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.
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Notes
Arthur B. Patten, “Mysticism and Fundamentalism,” Christian Century 40 (March 8, 1923): 297.
H. L. Mencken, “Protestantism in the Republic,” in Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 111.
Stewart G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1931), 306.
H. Richard Niebuhr, “Fundamentalism,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 6 (New York: MacMillan, 1931): 527.
Norman F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918–1931 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 28.
See also the popular history by Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper and Bros., 1931).
Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper and Bros., 1931).
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 4;
Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
Marsden, “Defining Fundamentalism,” Christian Scholar’s Review 1 (Winter 1971): 141–51;
Sandeen, “Defining Fundamentalism, A Reply to Professor Marsden,” Christian Scholar’s Review 1 (Spring 1971): 227–32.
See, for example, William V. Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990);
Virginia L. Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990);
Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 76–91;
Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996);
Mark Taylor Dalhouse, An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996);
Dale E. Soden, The Reverend Mark Matthews: An Activist in the Progressive Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001);
Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993);
Bendroth, Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);
and Jeffrey P. Moran, “The Scopes Trial and Southern Fundamentalism in Black and White: Race, Region, and Religion,” Journal of Southern History 70 (February 2004): 95–120.
Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 233.
William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 2.
Shirley Jackson Case, The Revelation of John (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1919);
Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York: MacMillan, 1924).
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975), 383, 15, 386, 379.
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 544–50.
Ibid., 54. For more on the theology, see Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 247–49; see also Tim Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1982 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
For recent popularizations of the endtime prophecies, see Hal Lindsay with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Press, 1970);
or the more recent series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind, 12 vols. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1996–2007).
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 73. See also Melvin Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980);
and Timothy L. Smith, Called Unto Holiness: The Story of the Nazarenes, the Formative Years (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962).
Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 11.
R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon, ed., The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (Chicago, IL: Testimony Publishing, 1910–1915); Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 118–19.
Curtis Lee Laws, “Fundamentalism from the Baptist Viewpoint,” Moody Bible Institute Monthly [Moody Monthly] 23 (September 1922): 1, 15.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Christian Century, 39 (June 12, 1922): 713–17.
William Bell Riley, “Report of Committee on Resolutions,” in God Hath Spoken (Philadelphia: Bible Conference Committee, 1919), 13.
Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 264; Larson, Summer for the Gods, 41.
William Jennings Bryan, The Bible and Its Enemies (Chicago, IL: Bible Institute Colportage Association, 1921), 33–34.
Ferenc M. Szasz, “Three Fundamentalist Leaders: The Roles of William Bell Riley, John Roach Straton, and William Jennings Bryan in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 1969), 148.
William G. McLoughlin Jr., Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 260, 270, 283;
Robert F. Martin, Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862–1935 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 122–34.
J. H. Ralston, “Notes and Suggestions,” Moody Monthly 21 (February 1921): 268.
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© 2010 Adam Laats
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Laats, A. (2010). A New Kind of Protestant. In: Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106796_2
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