Fundamentalism and American Culture

Description

Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.

In the twenty-first century, militantly conservative white evangelicals have become more prominent than ever in American life. Marsden's volume, which now takes the history through the end of the Trump administration, remains the essential starting point for understanding the degree to which that militancy has been shaped by the fundamentalist heritage of the twentieth century.

For Marsden, fundamentalists are, in the broadest sense, conservative evangelicals who are willing to take a stand and to fight. Yet their militancy needs to be understood in the light of some specific aspects of their heritage. In the late nineteenth-century, American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. Often the “traditionalists” were also innovators in affirming apocalyptic prophesies of the imminent destruction of modern civilization and the return of Christ. By the 1920s, a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches, the teaching of biological evolution in schools, and changing mores in the culture. Fundamentalists often were conflicted by impulses to separate from condemned modern culture or to take back America as a Christian nation. Even with such tensions, fundamentalists built networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and mission agencies. These coalesced into major religious movements that proved to have remarkable staying power. Beginning in the 1970s, fundamentalist impulses led to increasing overt political mobilization and the rise of the religious right. In the twenty-first century, militant fundamentalist zeal to preserve Biblicist doctrinal and behavioral purity in churches remained strong, but often was overshadowed by more widely popular impulses of Christian nationalism and political partisanship.

New to this Edition

• Includes a new preface and concluding chapter reflecting on the contemporary climate of religious fundamentalism and its political implications

Table of Contents

Preface to the Third Edition
Introduction

Part One
Before Fundamentalism
I. Evangelical America at the Brink of Crisis
II. The Paths Diverge
III. D. L. Moody and a New American Evangelism

Part Two
The Shaping of a Coalition
This Age and the Millennium

IV. Prologue: The Paradox of Revivalist Fundamentalism
V. Two Revisions of Millennialism
VI. Dispensationalism and the Baconian Ideal
VII. History, Society, and the Church

Holiness

VIII. The Victorious Life
IX. The Social Dimensions of Holiness
X. “The Great Reversal,”
XI. Holiness and Fundamentalism

The Defense of the Faith

XII. Tremors of Controversy
XIII. Presbyterians and the Truth
XIV. The Fundamentals

Christianity and Culture

XV. Four Views Circa 1910
1. This Age Condemned: The Premillennial Extreme
2. The Central Tension
3. William Jennings Bryan: Christian Civilization Preserved
4. Transforming Culture by the Word

Part Three
The Crucial Years: 1917-1925

XVI. World War I, Premillennialism, and American Fundamentalism: 1917-1918
XVII. Fundamentalism and the Cultural Crisis: 1919-1920
XVIII. The Fundamentalist Offensive on Two Fronts: 1920-1921
XIX. Would the Liberals Be Driven from the Denominations? 1922-1923
XX. The Offensive Stalled and Breaking Apart: 1924-1925
XXI. Epilogue: Dislocation, Relocation, and Resurgence: 1925-1940

Part Four
Interpretations
XXII. Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon
XXIII. Fundamentalism as a Political Phenomenon
XXIV. Fundamentalism as an Intellectual Phenomenon
XXV. Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon

Part Five
Fundamentalism Yesterday and Today (2005)

Part Six
What Happened to Fundamentalism in the Twenty-First Century

Afterword: History and Fundamentalism
Notes
Bibliographical Indexes
Index