Tonight I watched The Apostle, a fascinating film that portrays American religion. The film (1997 / PG-13) stars Robert Duvall, who also wrote, directed, and financed it. Duvall plays a Holiness preacher who, after fleeing Texas because he killed his wife’s lover, starts a new congregation in a backwater Louisiana town. The plot is pretty thin, but Duvall delivers a powerful performance as the ecstatic preacher and religious entrepreneur Sonny, or “the Apostle E.F.”

I intend to write a post or two about the film’s portrayal of American religion, and in particular how it might be useful in the classroom. If you wish, you can watch the film at Hulu, or embedded below.

You can also see the trailer at Youtube. (Don’t be disappointed by the trailer. Like most trailers, it emphasizes ploy and hype more than acting.)

Naselli, Andrew David. Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, forthcoming. 459 pages.

Andrew Naselli has an educational background shared by few theologians. He earned his BA at Baptist College of Ministry (2002), his MA and first PhD at Bob Jones University (2003, 2006), and a second PhD at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where he was an assistant to prominent Reformed theologian D. A. Carson.

Let Go and Let God? is a rewrite of Naselli’s dissertation published by the popular Bible study software company Logos. As such, it is targeted at an audience composed mostly of seminarians, pastors, and Bible scholars. And although the first section of the book is a survey of the history of the Keswick Movement, the meat of the book is dedicated to critiquing Keswick theology from a Reformed theological perspective. In short, it is a polemic.

It may seem strange for Religion in America to feature Let Go and Let God?. We normally choose works of history, not theology. That being so, this review will focus on the historical rather than the polemical aspects of Let Go and Let God?; it is not our job as historians to make value judgments on the relative merits of the Reformed and Keswickian views of sanctification.

After Naselli’s introduction, he begins with a 94 page survey of the history of the Keswick movement. Naselli’s task is complicated by the nature of the movement as a loosely formed network of hymnwriters, evangelists, and lay authors. The name Keswick comes from the town of Keswick in the Lake District of northern England where the Keswick Convention Trust has held annual conferences from 1875 to the present. Many, though not all, adherents of Keswick theology attended these conferences.

During the meetings, conference attendees sought to consecrate themselves to God. Although they had accepted Christ as their Savior in the past, they still needed to have an additional consecration where they fully yielded themselves to God. Salvation and consecration were separate, non-contiguous events. A newly converted believer who had yet to yield his will to God was labeled a “carnal Christian” for whom sanctification had not yet begun. His life would be characterized by sinful struggles, spiritual defeat, and a lack of Spirit-given power for service. But by “letting go and letting God” that carnal Christian could begin the process of sanctification, gain victory over sin in his life, and receive Spirit-empowerment for ministry.

At the annual conference, prominent pastors, missionaries, and lay leaders would share testimonies about their personal consecration experiences. Indeed, the list of people connected to Keswick theology reads like a Who’s Who of nineteenth century evangelicalism: F.B. Meyer, Charles Armstrong Fox, Andrew Murray, Hudson Taylor, Frances Havergal, and A.T. Pierson. These men and women were representative of Keswick theology at its height. But Naselli traces the origins of Keswick theology back much earlier, through the Higher Life Movement, Oberlin Perfectionism, the Holiness Movement, and Wesleyan Perfectionism. He also describes the influence of Keswick theology in the twentieth century, on institutions like Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary, in the rise of Pentecostalism, and on later evangelicals like R. A. Torrey, C. I. Scofield, Lewis Sperry Chafer, John Walvoord, and Charles Ryrie.

Prior to reading Let Go and Let God? I would have been unable to define Keswick theology, let alone explain the wide-reaching Keswickian influence on evangelical theology. Assuming that other religious historians share my weakness, scholars of recent American religious history should be interested in reading Naselli’s work. Further adding to the value of Let Go and Let God? as a reference work, Naselli has included a thorough, 127-page bibliography on all things Keswick, making it a good starting point for both seminarians and historians who are interested in the Keswick movement.

Grigg, John A. The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 276 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-537237-3.

As John Grigg observes, David Brainerd is second only to Jonathan Edwards in evangelicals’ memory of the Great Awakening. His often-republished diary has been a staple of evangelical devotional literature since Edwards published his Life of Brainerd in 1749. Academic historians take note of Brainerd too, both for his role in the controversies surrounding the Awakening and for his missionary efforts among the Delaware Indians. Grigg’s The Lives of David Brainerd is a history of both Brainerds. The book’s first section contains a careful reconstruction of Brainerd’s life, while the second section examines the memory of Brainerd since his death.

To write his life of Brainerd, Grigg has recovered fragments and leaves of Brainerd’s writings, very little of which is extant. He fills in the details with accounts of Brainerd’s hometown, of Yale, and of other missionary efforts to the Indians. Grigg’s argument is that Brainerd stood uneasily on the boundary between the radical and the moderate supporters of the Great Awakening. Brainerd’s expulsion from Yale was not precipitated solely by his intemperate outbursts against Yale leaders, but was a consequence of Brainerd’s attempt to minister to New Haven’s separatist congregation while trying to receive the imprimatur of a Yale degree. Nor was Brainerd forced into a mission to the Indians because he could not get a ministerial position. Rather, Brainerd turned down two offers of a position to continue his mission. Brainerd intentionally based his missions work on a mix of the radical and moderate Awakening. By the time of his death, Brainerd had mostly learned to shed the racist assumptions of his day and to think of people in terms of religion and not race, identifying himself with “godly Indians” rather than “white heathens.”

Grigg’s history of the memory of Brainerd runs from his death to the late twentieth century. He demonstrates that Jonathan Edwards used his Life of Brainerd as an argument in several debates, presenting Brainerd as an opponent of the enthusiastic excesses of the Awakening, as a denouncer of Arminianism, and as a model of life after conversion for his congregants. John Wesley, on the other hand, did his own editing of Brainerd’s journals to provide a model to itinerant Methodists of a minister who was unmarried, ascetic, a proper steward of money, and inured to hardship. Early nineteenth-century evangelicals, notably William Carey in Britain and Adoniram Judson in the United States, also claimed Brainerd, adding a mythical bethrothal between Brainerd and Jerusha Edwards in support of their belief that missionaries should be married. The student missionary movement at the turn of the twentieth century, led by men such as E. M. Bounds and A. J. Gordon, held up Brainerd as a model of prayer. In the second half of the twentieth century, Brainerd inspired missionaries like Jim Eliot, and also stood as a prototype of the campus radical and the civil rights leaders. Grigg thus uses Brainerd’s to reveal significant changes in American evangelicalism and missions.

This book is a revised dissertation, and readers unaccustomed to the genre will be jarred by the historiographical debates, not all of which have been excised from the main text. Because Grigg is obligated by the scarcity of Brainerd’s writings to turn to other sources, the text occasionally wanders from its topic, as in the needlessly long summary of Edwards’s writings. One wishes that the author had not been so generous with people who made up the versions of Brainerd out of whole cloth as to insist that there runs a “thread of truth beneath the surface” (190) of their fabrications.

Quibbles aside, Grigg’s book is precisely the critical study of Brainerd that has been needed by both historians and evangelicals. As such, it is likely to become the standard work on Brainerd.

Each year that July 4th falls on a Sunday, church leaders have to make a series of decisions. Sould we place an American flag on the podium? Should we sing God Bless America or My Country Tis of Thee during the worship service? Do we include a tribute to our military servicemen and servicewomen? Do we recite the Declaration of Independence? The manner in which churches celebrate July 4th depends in large part upon their understanding of American history. Clergy who believe that Revolutionary America was a Christian nation led by orthodox or evangelical founding fathers are far more likely to incorporate the pomp and circumstance of Independence Day celebrations into their congregational worship.

The subject of the Christian roots of America is a contentious issue today. Politicians invoke it in an attempt to curry favor with voters. Schoolboards fight over its inclusion in curricula. This blog has no intention of addressing the rights or wrongs of such a politicized topic.

Politicians and historians ask very different questions. For politicians history often becomes a tool for gaining cultural and political power. The past becomes the servant of the present. Politicized history is simplified history told in stark monochrome, a tale inhabited by clear heroes and obvious villains. But for historians, history comes in shades of grey; we seek to show historical events in their complexity. We try to understand the past on its own terms. Thus the politically-charged question, “Was America a Christian nation?” cannot be answered with a simple yes or a no.

If you’d like to explore the historical role of Christianity in the founding of America, I’d recommend The Search for Christian America. Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden approach the topic from a historian’s perspective. The Search for Christian America is a golden oldie by now (1983), but it remains the must-read book for understanding the role of Christianity in the founding of the United States. Noll, Hatch, and Marsden – each of whom is an evangelical Christian and a well regarded historian – carve out a middle ground between advocates of an essentially Christian America and those who believe that America was founded purely upon secular, Enlightenment ideals. Pick up a copy for your summer vacation reading list.

The American Revolution is a perennial topic for historians, but despite the constant output of books on that subject, there are few good, recent books on religion in the Revolution. Good, that is, in the sense that the book is suitable for undergraduates or general readers and that the author does not have an axe to grind in the style of Glenn Beck. Two new books promise to fill that gap.

The first book is T. H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, published this May. The book is not exactly about religion. It is a history of the Revolution from 1774 to 1776, in which Breen argues that the Revolution owes at least as much to the people of the “middling sort” as it does to the founding fathers. A key part of his argument is that the “young, evangelical” colonists started an insurgency because of their religious beliefs. Evangelical, mostly Calvinist religion taught them that their natural rights as Englishmen were in fact given by God; those rights came with God’s command to  preserve them. Religion also explained the duties that monarchs had to fulfill in order to be legitimate. For most people, then, the insurgency was an “appeal to heaven”—in both a Lockean and an evangelical sense. This argument runs throughout the book, but it is particularly the theme of chapter 9, “An Appeal to Heaven: Religion and Rights.”

The second is Thomas S. Kidd’s God of Liberty: A Religious History of the Revolution. This book is still forthcoming, due out in October. Kidd is a professor at Baylor University, and the author of The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (2007). If God of Liberty is of the same quality as The Great Awakening, then it promises to become the comprehensive history of religion in the Revolution. We’ll have a review when the book comes out.

Earlier this year USA Today ran an article and an interactive infographic about a recent survey of American religion. The American Religious Identification Survey has released data about the religion affiliations of Americans, finding that most religious groups have lost adherents since 1990.

One could find many things to quarrel with in either the survey’s design or especially in USA Today‘s visual presentation of the data. The most egregious problem is lumping religious groups into four categories: “Catholics,” “other Christians,” “other religions,” and “no religion.” Those categories are so broad and vague that they are essentially useless. Then too, the infographic suffers all the problems of bad data visualization. Someone at USA Today should buy Edward Tufte’s books.

Quibbles aside, the essential difficulty with these statistics is one of the classic problems of quantifying religion: the assumption that religious affiliation is closely linked to religious experience. Religious affiliation is the single most-used statistic about religion, because it is one of the very few facts about religion that can be quantified. The inference cannot be drawn, however, that a lower rate of religious affiliation implies a lower rate of religious experience (whatever that would mean). The ARIS study confirms what historians of recent American religion have known for a long time: that America religious experience since the 1960s has become less about institutions and groups and more about individuals and their experiences. To my knowledge, the study of religion or secularization has mostly resisted efforts at quantification. The best analyses, like Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, look at the aspects of religious experience which cannot be quantified. For more on Taylor, look for a future post.

Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds [USA Today]

See how U.S. religious landscape has changed in nearly 2 decades [USA Today]

With this post, Religion in America welcomes its first guest author. Devin Thomas is a recent graduate of Messiah College and a soon-to-be graduate student at Temple University. He studies twentieth-century American religious history, primarily the history of the Brethren in Christ Church. This essay is reposted from his blog The Search for Piety and Obedience.

In his essay “The Holiness Churches: A Significant Ethical Tradition,” historian Donald W. Dayton identifies an essential difference between the holiness movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the fundamentalist and evangelical traditions of the same period:

“The Holiness movement differs from fundamentalism and evangelicalism in that it is more oriented to ethics and the spiritual life than to a defense of doctrinal orthodoxy. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the Holiness traditions is that they have tended to raise ethics to the status that fundamentalists have accorded doctrine.”

This orientation toward ethical living (and against doctrinal precision) was evident in the lives of many of members of the Brethren in Christ Church who embraced Wesleyan Holiness teaching at the turn of the century — though few embodied it more fully than Abraham L. Eisenhower, a veterinarian-turned-roving-evangelist-turned-orphanage-caretaker.

The son of a Brethren in Christ minister, Eisenhower received his “full salvation” — or entire sanctification, an essential experience for Holiness Christians — in 1892, during a Brethren in Christ tent revival in his native Abilene, Kans. The experience so profoundly affected him that he sold his (moderately successful) veterinary practice and joined with other members of the church to pioneer an experimental form of evangelism: the Gospel Wagon. Later, he and his wife Anna founded the Jabbok Faith Orphanage and Missionary Training Home, a venture they conducted without the financial support of the church for a decade.

A.L. Eisenhower (pictured above, with wife Anna) was a 19th-century Brethren in Christ evangelist -- and a prominent voice for the kind of ethicism that kept the denomination from fully embracing fundamentalism. (Photo courtesy of BIC Historical Library and Archives)

Eisenhower’s “baptism in the Spirit” (as the experience is also known) had other effects, too — including instilling in him the long-held conviction that “we do not need more theology, but men who will spend their time on their knees in fasting and prayer until they get the pentecost baptism.”

As Eisenhower demonstrates in an 1907 Evangelical Visitor article, doctrinal accuracy was not a vital concern for those who’d experienced “the pentecost baptism.” Reacting to The Fundamentals — a four-volume series, penned by leading conservative Protestant theologians, that rigorously defends the five orthodoxies that would come to define the movement known as Christian fundamentalism — Eisenhower wittily contends:

“I find that the terms used by these [writers] . . . are of such a kind that in order that anyone might comprehend how to receive pardon or stand justified, he would need to be a Philadelphia lawyer. . . . If they would preach to a congregation with such language they would not bring a horse-thief or harlot under conviction, neither would it make a believer hungry or bring him under conviction for the experience of holiness.”¹

Eisenhower isn’t scrutinizing the central thesis of The Fundamentals, nor is he critiquing its intellectual rigor or its philosophical acumen. In fact, he’s not really reviewing the book at all. He’s reviewing the book’s authors — and finds them lacking.

His approach here is telling. For Eisenhower, as for many other Brethren in Christ of his day, a minister’s theological sophistication is immaterial: what matters is his ability to stir souls toward true conversion, a 180-degree turn from sin to Kingdom living.

Luke Keefer has identified a few key elements of the Brethren in Christ identity that kept them from fully embracing the fundamentalist cause in the early twentieth century: their system of self-trained ministry kept them out of the seminaries where the anti-modernist conflict raged; their allegiance to Anabaptist practices like pacifism, nonconformity in dress, and feet washing naturally distanced them from the Calvinistic doctrines of many fundamentalists.² Now we can add to his list another characteristic: their skepticism of “such dead theology.”³

1. “A.L. Eisenhower Scores ‘Fundamentals,’” Evangelical Visitor, October 31, 1910, 7.
2. “‘Inerrancy’ and the Brethren in Christ View of Scripture,” in Reflections on a Heritage: Defining the Brethren in Christ, ed. E. Morris Sider, 214 (Grantham, Pa.: Brethren in Christ Historical Society, 1999).
3. Eisenhower, 7.

Prominent religion professor Stephen Prothero has begun blogging for CNN. In a recent post he reported on a speech given by Justice David Souter. At the 2010 Harvard commencement, Souter called into question the “Originalist” reading of the US Constitution. He accused originalism of being overly facile, taking the text at face value without accounting for the document’s internal contradictions. Souter used the example of the Pentagon Papers to argue that the First Amendment right to freedom of expression was contradicted by the federal government’s constitutional responsibilities to provide for the national defense and to manage foreign policy.

Souter believes that the language of the Constitution is clear, but it remains internally inconsistent because it “embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty.  And we want not only liberty but equality as well.” This inherent ambiguity alarms Originalists who seek to make the Constitution self-consistent out of a “longing for a world without ambiguity, and for the stability of something unchangeable in human institutions.”

The clash between Originalist justices (eg, Antonin Scalia) and those like David Souter is a matter of epistemology, the question of how they determine what is true. They have adopted different hermeneutics of truth. Prothero notes that the tension between Living Constitutionalists and Originalists is similar to that between fundamentalists and liberal Protestants. Like Originalists, fundamentalists believe in a founding document –  the Bible – which is internally consistent and which has immutable, proscriptive power over human action. Prothero argues that Souter, a liberal member of the Episcopal Church (he once planned to become an Episcopal priest), holds both the Bible and the Constitution in similar regard. He believes that both the Constitution and the Bible are a “pantheon of values,” not inspired or internally consistent, but written by a group of men over time. Both should be interpreted in each generation as living documents, unbound by authorial intent.

Prothero believes that “one way of reading this commencement speech, which argues against piecemeal interpretations of Constitutional passages, is as an application of those liberal Protestant principles to questions of Constitutional law.” Prothero deserves praise for adroitly comparing Souter’s religious and judicial beliefs, showing that theology and political philosophy are intertwined.

Prothero’s observation should resonate with religious historians. We often create a (false) dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. We pretend as if theology and political philosophy can be compartmentalized apart from one another. But the concepts and even the very language of religion and politics are conjoined.

For example, Lincoln has studied the use of Jeremiads in American culture. The term is a Biblical reference, but the concept applies to secular discourse as well. Likewise, civil religion is the label we give the blending of faith and the State. My own thesis involves the reaction of a Cold War era preacher, Carl McIntire, to the denominational politics of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, a reaction that had profound consequences for both his theology and his politics.

Souter is the perfect example of the way in which the sacred and the secular are combined. In his address, Souter describes one of the fundamental tenets of his faith, that he abides “in an indeterminate world I cannot control.” But despite the absence of the Constitutional certainty that Originalists find so comforting, he still trusts “that a way will be found leading through the uncertain future.” This is the unifying theme of both Souter’s faith and political philosophy. They cannot be isolated from one another.

We religious historians like to think of our specialization as a field or a topic of study. We study a thing called religion, it’s structures, adherents, and beliefs. But I believe that religion is something far more fundamental. It is not only a topic; it is a category of analysis like race, class, and gender. Indeed, someone can even use religious modes of expression without adhering to any formal religion. (Religion being just a name for the systematization of faith, the structures that we construct around our presuppositional beliefs.)

I hope that religious historians will engage topics beyond their traditional preserves of churches, seminaries, and ministers. Likewise, historians in traditionally secular fields should explore the role of religion in social, cultural, and political history. For example, why hasn’t a religious historian examined the impact of John Foster Dulles’s theological liberalism on his foreign policy? Why has no one written a political history of fundamentalism?

First we must discard the Enlightenment categorization of the secular as something apart from the sacred.

To the Christian, there is no difference between the secular and the sacred: every bush is a ‘burning bush’ and all ground is ‘holy ground.’

Bob Jones Sr. (1883-1968)

Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Watt, David Harrington. A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

In 1980 George Marsden published Fundamentalism and American Culture, a history of the first decades of American fundamentalism. The book quickly rose to prominence in the historical profession, provoking new studies of American fundamentalism and contributing to a renewal of interest in American religious history. The book’s timing was fortunate, for it was published as a resurgent fundamentalism was becoming active in politics and society. The rise of the Christian right provoked the question: where did the movement come from?
¹

The historical interpretation of fundamentalism that was then current could not provide an adequate answer. In the standard narrative, fundamentalism was a reaction by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evangelical Christians against modernizations in American society, such as industrialization, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and changes in popular mores. Fundamentalists resented modernization because it clashed with their out-of-date worldview and literal faith in the Bible and Christian doctrine. Within the American denominations, fundamentalists fought modernists in losing battles over doctrines such as the inspiration of the Bible, the creation of the world, and the virgin birth of Jesus, but fundamentalists were eventually driven from their denominations in defeat. Fundamentalists also mounted a bid to retain control of American society, most notably through laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Their attempt was soundly defeated and ridiculed at the 1925 Scopes trial. After the trial, fundamentalists were demoralized and in retreat, sufficiently marginalized that they could never again make a serious effort to control the nation. By defining fundamentalism as a reaction against modernism, the standard narrative implicitly predicted that fundamentalism would disappear as the United States completed modernizing.

When fundamentalism reappeared in the 1970s, the flaws in that interpretation were revealed. In its place, a new body of historical work, including Marsden’s book, redefined fundamentalism not as evangelicalism reacting against modernism, but as evangelicalism adopting modernism. The first historian to make this argument was Ernest R. Sandeen in The Roots of Fundamentalism. Sandeen saw fundamentalism as a movement descended from American and British evangelicalism with the additions of dispensationalist eschatology and an explicit definition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. George Marsden expanded on Sandeen’s definition by unpacking the significance of those additions. Dispensationalism divided history and biblical prophecy into a series of eras, or dispensations—a type of scientific classification. By defining biblical inspiration as extending to the very words of Scripture, fundamentalists created a new hermeneutic which treated the Bible as a source of data to be mined and scientifically analyzed. Marsden further observed that fundamentalism added borrowings from the Holiness movement and from Scottish commonsense realism.²

The implications of Marsden’s redefinition were radical. He revealed that fundamentalism was not rural, Southern, and pre-modernist, but rather urban, often Northern, and aggressively modern. Its relationship to modernism led to a paradox in fundamentalists’ identity. On the one hand, fundamentalists identified as heirs to the Protestant establishment of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, they saw themselves as displaced from power by a new modernism, though partaking of what they found desirable in it. Marsden’s explication of this paradox had great power to explain fundamentalism’s struggle to control the United States at the same time that they felt alienated from it. Even though Marsden ended his book in the 1930s, his thesis could explain how fundamentalism, moribund after the Scopes trial, could rise again in the 1970s.³

Joel Carpenter extended the history of fundamentalism beyond the 1930s in his book Revive Us Again. Carpenter agreed with Marsden that fundamentalism was not merely a reaction against modernism. Carpenter’s insight was that fundamentalists’ defeat at the Scopes trial did not necessarily mean that fundamentalism retreated after the 1930s. Rather, Carpenter looked at how fundamentalists created their own network of extra-denominational institutions, most notably Bible colleges that turned out thousands of pastors, evangelists, and missionaries. Also important in linking fundamentalists together were publishing houses, radio shows, and Bible and prophecy conferences. In one sense the creation of these networks was a retreat, because fundamentalists increasingly withdrew from “the world” and from liberal denominations, thus forming their own subculture. Still, because most fundamentalists tended to form para-church institutions rather than denominations, one could identify as a fundamentalist and contribute to fundamentalist organizations even while remaining in mainline denominations. Fundamentalists’ withdrawal was driven far more by their theology of separation from the world than by any marginalization at the Scopes trial.⁴

Even in the period that Carpenter studies, fundamentalists refused to give up their claim to cultural dominance and instead planned for a revival. What was surprising about 1970s fundamentalism, then, was not its strength or its claims to cultural primacy, but the decision of leaders like Falwell to give up withdrawal in favor of political activism. Even political activism, though, was a part of fundamentalists’ heritage. They were heirs to the evangelical reform movements in the nineteenth century, such as temperance, abolition, and benevolence. Fundamentalism was also a way to be modern while critiquing the reformers of the Progressive era. Anti-evolution crusades were, for example, an attempt to defend the doctrine of creation, but they were also critiques of efforts to reform society scientifically, such as eugenics.⁵

Legal historian Edward J. Larson took up the study of fundamentalism and anti-evolution in his Pulitzer prize–winning book Summer for the Gods. The book is a history of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, covering both the trial and its aftermath. Larson pointed out that Dayton was not particularly fundamentalist, but that boosters drummed up the trial as a publicity stunt to put their town on the map. The trial might not have turned into a religious showdown until Clarence Darrow, a famous trial attorney who was a public agnostic, and William Jennings Bryan, a politician and leader of the anti-evolution movement, took the case as lead counsel for the defense and the prosecution, respectively. Darrow and Bryan, along with reporters like H. L. Mencken, turned the trial into a cause célèbre that tested the validity of fundamentalist Christianity, climaxing in Darrow’s questioning of Bryan on the witness stand as an expert on the Bible.⁶

Larson proves that the Scopes trial was not the defeat for fundamentalists that historians have portrayed it as. Indeed, fundamentalists won the trial and took it as encouragement in their crusade. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court used a technicality to avoid fining John Scopes but also to avoid striking down the anti-evolution law, which remained on the books for decades. The rewriting of the history of the Scopes trial into a victory for modernism did not occur for decades, most notably in the writings of Charles Beard and in the Broadway play and film Inherit the Wind, produced in the 1950s as a fictionalized critique of McCarthyism.⁷

Larson’s book makes it possible to write a history of fundamentalism that could escape the undue influence of the Scopes trial. For too long, historians have relied on the trial as a milestone marking the periodization of religious history. Because it was extraordinary, the trial is a useful lens for studying American religion, but because it is extraordinary, the trial cannot be taken as typifying the course of fundamentalism. What is needed is a history of fundamentalism that takes the trial into account, yet which refuses to periodize the history of fundamentalism around the mistaken notion that it was a turning point. By doing so, historians can move beyond the narratives of declension and revival into which religious history too often falls.⁸

Marsden and Carpenter’s cultural histories provide one way of situating fundamentalism, whether in decline or revival, within American culture. In A Transforming Faith, David Harrington Watt provides a complementary approach. Where Marsden and Carpenter explicate fundamentalists’ distinctive subculture, Watt examines how American culture shapes and controls the culture of fundamentalism. His approach depends on the same definition of fundamentalism as modern, yet it recasts the inquiry in a profitable new way.⁹

Watt examines how a subculture can maintain its identity within a dominant culture, a hegemonic relationship he terms “asymmetrical power.” Watt argues that American fundamentalists since the 1950s, for all their withdrawal from and critiques of American culture, bought into the major characteristics of the dominant culture. Watt begins with an essay on Bill Bright’s evangelistic tract “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” pointing out how the text markets Christianity as a commodity. He extends similar analysis to other parts of evangelism. Evangelical teaching on marriage and the family were often indebted to feminism, while evangelical counseling owed as much to psychology as to the Bible. Evangelical politics bought uncritically into conservative, free market ideas. Watt’s title points to evangelicalism not as a faith that transforms culture, but as a faith that was transforming under culture’s influence.¹⁰

Marsden’s, Carpenter’s, and Watts’s books are cultural histories that attempt to examine fundamentalism as a whole, to come to grips with its essential characteristics while remaining within the particulars of history. A local history that points in a promising direction for new research is Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalists in the City. Bendroth’s book is a fine-grained study of fundamentalist congregations, leaders, and events in Boston from the 1880s to the 1950s. Her chapters on Tremont Temple and Park Street Church in particular make good use of demographic data and show a fine sensitivity to the local motivations and methods peculiar to each congregation. Defining fundamentalism as “oppositional” evangelicalism, Bendroth finds that fundamentalists in Boston did not fight primarily against theological liberals, many of whom called Boston and Cambridge home, but rather against Catholics. Fundamentalists’ battles were inextricably linked to local politics, which in Boston were defined by a statehouse controlled by Protestants and a city hall controlled by Catholics. This kind of insight which could not be deduced from a national history is precisely the promise of local histories of fundamentalism. Bendroth’s study also does valuable work in confirming the conclusions of broader studies, for example, by illustrating how Gordon College was a crucial nexus for Boston fundamentalists, and by showing how fundamentalism flourished even in Boston in the periods when it was supposed to have been in decline.¹¹

Bendroth’s history might well be taken as a model by future historians of fundamentalism, who must fill up the deficit of local histories of fundamentalism. To be sure, there have been many highly particular books on recent fundamentalism. Some of these are exposes, whether as journalism or as memoir. Of more scholarly use are David Watt’s brief ethnographic studies of three Philadelphia congregations in the 1990s, and James M. Ault’s sociological study of a Baptist congregation in 1980s Worcester, Massachusetts. These studies are all recent, though, and they are not histories. What is needed are local studies of fundamentalist congregations or institutions, researched in the tradition of ethnographic history and focusing on the congregants rather than the leaders. If the sources are extant, numerous congregations present themselves as options: J. Frank Norris’s First Baptist Church in Fort Worth; William Bell Riley’s First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, John R. Rice’s Sword of the Lord conferences; A. C. Dixon’s Moody Church in Chicago or Metropolitan Tabernacle in London; and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Westminster Chapel in London.¹²

If the history of fundamentalism could benefit from going local, it could also benefit from going transatlantic. Some of the British connection of fundamentalism are well known, such as the tours in Britain by evangelists from D. L. Moody to Billy Graham. Other known connections include how American fundamentalism imported dispensationalism and the literal interpretation of biblical prophecy from John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren, and later imported apologetics and fiction from C. S. Lewis. Some pastors, such as A. C. Dixon, held pulpits in both Britain and United States. Less well known, though, is how British and American Christians interacted on a regular basis, and how fundamentalism in America and conservative evangelicalism in Britain functioned in their different political and cultural circumstances. Some excellent work has been done in tracing evangelicalism in the Anglophone world, most notably the series A History of Evangelicalism, edited by Mark Noll and David Bebbington. A transatlantic study along those lines could free the study of American fundamentalists from what may be invalid assumptions about its peculiar Americanness. Such a transatlantic history would be a return to Ernest Sandeen’s insight that dispensationalist theology could be understood only by linking British and American history.¹³

1. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2. Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 16-18, 43-71, 80-100, 102-22. Marsden’s helpful definitions of the terms fundamentalism and evangelicalism and their varying usage over time are on pages 234-35. Fundamentalists themselves have put much effort into defining their movement, for example, David O. Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville, SC: Unusual Publications, 1986), 3-12. These definitions tend to be normative rather than descriptive.
3. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 6-8.
4. Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13-32, 57-75, 124-40. For a study of fundamentalists’ appropriation of modern mass culture, see Douglas Carl Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
5. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 32, 54, 110-23, 187-232.
6. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 92-93, 101-5, 116-21, 198.
7. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 225-66.
8. An example of a work which purports to displace the Scopes trial as “antievolution’s defining moment” is Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), which nevertheless spends only two chapters tracing the history of anti-evolution movements after Scopes.
9. David Harrington Watt, A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Most histories of fundamentalism, like those of Marsden and Carpenter, have tried to explicate fundamentalism’s subculture. Another fine work in this mode is Randall Herbert Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). A recent book that, like Watt, is more concerned to show how American culture has influenced religious subcultures is Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007).
10. Watt, A Transforming Faith, 4-7, 15-32, 49-154.
11. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3-9, 99, 101-24, 155-76.
12. For expose as journalism, see Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009). For expose as memoir, see Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007). Schaeffer’s book is notable only for being the most shameless of the ex-fundamentalist memoirs. For a far more sensitive and sympathetic memoir, used as a means of introduction to the history of fundamentalism, see Brett Grainger, In the World But Not of It: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America (New York: Walker, 2008). David Harrington Watt, Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); James M. Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
13. Three volumes of A History of Evangelicalism, published by Inter-Varsity Press, have appeared. The two projected volumes, The Disruption of Evangelicalism: The Age of John R. Mott, J. Gresham Machen and Aimee Semple McPherson, to be written by Geoff Treloar, and The Gobal Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott, to be written by Brian Stanley, will cover the period of American fundamentalism.

Next year is the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. The Baylor-based Institute for Studies of Religion will be hosting a conference on April 7th-9th.

So far, the conference organizers have confirmed the participation of quite an impressive list of historians and theologians, including Mark Noll, Philip Jenkins, N. T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and David Bebbington.

From the conference website:

Major conference themes will include the way that the King James Bible created a common literary and religious culture in the English-speaking world; the significance of vernacular translation for Christian growth and development; and the challenges posed by recent declines in biblical literacy and the end of the King James’s dominance as the Bible translation for English-speaking Christians.

So mark your calendars and clear your schedules! To quote one of my professors, this is “arguably the Christian academic conference of the upcoming year.”