A New Kind of Protestant

  • Adam Laats
Chapter

Abstract

To many contemporaries, the Protestant fundamentalist movement of the 1920s seemed to come out of nowhere. In 1923, Congregational Minister Arthur B. Patten blasted the “horrific … dismal and devastating … stygian and destructive … desperate … barbarous … cult” of fundamentalism as an evil that had only recently “come into vogue.”1 Journalist and critic H. L. Mencken traced the roots of fundamentalism back to the passage of Prohibition in 1918. From Mencken’s alarmed view in 1926, in a few short years fundamentalists had undertaken a “rapid descent into mere barbaric devil-chasing,” plunging rural America “into an abyss of malignant imbecility.”2 Although the fundamentalist movement had only recently come to the attention of these critics, fundamentalism had much deeper roots. The most influential cause of the movement was the nineteenth-century intellectual revolution that included such ideas as materialistic evolution, higher criticism, and theological modernism. All three of these ideas transformed mainstream American thinking and fundamentalism emerged in part as a response to this trend.

Keywords

American Culture Fundamentalist Movement Scope Trial Protestant Belief Virgin Birth 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Arthur B. Patten, “Mysticism and Fundamentalism,” Christian Century 40 (March 8, 1923): 297.Google Scholar
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© Adam Laats 2010

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  • Adam Laats

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