The Historic Rise of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States in the Late Nineteenth Century.

Fundamentalism is a phantasmal rejoinder to modernism. Although the verge is frequently used in a habitual context to toy with any religious position perceived to be traditional, archaic or scripture-bound, it has a specific meaning from an historical perspective, and a genealogy which has seen the boundary change from the self-referential description of a particular religious aggroup, to a line which may have lost its impact by dint of misplaced, and indiscriminate, application.Origin tout ensembley used by a specific group of the Statesn Protestants, who shared a homogeneous world-view and theology, Fundamentalism grew from individuals inwardly disparate denomi body politics finding common cause to an organized figurehead with the government get onncy to challenge modernity at the level of the courtroom and the popular press. This essay get out numerate vindicatory how we can account for Fundamentalisms emergence in the US by scratch line considering its histori cal grow inwardly the Great Awakening, and up to the 1920s with the Scopes Monkey trial.Secondly it allow for consider the theological innovations that underpinned Fundamentalism by exploring both Dispensationalism and Premillenarianism, before finally placing Fundamentalism within its sociological background by looking at broader cultural moves in American corporation, and considering how changes in both the scientific and intellectual spheres challenged the traditional place of evangelistic Protestantism. Christian fundamentalism has been succinctly defined by George Marsden as militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism. In the latter part of the 19th coulomb and into the first decades of the 20th they essential specific beliefs and operating tenets that set them apart from what was, in their view, dangerously lax evangelical Protestantism. In a post-Darwinian world the Protestant worldview, particularly in the US, came under a number of specific threats from ad vances in science and contemporary intellectual developments. Unlike the liberals, who sought compromise with these developments, it was the fundamentalistics chief duty to trash uncompromisingly modernist theology and certain secularizing cultural trends. This militant tendency would lastly lead them to challenge modernity in the courtroom, and done utilizing the semipolitical carcass to achieve their ends. Although fundamentalists were anti-modernity, they were not anti-modern in their readiness to embrace new forms of confabulation media. Newspapers, publishing, cinema and radio were all exploited as effective methods to denudate their agenda. The very term Fundamentalism was coined in 1920, in the Watchman-Examiner newspaper, by Curtis Lee Laws, who defined fundamentalists as those ready to do battle royal for the bedrock. Traditional evangelicalism, from which Fundamentalism would grow, had shown shape during the Great Awakening of the 18th cytosine. A series of Ch ristian revivals had brought together a number of disparate movements, and bl s run Calvinist and Methodist theologies on with experiential conversion into a powerful and popular Christian movement. It also pr from each oneed on the evils of alcohol and another(prenominal) forms of vice, in addition to the pauperization to evangelize to the poor for their moral renewal done a loving evangel that emphasized personal piety and good lap ups. Nineteenth century America started out as an overwhelmingly Protestant country.The specific lineage of the majority group was traced back to northern European ancestry, from the settlers who had travelled crosswise the Atlantic in search of land in which they might shape a truly reformed Christianity. Different colonies on the eastern seaside had been under the theocratic rule of the different Protestant sects, yet all had a common purpose in implementing beau ideals will as laid out in the Bible. This would all change with the reachin g in the 1820s complete the first large scale immigration of Catholics, along with Jews and other religious minorities.Together with homegrown religious movements like the Mormons, these new groups in all changed the religious landscape of the US, and helped to reconcile the different protestant groups to one another. Evangelicalism emerged as a voluntary association of believers founded on the authority of the Bible alone. The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin had a profoundly worring effect on the prissy Protestant mindset. They, along with advances in philology, geology and the historical critical method of Biblical scholarship began to weaken the foundations of religious certitude.The Bible had been seen as the very ledger of God and was whence the notwithstanding guide a Christian would need to guide her finished the ethical and moral trials of life, safe in the knowledge that Gods will was being followed. The Bible had always been revered as the revealed formul ate of God, correct in every detail and in need of no addition to the text, and yet it was now under sustained questioning within academia. Towards the end of the 19th century an interdenominational revivalist profit, which sought to recurrence these trends, began to take shape around the eras greatest evangelist, Dwight L.Moody. A one- meter shoe salesman, Moody had a conversion experience to evangelicalism. After a massively popular tour of Ireland and the UK in the mid 19th century he emergenceed to the US as a preacher with the power to run very large audiences. Moody was of the generation immediately preceding that of the fundamentalists, and he had nonetheless provided them with a sufficiently well developed ne twainrk (which included his famous Bible Institute), and a strong charismatic nature about which the emerging movement could coalesce.Moody, who could not countenance Liberals in what they were teach or doing to the Christian Faith, found common ground with Funda mentalist thinkers and opinion shapers. Starting in 1910 a series of small booklets appeared called The Fundamentals. Each booklet contained a series of essays by a leadership evangelical thinker, plus a number of personal stories that attested to a radicalized evangelicalism.Although Fundamentalism, as we now know it, did not emerge as an imperious political orientation from this humansation alone, it was emerging as a broad movement within evangelical Protestantism as more of its membership took an increasingly spartan line on modernity. As they saw themselves losing control of their churches, their families, their working environments, their schools and their nation certain members withdrew into a specific eschatological belief system and a principle of separatism from liberal protestant thinkers.Organized around a system of Bible conventions that were held in the birthplace of Fundamentalism, New England, leading evangelistic preachers and scholars contemplated their enco unter to modernist theology and to some of the relativistic cultural changes that modernism embraced. Relativism, especially where the revealed script of God was concerned, was a hated innovation. Fundamentalists refused to acknowledge the congenator merit of each religion, or each Christian denomination either their beliefs were right and were charge defending, or they were wrong.They would defend an absolute truth, merely not a relative one. The second decade of the 20th century saw the Fundamentalists win two important battles, but gain public opprobrium as a direct result. The first, the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, was a victory that saw the courts carry on the teaching of the Genesis account of human origins over the empirical Darwinian view. The case became a cause celebre by means ofout the US, and opened up the Fundamentalist position to widespread ridicule finished a largely violent press. The second front in which they had a pyric victory was over prohibition.The discard on alcohol consumption was in place from 1919-1933, during which time outlaw(prenominal) alcohol distillation and sales fueled the rise of mafia organizations, and advance political and police corruption. Public morality did not increase as a result of banning alcohol, and the public resented the intrusion of religious ideology into public life. Afterwards Fundamentalists largely withdrew from public life to nurse their wounds and regroup, rather than retreat. Fundamentalism arose as a historically new religious movement with distinctive beliefs from its beastly in evangelical Protestantism.These beliefs, which they would go to great lengths to promote and defend, occur to on their own conception of themselves as a special good deal in Gods eyes with a Biblically mandated mission to manipulate the way for the kick the bucket of Christ. The two closely characteristic beliefs, which defined the Protestant Christian Fundamentalist, were dispensationalism and premil lenarianism. Fundamentalists drew their theology from a verbal reading of Christian scripture, with a special emphasis being placed on the eschatological books of Revelation and Daniel, from which they were equal to(p) to discern Gods plan for gentlemans gentlemans future.A literal interpretation of Holy Scripture demands the believer is able to trust the text as a revealed source of Gods will. Fundamentalists believed the Bible to be the actual word of God, as revealed to the authors of the various books it contains. The subject it contains must be divinely ordered free from the errors human means is so prone to. Inerrancy in the Bible, specifically the King James version, was the profound pillar Fundamentalist theologians developed their understanding of Gods will upon.They believed the Bible free from all mistakes, errors and faults that it was in an unchanged condition since the earlier days of Christianitys founding fathers. It could therefore be absolutely relied upon by the individual for her understanding of the words and deeds of Christ, his followers and his message of salvation. It was the necessary word of God and hence anything which challenged itwas not just wrong but sinful especially for the evangelical who took a liberal position, and risked personal eternal damnation by doing so.Another central tenant, that of dispensationalism, became a hallmark belief for Fundamentalists. It is a abstract for interpreting all of history on the basis of the Bible, following the principle of literal where possible. They believed that history was divided up into seven distinct eras, or dispensations. Each of these eras was marked by a catastrophe for mankind, so the first dispensation was recorded in Genesis as the period of Eden, which culminated in the gibbosity of Adam and Eve from the earthly paradise with the stain of original sin.Others dispensations ended with Noah and the flood, or the Tower of Babel and mutually incomprehensible languages etc . The present age was known as the age of the Church and would culminate in the apocalypse as foretold by the revelation of John in the New Testament. This would be followed by the return of Christ to earth and the final of the seven dispensations that of the predominate of God on earth. The revelation of John, as interpreted by the Fundamentalists, speaks of a period of time numbering one thousand years in which Christ will reign before judgment on humanity.Theological consider within evangelical Christianity takes two approaches to just when the millennium will take place one side, the moderate evangelicals, believes there will be a millennium followed by judgement and the other side, that of the Fundamentalists, believes that Christ will return first, judge human kind and institute the period of heaven on earth. This belief, of Christs return followed by the millennium, is known as premillenarianism and became for Christians with fundamentalist leanings the focal point for bo th their heological positioning, and for informing both their political and amicable policies. Moderate evangelical millenarians believed that helping those worse off in this world, the poor and the destitute, would bring about Christs return through instigating a period of prosperity first, hence they involved themselves in the kindly Gospel through good works and charity. Premillenarians, on the other hand, waited on the return of Christ first and therefore did not believe that charitable work would save souls from the coming judgment.Theological development within fundamentalism was therefore a response to greater sociological conditions prevalent in the US in the early on decades of the 20th century. Post-war America was a radically different country than it had been just two generations before. Sociological conditions had altered in ways that elicited a response from some Protestants that were analogous to the experience of ethno-cultural groups newly arrived in the US Prote stants had, in Marsdens analogy, experienced the transition from the old world of the ordinal century to the new world of the twentieth wholly involuntarily. Fundamentalists had experienced a traumatic cultural shock as the result of changes to American smart set that had been rapid, far-ranging and decisive. Structural changes within the family, the work place and the political order had dislodged the Protestant world-view in the US from a position of being, in their view, normative to a relative position in the panoply of religious identities in the modern American experience. Traditional Protestantism was no longer a matter of necessity it was a choice and a leisure activity. This fragmentation of Protestant identity was a mirror of broader changes that had taken place within society. Social institutions had undergone a shift, within modernity, that fed into the Fundamentalist idea of change as anathema to perceptual constancy and as undermining a true understanding of Christi anity, and its role as the only sure path to personal salvation. The family unit had been, within living remembrance for some of Fundamentalisms early adherents, a stable basis upon which to establish the religious life.As an agrarian unit, the family had encouraged hierarchy with the father on top of a structure that spent most of its time together. This was necessary for the time consuming, and expensive, business of agricultural production. Family life, which included work, education, prayer and social instruction, had once guaranteed the coevals of the next generation of family, worker and religious adherent. Modernity brought new social roles, and new forms of social mobilization, through factory production and office work.Men, and to a lesser degree women, now traveled to a place of barter outside of the family home. The field of honor of the US that had seen the greatest amount of industrialization, the Northeast, was also the area that gave birth to Fundamentalism. As new opportunities to better oneself socially and financially arose so did new forms of egalitarianism. The needs of a developing industrial society called for the individualisation of wad through empowering them to make personal decisions about where they would live, marry and pray.Within the cities numerous people began to explore new forms of spiritual expression, with substantial numbers of people returning to traditional branches of a Protestantism which was now exploring new theologies, such as premillenarianism, in response to anomic uncertainty. Fundamentalism attracted growing numbers of people in urban, rather than rural, settings through marginalization and alienation. The growth of fundamentalist churcheswas largely through conversion of individuals within the city seeking the assurances offered by the theological assertions of the most radical Protestant sects.The position of the Bible as the inerrant word of God had come under considerable pressure from science throu gh the application of historical critical methodologies, as well as other from other disciplines that were investigating the Bible from new intellectual perspectives, and so had conceded its role of containing an ultimate truth. While nominally this would affect all Christianitys, including papistic Catholicism, the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, the individual top executive to interpret the word of God without an intermediary, left them particularly venerable to the accelerated pace of scientific progress.While many liberal Protestant theologians were willing to concede to lower criticism, or the critique of the human authorship of the Bible, Fundamentalists could not equivocate when a literal interpretation informed their very world-view, and their relationship to society and culture. It was not any particular movement in science, be it hard empiricism of Darwin or the soft theorizing of the Humanities, that ultimately upset the Fundamentalists as much as the mix of su spicion that now hung over the entire Christian project.Religion was challenged less by specific scientific discoveries than by the underlying logic of science (indeed, rationality) which had come full circle with the technological ability that had allowed America to enter into a world war as a super power. The social power to drive the new century was drawn from scientific rationalism, and not, as it had been in the past, from reliance upon the sacred. Fundamentalism was at war with modernity, and wished to reassert the old certainties in an age that had embraced their decline in favor of immediate temporal ability.Protestant Fundamentalism arose as a response to modernity during the late 19th and early 20th century. approach with a number of challenges on different fronts it developed a theological foundation that marked it off as a distinct religious phenomenon. Born of the schisms inherent in Protestantism since the reformation, it attracted adherents through a militant demur of traditional religious values that were increasingly undermined as progress in science questioned the Biblical narrative.Dispensationalism, and premillenarianism, in addition to a principle off separatism from liberal Protestant evangelicals, combined to give this new group a powerful voice in American religious life. At their height the fundamentalists were able to successfully challenge the American establishment through a highly publicized court trial that pitted modernitys champions against religions staunchest defenders. At the same time their political influence was such that their dream of public moral regeneration through the wholesale ban on alcohol consumption demonstrated their ability to mount effective campaigns, and win.These victories turned out to be Fundamentalisms undoing, at least where the general public was concerned, as the publicity generated by the Fundamentalists engendered public ridicule and resentment towards this new group. American society had changed radically from the victorian religious society, based on the principles that had once been clearly understood through a thorough individual grounding in the Bible, to a society that was increasingly materialistic, secular and diverse. As the Fundamentalists withdrew to regroup, and quietly build their power base through their own separate nstitutions, they would later reemerge to continue their challenge to modernity within American society. Bibliography Bruce, S. , Fundamentalism (2nd Ed. ), UK Polity Press, 2008 Bruce, S. , The Moral Majority the Politics of Fundamentalism in Secular Society in Studies in Religious Fundamentalism (ed. Lionel Caplan), London Macmillan Press, 1987 Carpenter, J. A. , mend Us Again The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, New York Oxford University Press, 1997 Hudson, W. S. , Religion in America (3rd Ed. )), New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1981 Lawrence, B. B. Defenders Of God The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age, ground forces Univ ersity of South Carolina Press, 1989 Marsden G. M. , Encyclopedia of Religion (ed. Lindsay Jones), Vol. 5. 2nd ed. Detroit Macmillan Reference USA, 2005 Marsden G. M. , Fundamentalism and American gardening The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925, New York Oxford University Press, 1980 Marty, M. E. , and Appleby, R. S. , Fundamentalisms Observed (The Fundamentalism Project, Vol. 1), Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, 1991 1 . Carpenter, J.A. , 1997, Revive Us Again The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, New York Oxford University Press, p. 5 2 . Marsden G. M. , 2005, Encyclopedia of Religion (ed. Lindsay Jones), Vol. 5. 2nd ed. Detroit Macmillan Reference USA, p. 2887 3 . Marsden G. M. , 1980, Fundamentalism and American socialization The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925, New York Oxford University Press, p. 159 4 . Marsden, Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 2887 5 . Bruce, S. , 2008, Fundamentalism (2nd Ed. ), UK Polit y Press, p. 12 6 . Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 6 7 . Lawrence, B. B. 1989, Defenders Of God The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age, USA University of South Carolina Press, p. 162 8 . Bruce, Fundamentalism, p. 70 9 . Marsden, Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 2889 10 . ibid, p. 2890 11 . Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 5 12 . Bruce, Fundamentalism, p. 69 13 . Marsden, Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 2889 14 . Lawrence, Defenders of God, p. 166 15 . Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 204 16 . Bruce, Fundamentalism, p. 20 17 . ibid, p. 17 18 . Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 202 19 . Bruce, Fundamentalism, p. 24