The rise of Christian fundamentalism (salvation, souls, genesis, America)
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If one pays careful attention to history, especially religious history in relation to the three Abrahamic faiths, they are all about "reactions to." This is evident in their scriptures also. First there was Judaism which Christianity reacted to. They hit head on and as a result created their own path complete with their own collection of scriptures to support their break with Judaism. Islam came along; rejected both Judaism and Christianity and came up with its own holy book.
Within each of these faiths there were also divisions - more "reactions to." In Judaism the Pharisees reacted to the status quo establishment represented in the Saduccees which supported the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty. Key differences included the topic of a bodily resurrection after death which the Saduccees rejected, primarily because it was a foreign doctrine picked up from the Persians and brought back to Jerusalem with some Jews amongst other [religious] ideas Persian. The Pharisees also rejected the Hasmonean Dynasty whom they felt should not rule over the Jews because the family did not come from the line of David nor the tribe of Judah.
Christianity had many sects, each reacting to each other and coming up with scriptures to suport their views. It was so bad councils had to be set up to establish uniformity while those who did not go along with what had been established were labeled heretics and run out of town on pain of death. Their books were also confiscated and burned.
Islam had its issues also resulting in two rival groups - the Sunnis and the Shiites, the latter coming into existence in reaction to the former.
One of the more well known reactions in the religious world was the Protestant Reformation which ended up setting the stage to break the stranglehold the Roman Church held on Europe for centuries. One of the other victories the Reformation won was putting the bible into the hands of the common people. This is often brought up by Christians as a watershed moment when man could now read the "word of God" for himself and come to know God personally. What is often overlooked is the fact that it also provided a chance for thinkers to dissect the bible objectively and this is precisely what happened in Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation, in 1520 when a German Reformation scholar (Carlstadt) noticed something odd in the book of Deuteronomy. He concluded that portions of that book could not have been written by Moses because it was impossible for Moses to write about details after his own death.
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes followed up in this and drew the same conclusions but went even further by claiming that there were entire portions of the Pentetauch that was not written by Moses. Twenty-Five year later, the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza concluded that not only did Moses probably not write any of the Pentetauch but that the entire Old Testament was written by many different writers at a much later time from the times of which they spoke or edited by later Jewish editors.
It was not until 1753 when a French doctor, Jean Astruc, published a pamphlet (anonymously) titled Conjectures on the Original Documents That Moses Appears to Have Used in Composing the Book of Genesis. He pointed out that the book of Genesis had ertain stories that were told twice with different details and this led him to believe that this was evidence more than one author put the book together and/or, showed the invisible hand of an editor or editors.
As a result, Astruc proposed what later became known as the "Documentary Hypothesis" and within a short time, his ideas were picked up and expanded by German scholars resulting in a school that became known as "Higher Criticism." The German scholars Eichhorn, Ewal, DeWette, Graf and Wellhausen identified four different sources for the Old Testament which was later put together and edited by later redactors and put in their final form around 400 B.C while under the Jews flourished in Babylon under the rather mild rule of the Persians. We call it the Old Testaent today.
The Documentary Hypothesis eventually crossed the Atlantic in the late 19th century and hit the United States like a storm. It gained the name "Modernism" in the United States and became popular amongst many Protestant Conservatives. The hypothesis not only suggested the Old Testament was written by diferent authors, but different authors with differing theolgies and motives that arose in "reaction to."
This new interpretation infuriated American conservatives who could not accept the idea that the Old Testament detailed stories that were written long after the times the stories were set in, as that would be problematic. In reaction, they came together at the Niagara Bible Conference in 1897, to hammer out a counter-theology, a process continued at the 1910 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church which would eventually set the stage for the creation of American Christian Fundamentalism, yet another "reaction to" in the long history of theological evolution. That story will be told another day.
At the conference the Conservatives came to a agreement on five core principles they felt defined Christianity. There were:
(1) the inerrancy of the Bible
(2) the Virgin Birth and the deity of Jesus
(3) the belief that Jesus died to redeem mankind's sin and that salvation resulted through faith in Jesus
(4) the physical resurrection of Jesus
(5) the imminent Second Coming of Jesus.
Between 1910 and 1915 a series of 12 booklets were published titled The Fundamentals; A Testimony to the Truth, containing 94 articles by 64 authors. The purpose of these were to defend the core beliefs which were agreed upon at the Niagara conference. Large sums of money was invested by two Christian laymen (Milton and Lyman Stewart) to see that the booklets circulated worldwide amongst Christians down to Sunday school teachers, ministers and missionaries free of charge. As a result of these booklets, those who upheld the principles became known as "fundamentalists."
Around 1919 the Moody Bible Institute came into existence in Chicago to continue publishing defenses for biblical inerrancy. This was followed by the first annotated Reference Bible put together and published by fundamentalist theologian, Cyrus Scofield which became known as the Scofield Reference Bible.
The Fundamentalist position led them to believe they were the only "true Christians" and led to bitter disputes with other Christians. In addition, they also made attempts to take over as many theological institutions in order to purge them of "modernists" and other "liberals."
In addition to the core principles of the movement, the fundamentalists also came to embrace a few other concepts. They believed in exclusivity, believing only they alone had the wherewithal and authority to interpret the Bible correctly based on the idea that they were indwelt by the spirit of God which taught them all truth. As a result they were inclined to believe they were the only "true Christians." As expected, they began to view other Christians, most notably, the Catholics, with great suspicion which led to condemnation. This created the concept of separation and it was their duty to oppose the church of Rome and all other liberal churches while striving to stay away from their corruptive influence.
Many of the essays in The Fundamentals were written with the expressed purpose of attacking "higher criticism" and to promote the idea that the Bible was indeed inerrant and was a literal revelation from God to man. Other essays sought to tear down the idea of a "Social Gospel," in which many liberal Christians asserted that Christians should ally with other social groups and become active in political movements to improve the living conditions for all humans. The Fundamentalists asserted this was futile because the hardships of the world were signs that would precede the retun of Jesus. The more important mission at hand, in their estimation, was to save souls for the kingdom of God. Futhermore, they were not willing to associate with people they considered liberal and heretics.
The essays also targeted science, notably, at that time, the theory of evolution which was gaining popularity. The rebuttals from the essays became the building blocks for what would become known as "creationism/intellgent design." What happened next has become the stuff of legend and bitter disputes up to this very day.
To write about the Protestant Reformation without acknowledging the political and socioeconomic aspects of that movement is an incomplete history. And of course there were protestant movements in Europe and elsewhere for all of Christian history. The key question is, why was Luther's movement successful when, for example, the Albigensians were not.
Your posting implies that the "fundamentalists" who organized the Niagara Conference were most interested in resisting ideas that had come across the Atlantic from thinkers (biblical scholars) in Europe. That is, those organizers were most interested in retaining control over the ideas by which they led their own respective congregations in America. I think this implication is an accurate example of the roles of most religious leaders -- to develop then maintain de facto control over a social organization that happens to be centered on religious ideas rather than political ones. This means that the American fundamentalist movement spilling out from the Niagara Conference is just another movement to retain authority across a social movement in reaction to an outside "threat". The problem for them is that, by setting themselves as enemies of intellectual inquiry, such as the scientific movement, they are in danger of becoming a backwater, incompatible with the inherently progressive mainstream of American culture.
Last edited by ParkTwain; 12-22-2008 at 03:28 PM..
Europe and its Christians initially had issues with Darwin's conclusions but eventually came to accept them as valid scientific conclusions. Just about about all of her religious authorities placed their stamp of approval on Darwin's findings.
In the United States, it was an entirely different matter. Evolution was seen as a serious threat because its position did not need God and was believed to teach a concept that man came from apes contrary to biblical teachings. Fundamentalists went up in arms and formed alliances with conservative lawmakers. These lawmakers then went on to pass what became known as "Monkey Laws" which made it illegal in half of the United States to teach evolution in school classrooms. The dispute heated up until it came to a head in the Scopes Trial which proved disastrous for the fundamentalist camp. It did not help their cause that sarcastic newspaper articles, by writers like HL Mencken and others, as well as novels such as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, depicted fundamentalists as uneducated hicks and backwoods country bumpkins.
Within a short period, the gains made by the fundamentalists with the passing of the monkey laws fell by the way side. The fiasco at the Scopes Trial let to infighting and even more theological wars with the rival liberal modernists. Their theological campuses saw a decline in student population and church attendance declined. By the time of the Great Depression, the fundamentalists movement was all but ineffective and dead in the water.
The late 1960s helped to resurrect the movement a few years later as it rose up in reaction to the what it deemed as an onslaught on America's Christian heritage. All of the old social orders were threatened and turned upside down on their heads. The civil rights movement broke down traditional social roles and also led to the renewed rise of the Social Gospel advocates; anti-war and human rights movements led to questions about patriotism and the role of the US in world affairs. Participatory democracy movements challenged traditional political authority; women's liberation and gay rights movements challenged sexual mores and family structures; interest in Eastern religious traditions led to skepticism about the role of traditional Christianity in society. To the fundamentalists, these things were to be fought and vanquished from American society.
For decades, culminating in the 1970s, the Fundamentalist movement took additional hits with four Supreme Court rulings. In 1954 there was Brown v Board of Education which outlawed segregated schools, a position vehemently supported by southern Christian fundamentalists. To get around this, fundamentalists set up their own private schools in order to continue their practice of segregation; one of these schools being the Bob Jones University which actually sued the Supreme Court to keep their practice of segregation in place (a practice only lifted in 2000 in face of public pressure). Brown V Board of Education was followed by Engel v Vitale in 1961 which outlawed government sanctioned prayers in school. This was then followed by Epperson v Arkansas which ruled that the so-called "monkey laws" were unconstitutional and then in 1973, Roe V Wade legalized abortion in the United States.
The stage was set for fundamentalists to take a plunge into the political process and they would score big.
To write about the Protestant Reformation without acknowledging the political and socioeconomic aspects of that movement is an incomplete history. And of course there were protestant movements in Europe and elsewhere for all of Christian history. The key question is, why was Luther's movement successful when, for example, the Albigensians were not.
Your posting implies that the "fundamentalists" who organized the Niagara Conference were most interested in resisting ideas that had come across the Atlantic from thinkers (biblical scholars) in Europe. That is, those organizers were most interested in retaining control over the ideas by which they led their own respective congregations in America. I think this implication is an accurate example of the roles of most religious leaders -- to develop then maintain de facto control over a social organization that happens to be centered on religious ideas rather than political ones. This means that the American fundamentalist movement spilling out from the Niagara Conference is just another movement to retain authority across a social movement in reaction to an outside "threat". The problem for them is that, by setting themselves as enemies of intellectual inquiry, such as the scientific movement, they are in danger of becoming a backwater, incompatible with the mainstream of American culture.
Park, please feel free to go even further back in relation to the Protestant Reformation if you think it will have relevance to what I have written so far. I did not want to dwell on it too much as I was more interested in how it sparked the movement of critical thinking.
You didn't mention why Southern fundamentalists preferred segregated schools. That is, in what ways did the fundemantalists attempt to apply their beliefs in the social and political spheres.
You didn't mention why Southern fundamentalists preferred segregated schools. That is, in what ways did the fundemantalists attempt to apply their beliefs in the social and political spheres.
The attention span around here seems to be about 3 sentences max. I'm not trying to push a 29 page dissertation.
Yes, I'm leaving out a lot of details for the sake of relative brevity. Sorry.
Why can't I give reputation to the same person twice . Deguire, your posts are well-written and very interesting.
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. Deguire, your posts are well-written and very interesting.
