School of the Bible's Serving and Waiting, the Denver Bible Institute's Grace and Truth, and the Northwestern (Minneapolis) Bible and Missionary Training School's The Pilot.

In general, evangelical colleges and Bible institutes prospered enormously during the 1930s. For example, Wheaton College saw its enrollment climb from 400 students in 1926 to 1,100 students in 1940.

---

113

A host of summer Bible conferences held at lakes, resorts, and camps mixed the rustic camp-meeting atmosphere with Chautauqua-style lectures and preaching for youth, businessmen, ministers, housewives, and Sunday school teachers. The Moody Monthly published lists of upcoming conferences. In reviewing back issues, Carpenter found that the lists grew from twenty-seven different sites and eighty-eight conference sessions in 1930 to more than 200 sessions at fifty sites in 1941.

The fundamentalists could also stage huge rallies, and not in remote cornfields. Evangelists could fill stadiums and large auditoriums in urban centers. In 1935, evangelist Elwin Wright held a "Bible Demonstration Day" rally in Boston Garden, and 16,000 enthusiastic believers attended. In 1936 the Moody Bible Institute celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with "Moody Day," an event attended by members of more than 500 churches. Representatives of more than 800 congregations showed up during 1937 for the centenary of Dwight L. Moody's birth, with more than 400,000 attending courses in Bible teaching and evangelism. The institute decided to stage a second "Moody Day" that year, pulling in 2,300 participating churches and winding up festivities with a crowd of 15,000 at a Chicago Coliseum rally.

Fundamentalists were repeatedly encouraged by their ability to produce impressive audiences at public rallies and revivals. Charles E. Fuller, the radio evangelist of the Mutual Network's "The Old Fashioned Revival Hour" (Jerry Falwell named his own television program "The Old Time Gospel Hour," he claimed, because he was converted by listening to one of Fuller's broadcasts), regularly drew crowds in tens of thousands throughout the late 1930s. For example, in 1938 at Chicago's Soldier Field, 40,000 believers showed up for Fuller's Easter service. In 1939 he completely filled New York City's Carnegie Hall.

Fundamentalists used the newest medium, radio, with great success. More than 400 religious programs on eighty radio stations in 1932 were endorsed by The Sunday School Times as "sound and scriptural." Charles Fuller's weekly program was broadcast on 152 stations in 1939 but on 456 by 1942, making it the largest radio broadcast in the nation.

Such exposure had tremendous importance, not just for demonstrating that conservative Christianity had not withered up and blown

---

114

away, but also for giving legitimacy to the evangelistic "style." Putting it on radio and sending it into people's homes made the message part of mainstream culture. Says Joel Carpenter, "It appears that no other religious movement went to the airwaves as extensively nor was able to fully integrate radio broadcasting into its institutional framework as did fundamentalism." [16]

There were numerous other areas, such as missionary work, in which Bible schools cooperated with independent agencies and simply bypassed the larger denominations. And, as Richard G. Hutcheson has documented in his book Mainline Churches and the Evangelicals, many fundamentalists remained within these denominations, sometimes in an uneasy state of detente, but redirected their support to missions that preached a more acceptable message. The Fundamentalist Fellowship of the [mainline] Northern Baptist Convention was one such example of "loyal opposition." As a group-within-a- group, it arranged for full autonomy in supporting its own missions, preferring to work with more conservative agencies. [17]

Other looser coalitions of independent fundamentalist congregations formed, such as the American Conference of Undenominational Churches and the Eastern Conference of Fundamentalists and Undenominational Churches. These worked closely with Bible schools in recruiting pastors, supporting missions, and obtaining instructional materials.

So the post-Scopes 1930s was not entirely an era of stagnation, retreat, or decline.

To be sure, the separatists were still bitter and outspoken. Many were appalled at the evangelism outreach, the radio ministers, and the mass rallies. It was as if a "sour grapes" anger consumed their sermons and writings, poisoning their capacity for cooperation, fellowship, or even civility in respect to any person or group that did not uphold their negativism.

They were quick to point fingers and throw out labels of "sellout" and "accommodationist." They were the world-rejecting fundamentalists whom liberal critics mistook for all conservative Christians. They were an embarrassment to those more interested in getting on with evangelizing the world. In their own culture-denying way, however, they inspired others to rediscover and resurrect the covenant theme.

Encouraged by the growth of parachurch activities and by their

---

115

successes in turning out large crowds for rallies and conferences, some fundamentalist leaders began to sense the opportunity for a large-scale revival in America. During the war years of the 1940s, in particular, a sense of mission and solidarity spread throughout the nation. The urgency of the crisis served as a powerful stimulant to the reawakening of the nationalistic and patriotic aspects of covenant and dominion.

Men such as Carl F. H. Henry and Harold J. Ockenga felt that conservative Christianity- what they deliberately called evangelicalism to distance it from fundamentalism-could deal with modern biblical scholarship and criticism, but only if it jettisoned the primitive know-nothingism of the separatists. Regretfully, wrote Carl Henry in 1947, "Modern prejudice, justly or unjustly, has come to identify Fundamentalism largely in terms of an anti-ecumenical spirit of independent isolationism...." [18]

These evangelicals also sought cooperation, not division, among conservative groups, for the sake of the hoped-for revival. In 1942, J. Elwin Wright, Robert T. Davis, Torrey Johnson, Carl Henry, Harold Ockenga, and others brought together all shades of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, holiness groups, and charismatics, including representatives of some mainline denominations in the Federal Council of Churches, for a National Conference for United Action among Evangelicals. Out of that fateful meeting sprang the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE).

The separatists declined to join. Carl McIntire, who regarded many of these "moderates" as apostate-forever barring common fellowship-founded his own American Council of Christian Churches in September 1941. McIntire was a thorn in the NAE's side, but to these new "postfundamentalist" evangelicals, the enmity of fundamentalists like him was a price worth paying.

The NAE succeeded as a conservative ecumenical effort. At the end of its first four years, its membership included twenty-two denominations and hundreds of single congregations, twenty-two regional offices, numerous regional and local chapters, and approximately a million souls. The NAE also spun off the National Religious Broadcasters, the National Sunday School Association, the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (with forty-three missionary boards), the Commission for War Relief, and the Commission for Army and Navy Chaplaincies.

---

116

Meanwhile, evangelicals and some moderate fundamentalists labored on other parachurch fronts. The year 1944 saw Christ for America rallies held in several major cities, as well as the founding of Youth for Christ (YFC). In 1945, 70,000 evangelicals gathered at Soldier Field for a memorial/rededication service sponsored by YFC. By 1946, an estimated one million young people were YFC members. By 1948, YFC had spread to forty-six countries and held its first postwar evangelistic missions conference in Beatenberg, Switzerland.

Evangelicals underwent a tramiformation of self-image. They no longer considered themselves outsiders, a new reaction reinforced by the comments of various national leaders. Joel Carpenter recounts in a Christianity Today retrospective:

The end of World War II brought the covenant/dominion theme full circle. With a reawakened sense of national mission couched in distinctly spiritual terms, with a Billy Graham to assume the mantle of the greatest movement leaders of the past, with new and larger parachurch organizations, and with faith in themselves, the evangelicals were on a roll.

It should now be obvious that if the mass media, academics, or other observers thought the evangelicals came out of nowhere during the late 1970s, they had prevailing liberal "group think" to thank. The fundamentalist stereotypes held by mainline America were glaringly misleading. This branch of Christianity regained the momentum it had lost shortly after World War I and was merely returning to "normal"

The turbulent decade of the 1960s helped obscure matters, particularly in the area of evangelicals' social concerns. Mass media paraded

---

117

a constant stream of protest, or countercultural, images: antiwar, women's liberation, civil rights, gay pride, environmentalists, even exotic religious cults and gurus of every conceivable stripe. Even the "Jesus movement"-which involved the start-up or expansion of evangelical ministries to ax-hippies and former drug culture "freaks" as well as college and high school youth-was lumped indiscriminately into the pot. Liberals ignored the fact that evangelicals had been calling for increased social action since the 1940s.

In 1947, for example, Carl Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism laid out an activist manifesto: "A Christianity without a passion to turn the world upside down is not reflective or apostolic Christianity." [20] Henry's call was answered in the ferment of the 1960s, as young evangelicals such as Jim Wallis of the People's Christian Coalition in Washington, D. C., Fred and John F. Alexander, founder-editors of Philadelphia's The Other Side, and the various countercultural-style members of the Berkeley Christian Coalition, took on the contradictions and injustices of American capitalism ignored by an earlier generation of fundamentalists. Richard Quebedeaux called them "the worldly evangelicals":

Most important, evangelicals may have been fairly low-key during the 1960s (they rarely burned draft cards or American flags), but they learned a critical lesson. The righteous crusades of that era, in sociologist Robert C. Liebman's words, "blurred the distinction between private morality and public institutions." Liebman argues that the trauma of Watergate and its regular media exposure altered conservative Christians' thinking about supposedly impersonal events. As both Watergate and the abortion controversy were driven home to many previously apolitical evangelicals, "morality came increasingly to be viewed as a public issue, rather than a matter of private concern." [22]

Thus, despite the presumed dispersion of fundamentalists and evangelicals to America's cultural hinterlands, they never left its heartland.

---

118

Their history from the Scopes trial to the present reveals a remarkable continuity of energy and only a relatively brief interruption from addressing social concerns. One evangelical writer concluded, "In the two decades between 1930 and 1950, evangelicals laid the foundations for the renovation of the gospel witness that caught national attention in the 1970s. [23]

Likewise, the sudden attention paid to the New Christian Right is more a product of selective perception by liberals than it is an accurate reading of religious change in this country. The fact is that years of grass-roots networking, settling in-house squabbles, and accumulating political savvy is finally paying off. The evangelical are returning to cultural center stage.

Notes