The Revisionist View of Fundamentalist History
by Mark Sidwell
This article originally appeared in Biblical Viewpoint 26, no. 2 (November 1992): 96-104. © 1992 Bob Jones University. All rights reserved. Permission to copy or distribute this article must be secured in writing from the editors of Biblical Viewpoint.
Revisionism is the term in historical study for that approach to a subject which takes exception to the previously dominant approach. Unfortunately, it is sometimes equated with “debunking,” that extreme form of revisionism which stresses negative aspects of respected subjects, as in the case of historians who think it is as important to repeat the rumor that Thomas Jefferson fathered illegitimate children by his slaves as it is to mention that he wrote the Declaration of Independence. In reality, revisionism can serve as an important corrective to distorted views of history which present only one side of a subject or misrepresent it entirely. The value of revisionism is plainly seen in the growth of a revisionist view of the history of fundamentalism in the last twenty-five years.
The Traditional View
The traditional view of fundamentalist history began to develop during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s.1 Outlined by the secular media and filled in by liberal historians, the traditional approach viewed fundamentalism as a cultural reaction to the modernization of American life, often southern and rural in its outlook. Modernism, on the other hand, emerged as the upholder of progressive, urban society. H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, wrote in his influential Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929),
In recent times the conflict between urban and rural religion took on dramatic form in the theological battles of Modernism and Fundamentalism. The agrarian leader of the West, [William Jennings] Bryan, became not only the champion of its economic interests but of its religion also. In the religious position he and his followers represented were reflected not only the memories and habit of frontier faith but also the experiences of rural life. Modernism, however, grew out of the social experience of the city bourgeoisie as well as out of the impact of the new science on religion.2
Stewart Cole in The History of Fundamentalism (1931), the earliest history of the movement, underlined this point more subtly but no less certainly.3 What Cole sees as the reactionary character of fundamentalism comes out clearly in his chapter “The Rise of Fundamentalism”:
Fundamentalism was the organized determination of conservative churchmen to continue the imperialistic culture of historic Protestantism within an inhospitable civilization dominated by secular interests and a progressive idealism. The fundamentalist was opposed to social change, particularly such change as threatened the standards of his faith and his status in ecclesiastical circles. As a Christian, he insisted upon the preservation of such evangelical values as at one time had been accepted universally, but in recent years were widely abandoned for more meaningful ideals.4
As this quotation demonstrates, Cole believed that that fundamentalism was a religious movement but denied that it was shaped primarily by distinctly religious beliefs. So far did this social and psychological approach proceed that by the 1950s Norman Furniss felt comfortable in listing the characteristics of fundamentalism as, among other things, “violent language and vituperative personal invective,” ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and egotism. He lumped fundamentalism with the Ku Klux Klan as “movements stressing hatred and bigotry.”5 Richard Hofstadter made fundamentalism one his subjects in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, describing it as “a religious style shaped by a desire to strike back at everything modern—the higher criticism, evolutionism, the social gospel, rational criticism of any kind.”6
George Marsden, after surveying the views of these and other writers, notes that they unite in treating “fundamentalism as a side effect of the passing of an old order” and that in doing so they “intimated that the movement would die away when the cultural transformation was complete.”7 Ironically, it was not so much the flaws of interpretation in these presentations that caused historians to reevaluate fundamentalism but rather the embarrassing fact that it did not die out as they predicted. By the late 1960s, a new direction was emerging in the study of fundamentalism.
Pioneer of the Revisionist View: Ernest Sandeen
Although others contributed to the revision of fundamentalist studies,8 it is Ernest Sandeen who probably deserves the credit for pioneering the revisionist view. In place of the cultural and social emphasis that previous historians had stressed, Sandeen sought to demonstrate that fundamentalism was primarily a religious movement arising out of a distinct religious heritage. In essays that appeared in the 1960s, one of which was republished in pamphlet form as The Origins of Fundamentalism,9 Sandeen began advancing his views and finally climaxed his research in 1970 with the publication of The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930.10
Sandeen’s major thesis is that the theological roots of fundamentalism are found in the growth of premillennial teaching first in Britain and later in America. He also saw a lesser, though still important, contribution from the Princeton theologians with their strong view of biblical inerrancy. Historians have debated his findings. Sandeen and George Marsden, in fact, engaged in a genteel debate in print over Sandeen’s main ideas.11 Regardless of whether his position is entirely valid—and he unquestionably, as Marsden notes in his review, highlights at least one major root of fundamentalism—Sandeen revolutionized the study of fundamentalist history. Rather than cast its inspiration in cultural or psychological terms, Sandeen put it in intellectual or (the fundamentalist might say) theological terms. When many other historians were looking for fundamentalism’s origins in the rural South, Sandeen had the literary audacity to put them out of the United States altogether. He outlined an approach that other historians appreciated and soon appropriated.
Spokesman of the Revisionist View: George Marsden
Probably the leader of the view that fundamentalism was shaped by ideas within it as well as of forces outside of it is evangelical historian George Marsden. Although one must beware of allowing a historian’s background to influence one’s view of his writing, Marsden’s biography perhaps helps illuminate his generally more sympathetic treatment of fundamentalism.12 His father, Robert S. Marsden, was a student at Princeton Seminary during the reorganization that led to the departure of J. Gresham Machen with several others and their founding of Westminster Theological Seminary. Robert Marsden followed them to Westminster and later left the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to join Machen’s Orthodox Presbyterian Church. George Marsden was born in 1939, after his father had made these momentous decisions. After a period of religious doubt in college, Marsden attended Westminster Seminary, receiving a bachelor of divinity degree, then went to Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in history. He then went to teach at Calvin College, a Christian Reformed school in Grand Rapids, where he labored for over twenty years.
Marsden displayed his interest in evangelical history with his first major work, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970).13 He went on to contribute a series of articles on aspects of evangelical and fundamentalist history, but his reputation grew most rapidly with the publication in 1980 of Fundamentalism and American Culture. The great impact of this work was not due entirely to Marsden’s careful research. His book appeared during the 1980 presidential election, when Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, and the “religious right” in general were perceived to be fueling Ronald Reagan’s drive to the White House. Since liberal scholarship had at least superficially consigned fundamentalism to death in the Scopes trial in 1925, Marsden’s work came at a time when even the nonreligious were asking what fundamentalism was and whence it had come.
Propitious timing alone did not propel the book to fame, though. Marsden carefully restated and revised the origins of fundamentalism in convincing fashion. Granting the contribution of Sandeen in recognizing the importance of premillennialism and biblical inerrancy to the rise of fundamentalism, Marsden nonetheless saw it as a broader movement. It was the heir to mainstream nineteenth-century American evangelicalism with all of its revivalistic and pietistic tendencies. As American culture underwent tremendous stress and change during the turn of the twentieth century and particularly after World War I, fundamentalism arose as the attempt of one stream of evangelicalism to grapple with those changes. Marsden notes that he “views fundamentalism not as a temporary social aberration, but as a genuine religious movement or tendency with deep and intelligible beliefs.” Furthermore, he “seeks to clarify the way in which this movement and these beliefs were conditioned by a unique and dramatic cultural experience.”14
The success of Fundamentalism and American Culture was enormous. It seized the attention of the scholarly world and won accolades within evangelicalism; Eternity magazine named it the book of the year. Its fame was probably no small factor in Marsden’s leaving Calvin College in 1986 to join the faculty of the more prestigious Duke Divinity School. It has also given impetus to other scholars to pursue this rich line of revisionist research. Marsden himself followed it up with several works, the most notable of which is Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1987),15 a study of the rise of the “new evangelicalism” as it is reflected in the history of Fuller. His contribution to the revitalizing of the study of fundamentalist history has been and continues to be enormous.
The Fundamentalist Contribution
As this revisionist view was gaining currency in scholarly circles, fundamentalists themselves offered their first comprehensive surveys of the movement: George W. Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America (1973), and David O. Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (1986).16 Both writers were members of the faculty of Bob Jones University at the time of the release of their respective publications. (Beale was in fact the student of Dollar and his successor.) The timing of their publication placed them chronologically in the revisionist surge, and, by content, they fit ideologically as well.17
The two works differ moderately in approach. Dollar, eager to interpret fundamentalism in light of its contemporary expression as he sees it, draws lines. He denies the term fundamentalist to nondispensationalist, non-Baptist conservatives such as Presbyterian J. Gresham Machen and refers to them instead as “orthodox allies” (pp. 173-83). Likewise, he divides up even contemporary fundamentalism into “militant,” “moderate,” and “modified” camps (pp. 282-89). Dollar defines fundamentalism as “the literal exposition of all the affirmations and attitudes of the Bible and militant exposure of all non-Biblical affirmations and attitudes” (p. xv).
Beale, though no less firm in his convictions, is more irenic in approach. He stresses fundamentalism’s interdenominational aspects18 and sees its essence not in “militant exposure” but in “an emphasis on the doctrine and practice of holiness, a full-orbed holiness that includes both personal and ecclesiastical aspects” (p. 3), an emphasis that is found in its practice of separation. More aware of the dangers of historical presentism, Beale seeks to treat historical periods more on their own terms. He divides fundamentalist history into two periods “Nonconformist Fundamentalism” to 1930, when fundamentalism was a Puritan effort to purge liberalism from the existing institutions of American Christianity, and “Separatist Fundamentalism,” which corresponds more closely to the militant fundamentalism of today.
Despite these differences, Dollar and Beale unite with each other and the revisionists in much of their approach. They see fundamentalism as a conscious theological movement. In fact, they are in some ways the exact reverse of the traditional school. Whereas the traditionalists at times approached fundamentalism almost solely from a social/cultural viewpoint, the fundamentalists approach it from almost solely a religious one. Indeed, Dollar and Beale represent, appropriately enough, the most militant shade of the revisionist view. Other revisionists treat fundamentalism theologically out of a sense of fairness to the whole body of evidence; the fundamentalist scholars write with a consciousness that they are defending the truth. It is this distinctive of the fundamentalist historians that gives rise to their other unique characteristics: their interest in presenting an apologetic for the movement and their focus more on addressing the popular fundamentalist audience rather than the scholarly world. Dollar and Beale also include a strong devotional element, seeking to inspire their audience by recounting the deeds of the fundamentalist leaders as examples. Neither ignores the failures of the movement, however. Although sometimes criticized by nonfundamentalists for their lack of objectivity, they were the first to attempt a favorable and comprehensive narrative history of the movement.
Concluding Generalizations
Numerous other historians have contributed to this resurgence. In addition to citing the books of Marsden and Sandeen “as the most influential works in this revisionist historiography,” William Trollinger lists C. Allyn Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism; Ferenc Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America; and Timothy Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming as “other important general studies.”19 Trollinger’s own ground-breaking study of W. B. Riley should be included, as well as Virginia Brereton’s recent history of the Bible school movement, Training God’s Army (1990). It is interesting to note how many of these writers, such as Marsden and Weber, have an evangelical heritage. Trollinger says of his own background,
I should note that I am not a fundamentalist. I grew up in a conservative evangelical—but not fundamentalist—family; while I remain strongly committed to the Christian faith, over the years my religious (and political) allegiances have shifted even further away from fundamentalism. But while I am not attempting to write an apologetic for fundamentalism, neither do I seek to savage the fundamentalists.20
It is tempting to conclude that the revisionist authors were perhaps inspired by the realization that the distorted views they read in the traditionalist school did not match the reality they had personally experienced. Such an assertion would be far too sweeping, however, and fails to explain the contribution of writers such as Brereton, who had little previous exposure to the movement.
In conclusion, what can the fundamentalist say about the revisionist school? The approach is certainly more balanced and at times even favorable to the movement. The fundamentalist must be aware, however, that even those writers willing to treat the movement more sympathetically do not necessarily endorse it wholeheartedly or restrain from pointed criticism. Ernest Sandeen’s almost polemical chapter on the Princeton view of inspiration is a case in point.21 And—considering the usual swing of historical studies—it is only a matter of time before historians begin to challenge the revisionist school and carry fundamentalist studies in directions that those in the movement will find less pleasing.22 In the meantime, fundamentalists should take advantage of this interest, their own familiarity with the subject, and their close proximity to the original sources not only to contribute to fundamentalist studies but also to help shape them.
Notes
1 For a thorough survey of the historiography of fundamentalism up to the early 1980s, see William Ellis, “Evolution, Fundamentalism, and the Historians: An Historiographical Review,” The Historian, 44 (1981): 15-35. Ellis actually distinguishes between two approaches in the traditional view of fundamentalism in contrast to the revisionist view. The earlier treated fundamentalism almost with contempt as a mere backwoods anti-intellectualism. Later, during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, historians saw it as a more sinister force, “one manifestation of a national temper of hypervigilance against subversion and innovation” (p. 22, quoting Kenneth Bailey). However, since both of these approaches treated fundamentalism apart from its basic theological roots, this article does not use Ellis’s secondary distinction. See also the fine discussions of the definition of fundamentalism and the significant literature in Virginia Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 165-70, 197-208.
2 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929; reprint ed., New York: Living Age Books, 1957), p. 184.
3 Cole stresses that the South and rural North were least touched by modern urbanization and provided much of the leadership for fundamentalism. On this point see Stewart Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1931), pp. 26-28, 82.
4 Ibid., p. 53.
5 Norman Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 35-45.
6 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 121.
7 George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 199. The authors cited here to represent the traditional viewpoint are suggested by Marsden and Ellis.
8 Ellis (pp. 26-27) cites the work of historian Paul Carter and others in the 1960s in calling attention to the flaws of the traditional view. Sandeen, however, more clearly offered a full-fledged explanation in place of the older view instead of just enumerating its failures.
9 Ernest Sandeen, The Origins of Fundamentalism: Toward a Historical Interpretation, Facet Books Historical Series—10 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 1967. It originally appeared as “Toward a Historical Interpretation of Fundamentalism,” Church History, 36 (1967): 66-83. See also Ernest Sandeen, “The Princeton Theology: One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism,” Church History, 31 (1962): 307-21.
10 Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (1970; reprint ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978).
11 George Marsden, “Defining Fundamentalism,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 1 (1971): 141-51; Ernest Sandeen, “Defining Fundamentalism: A Reply to Professor Marsden,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 1 (1971): 227-32; “Professor Marsden’s Concluding Remarks,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 1 (1971): 232-33. See especially pp. 232-33 for the differences between the respective interpretations of Sandeen and Marsden.
12 See Leslie R. Keylock, “Evangelical Leaders You Should Know: Meet George M. Marsden,” Moody Monthly, July/August 1986, pp. 61-63.
13 George Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Two articles by Marsden written originally in the 1960s dealing with both this subject and the split in Machen’s Orthodox Presbyterian Church are found in Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, ed., Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), pp. 169-82 and 295-328.
14 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 5-6. For an overall summary of his views, see pp. 3-8, 229-30.
15 George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987). For a collection of some of his shorter writings concerning fundamentalist and evangelical history, see George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).
16 George W. Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville, S.C.: Bob Jones University Press, 1973), and David O. Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville, S.C.: Unusual Publications, 1986). There has been one other attempt from within the movement to outline fundamentalist history: The Fundamentalist Phenomenon: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity (New York: Doubleday ∓ Company, 1981). The book was “edited” by Jerry Falwell but was actually written by Ed Dobson and Ed Hindson, members of the faculty at Falwell’s Liberty University; it is a somewhat more superficial survey written with an even narrower apologetic purpose (i.e., the defense of Falwell) than the other works. Reviewer Timothy Weber notes these “three book-length studies by fundamentalists” and observes, “Of the three fundamentalist histories, Beale’s is by far the best.” Timothy Weber, “Review of In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1950,” Fides et Historia, 19 (1987): 88-89. Weber’s review, however, is also highly critical of some aspects of Beale’s work.
17 The question naturally arises of how much the fundamentalist works were a reaction to the other revisionist works. Beale’s work, coming in the 1980s, is clearly so, and he is quick to give credit to other historians who proceeded him. (See pp. 4-5, for example, and his brief bibliographic essay on pp. 399-401.) In Dollar’s case the link is less certain. Ernest Sandeen, for instance, said that Dollar conducted no research for the “first hundred pages” but simply followed Sandeen’s Roots of Fundamentalism. [Ernest Sandeen, “Review of A History of Fundamentalism in America,” Church History, 43 (1974): 426.] Dollar denied this charge and in support of his previous research and originality of approach one should note George W. Dollar, “The Early Days of Fundamentalism,” Bibliotheca Sacra, 123 (1966): 115-23.
18 Beale in fact expressly repudiates Dollar’s characterization of Presbyterians as merely “Orthodox Allies” to fundamentalism (p. 117 footnote 10; for another example of a point of divergence, see p. 181 footnote 3, concerning Alvah Hovey and Frederick L. Anderson). In his concluding bibliographic essay, Beale notes Dollar’s narrowness in depicting fundamentalism “as essentially a Baptist, premillennial, reactionary movement against modernism.” He adds, however, that the earlier effort “was a pioneer work for Fundamentalists, and it contributed to a widespread awareness among Fundamentalists of their heritage. . . . Consequently, the work contributed to increased interest in the movement’s history” (pp. 400-401).
19 William Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 166 footnote 9. The works he cites are C. Allyn Russell, Voices of American Fundamentalism: Seven Biographical Studies (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1982); and Timothy Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983).
20 Trollinger, p. 9.
21 Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 103-31. Beale calls this chapter “biased and somewhat inaccurate” (In Pursuit of Purity, p. 12 footnote 2).
22 An example of this “re-revisionism” may already be seen in feminist critiques such as Betty A. DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990).