“The Age of Space Requires Space Age Teaching Tools”: Technology on Evangelical Terms

  • Michele Rosenthal
Chapter
Part of the Religion/Culture/Critique book series (RCCR)

Abstract

Although evangelicals rejected new developments in science and scientific method, they remained friendly to new technologies, including communications technologies. In this sense, evangelicals, like their fundamentalist and liberal counterparts, strove to find a balance between tradition and modernity 1 Ultimately evangelicals accepted the technological fruits of science in so far as they could be Christianized or at least in so far so they failed to threaten the foundations of evangelical Christianity. In rejecting science but ambiguously embracing technology, evangelical leaders pursued a paradoxical and often contradictory position that required legitimation and justification. Their understanding and use of television as new medium was part of this broader evangelical discourse concerning the role of science and technology in society. Through an examination of articles published in United Evangelical Action and Christianity Today, this chapter examines how evangelical leaders responded to the increasing prestige of science in post—World War II America, the rise of new technologies in general (and in the household) and the new medium of television in particular. These strategies of accommodation were not “natural” or “inevitable” but rather chosen and pursued. Why did evangelical leaders choose to accommodate to technology rather than reject it wholeheartedly along with the scientific philosophy that produced it?

Keywords

Color Television Theoretical Science Scope Trial Christianity Today Christian Century 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Everett Mendelsohn, “Religious Fundamentalism and the Sciences” in Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 23.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Gilbert emphasizes that the definitions of “science” and “religion” are unstable and change over time.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. 3.
    Conservative Protestants rejected evolution in so far as it contradicted the biblical story of creation. While liberal Protestants were able to accept and even embrace forms of evolutionary theory, conservative Protestants viewed evolution as one of the main causes of World Wars I and II (Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880–1930 [Alabama: University of Alabama, 1982]).Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Frederick Gregory distinguishes between three main kinds of Protestant responses to Darwin: the orthodox (conservatives) who rejected any scientific development which clashed with religious belief, a more moderate group which hoped to create harmony between science and religion partially by adapting Christian theology and partially by forcing science to admit that religion has a role in the natural world and a smaller tradition which wished to separate science and religion (Frederick Gregory. “The Impact of Darwinian Evolution on Protestant Theology,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986], pp. 369–390) .Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    On the distinction between liberals and modernists see William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 2–4.Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). Bozeman studies the Presbyterian example, but claims that Baconianism pervaded intellectual life in America, and was much more influential than previously thought. Bacon’s arguments concerning the harmony of science and religion were well received by English puritans in the seventeenth century, but by the eighteenth century the Enlightenment strongly called into question this assumption. Bozeman’s study shows that Baconianism persisted in the American context throughout the nineteenth and in the case of fundamentalists into the twentieth century.Google Scholar
  7. On the relationship between Protestantism and science see George Becker, “Pietism’s Confrontation with Enlightenment Rationalism: An Examination of the Relation Between Ascetic Protestantism and Science,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30 (1991): 139–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. 8.
    Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997), p. 11.Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880. Vol. 1 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 90. pp. 87–110; Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, p. 30;Google Scholar
  10. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
  11. 13.
    George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 212–221.Google Scholar
  12. 17.
    George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture; George Marsden, “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science,” in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 122–152;Google Scholar
  13. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).Google Scholar
  14. See also David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1996), particularly pp. 31–32 on the problematic use of postmodern theory by evangelical scholars. One might question why such parity would be intellectually necessary, except for the evangelical belief-system of the scholars in question. In other words, while it is insightful to note that evangelicals believed that they had a scientific method for reading the Bible, and to note how they used that belief rhetorically in their fight against modernism, one does not need to cede epistemological validity to such a position. While Noll remains critical of the fundamentalist wedding with Baconianism and takes pains to show all the ways in which fundamentalists were innovators as they attempted to preserve the old-time religion, he also believes that the fundamentalist social critique of science is fundamentally correct (p. 186). Gilbert takes a similar, if more religiously neutral stance, when he argues that W. J. Bryan operated from an alternative definition of science (pp. 23–35).Google Scholar
  15. 22.
    George Marsden, “Preachers of Paradox: Fundamentalist Politics in Historical Perspective,” in George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 119–120.Google Scholar
  16. 31.
    James DeForest Murch, Cooperation without Compromise: A History of the National Association of Evangelicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956). Of course, liberal Christianity was the direct result of this new scientism according to Murch (p. 21).Google Scholar
  17. 46.
    They certainly rejected postmillennialism almost completely as it was considered to be almost synonymous with the social gospel. On premillennialism in the U.S. see Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1982. Enlarged edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar
  18. 56.
    Edward John Carnell, Television: Servant or Master? (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1950), p. 116.Google Scholar
  19. 58.
    Edward John Carnell, Television: Servant or Master? (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1950).Google Scholar
  20. 59.
    Carnell was in many ways not a typical evangelical leader. He was educated at Harvard, wrote a dissertation on Reinhold Neibuhr, and later committed suicide. Rudolph Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell (New York: Cambridge, 1987);Google Scholar
  21. George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987).Google Scholar
  22. 60.
    Rudolph L. Nelson, “Fundamentalism at Harvard: The Case of Edward John Carnell,” in Historical Articles on Protestantism in American Religious Life, edited by Martin E. Marty (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1993), pp. 228–247.Google Scholar
  23. 63.
    Ibid., pp. 35–39. See also Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1992);Google Scholar
  24. and Jane Shattuc, The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997). One cannot help but think while reading Carnell’s description of TV as a panacea for the troubled soul, that he might be referring to his own soul.Google Scholar

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© Michele Rosenthal 2007

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  • Michele Rosenthal

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