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

'Fundamentalism is a spiritual rejoinder to contemporaneousness. Although the term is frequently utilize in a familiar context to hateful any ghostlike fleck perceived to be traditional, archaic or scripture-bound, it has a peak essence from an diachronic perspective, and a genealogy which has seen the term dislodge from the self-referential description of a mathematical functionicular sacred group, to a term which may have lost its intrusion by means of mis sharpend, and indiscriminate, application.Originally used by a specific group of American Protestants, who shared a akin demesne-view and pietism, Fundamentalism grew from privates at heart disparate denominations finding common drive to an organized feces with the power to challenge modernity at the level of the courtroom and the popular press. This look for forget exact rightful(prenominal) how we can storey for Fundamentalism’s emergence in the US by first considering its historical roots w ithin the grand Awakening, and up to the 1920’s with the Scopes â€Å"Monkey” running play.Secondly it pass on consider the theological systemal innovations that under(a)pinned Fundamentalism by exploring both Dispensationalism and Premillenarianism, before lastly placing Fundamentalism within its sociological background by look at broader cultural movements in American society, and considering how removes in both the scientific and understanding spheres challenged the traditional butt of evangelistic Protestantism. deli truly boyian fundamentalism has been succinctly defined by George Marsden as â€Å"militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelisticism. In the latter part of the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th they genuine specific smells and operating principles that set them apart from what was, in their view, dangerously liberal evangelical Protestantism. In a post-Darwinian world the Protestant worldview, extraly in the US, came under a public figure of specific threats from advances in attainment and contemporary intellectual developments. Unlike the liberals, who sought agree with these developments, it was the fundamentalists â€Å"chief duty to combat uncompromisingly ‘modernist’ morality and sure profaneizing cultural trends. ” This militant tendency would finally lead them to challenge modernity in the courtroom, and by utilizing the political frame to achieve their ends. Although fundamentalists were anti-modernity, they were non anti-modern in their readiness to embrace raw(a) forms of communication media. sensitivespapers, publishing, flick and radio were all exploited as potent methods to publicize their maturenda. The very term â€Å"Fundamentalism” was coined in 1920, in the Watchman-Examiner pertlyspaper, by Curtis Lee Laws, who defined fundamentalists as those urinate to â€Å"do battle royal for the Fundamentals. Traditional evangelicalism, from w hich Fundamentalism would grow, had taken shape during the Great Awakening of the 18th century. A serial of rescuerian revivals had brought together a number of disparate movements, and blended Calvinist and Methodist theologies on with experiential conversion into a powerful and popular the Nazareneian movement. It also preached on the evils of alcoholic drinkic drink and opposite forms of vice, in addition to the pauperism to evangelize to the low for their moral renewal through and through with(predicate) a fond Gospel that emphasized personal piety and faithful works. 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 traveled across the Atlantic in search of republic in which they might practice a really reformed Christianity. Different colonies along the eastern seaside had been under the theocratic rule of the differen t Protestant sects, unless all had a common objective in implementing perfection’s will as laid out in the countersign. This would all interchange with the arrival in the 1820s off the first heavy(p) scale immigration of Catholics, along with Jews and former(a) religious minorities.Together with homegrown religious movements like the Mormons, these new groups solely changed the religious landscape of the US, and helped to reconcile the different Protestant groups to angiotensin-converting enzyme a nonher. Evangelicalism emerged as a â€Å"voluntary tie of believers founded on the authority of the Bible alone. ” The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin had a profoundly worring effect on the victorian Protestant mindset. They, along with advances in philology, geology and the historical critical method of Biblical scholarship began to undermine the foundations of religious certitude.The Bible had been seen as the very boy of divinity fudge and was then the moreover guide a Christian would need to guide her through the ethical and moral attempts of life, safe in the k without delayledge that God’s will was being followed. The Bible had always been revered as â€Å"the revealed word of God, correct in every detail and in need of no addition” to the text, and yet it was instanter under su markinged questioning within academia. Towards the end of the 19th century an interdenominational evangelist ne cardinalrk, which sought to counter these trends, began to take shape or so the era’s great evangelist, Dwight L.Moody. A one-time enclothe salesman, Moody had a conversion live to evangelicalism. after a massively popular tour of Ireland and the UK in the mid 19th century he checked to the US as a preacher with the power to guide very large audiences. Moody was of the generation instantly preceding that of the Fundamentalists, plainly he had nonetheless provided them with a sufficiently well developed ne dev ilrk (which include his famous Bible Institute), and a strong magnetized personality about which the emerging movement could coalesce.Moody, who could non countenance â€Å"Liberals in what they were commandment or doing to the Christian Faith”, found common ground with Fundamentalist thinkers and opinion shapers. Starting in 1910 a series of small booklets appeared called â€Å"The Fundamentals”. Each booklet contained a series of essays by a leading evangelical thinker, plus a number of personal stories that demonstrate to a entireized evangelicalism.Although Fundamentalism, as we now know it, did not emerge as an absolute political orientation from this military issue alone, it was emerging as a broad movement within evangelical Protestantism as more of its rank took an increasingly hard line on modernity. As they saw themselves â€Å"losing control of their churches, their families, their working environments, their schools and their nation” certain m embers withdrew into a specific eschatological belief system and a principle of separatism from liberal Protestant thinkers.Organized around a system of Bible â€Å"conventions” that were held in the birthplace of Fundamentalism, new England, leading evangelistic preachers and scholars contemp late(a)d their â€Å" encounter to modernist theology and to some of the relativistic cultural changes that modernism embraced. ” Relativism, curiously where the revealed word of God was concerned, was a hate innovation. Fundamentalists refused to acknowledge the relative merit of each religion, or each Christian denomination; either their beliefs were compensate and were worth defending, or they were wrong.They would defend an absolute truth, but not a relative one. The second decade of the 20th century saw the Fundamentalists win two important battles, but gain public traducement as a direct number. The first, the Scopes â€Å"Monkey” trial of 1925, was a victor y that saw the courts uphold the teaching of the Genesis account of valet de chambre origins over the experiential Darwinian view. The case became a cause celebre throughout the US, and opened up the Fundamentalist amaze to widespread ridicule through a largely belligerent press. The second front in which they had a pyric victory was over prohibition.The ban on alcohol outgo was in place from 1919-1933, during which time illegal alcohol distillation and sales fueled the rise of maffia organizations, and encouraged political and police corruption. Public ethical motive 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 â€Å"historically new religious movement with distinguish fittingive beliefs” from its plinth in evangelical Protestantism.These beliefs , which they would go to great lengths to conjure and defend, centered on their own conception of themselves as a special volume in God’s eyes with a Biblically mandated mission to pay back the way for the deteriorate of Christ. The two virtually sign beliefs, which defined the Protestant Christian Fundamentalist, were dispensationalism and premillenarianism. Fundamentalists drew their theology from a f efficient reading of Christian scripture, with a special emphasis being placed on the eschatological books of Revelation and Daniel, from which they were up to(p) to discern God’s plan for man benign’s future.A typographical error interpretation of Holy Scripture demands the believer is able to trust the text as a revealed stock of God’s will. Fundamentalists believed the Bible to be the actual word of God, as revealed to the authors of the various books it contains. The put across it contains essential be divinely valueed; free from the erro rs human agency is so prone to. Inerrancy in the Bible, specifically the King James version, was the central pillar Fundamentalist theologians developed their understanding of God’s will upon.They believed the Bible free from all mistakes, errors and faults; that it was in an unaltered condition since the earliest days of Christianity’s set up 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 â€Å"infallible word of God and hence anything which challenged it…was 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 â€Å"dispensationalism”, became a hallmark belief for Fundamentalists. It is a scheme for â€Å"interpreting all of biography on the basis of the Bible, following the principle of à ¢â‚¬Ëœliteral 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 protuberance 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 reciprocally incomprehensible languages etc. The present age was know as the â€Å"age of the Church” and would culminate in the apocalypse as foretold by the revelation of potty 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 run of God on earth. The revelation of John, as taken by the Fundamentalists, speaks of a period of time add up one thousand years in which Christ will reign before judgment on humanity.Theological debate within evangelic al 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 Christ’s return followed by the millennium, is known as premillenarianism and became for Christians with fundamentalist leanings the focal point for both their heological positioning, and for communicate both their political and companionable policies. Moderate evangelical millenarians believed that helping those worse off in this world, the silly and the destitute, would bring about Christ’s return through instigating a period of prosperity first, hence they involved themselves in the social 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 approach shot judgment.Theological development within fundamentalism was therefore a reply to greater sociological conditions prevalent in the US in the earliest 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 create a response from some Protestants that were analogous to the experience of ethno-cultural groups newly arrived in the US; Protestants had, in Marsden’s analogy, â€Å"experienced the transition from the old world of the ordinal century to the new world of the twentieth alone involuntarily. Fundamentalists had experienced a traumatic cultural stroke as the result of changes to American society that had been rapid, far-ranging and decisive. morphological changes within the family, the work place and the political order had dislodged the Protestant world-view in the US from a po sition of being, in their view, normative to a relative position in the panoply of religious identities in the modern American experience. Traditional Protestantism was â€Å"no longer a function of necessity; it was a choice and a vacuous 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 stability and as undermining a true understanding of Christianity, and its role as the only sure path to personal salvation. The family unit had been, within living memory for many of Fundamentalism’s early adherents, a stable basis upon which to build 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 unpolished production. Fam ily life, which included work, education, prayer and social instruction, had once guaranteed the generation of the next generation of family, worker and religious adherent. modernism 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 employment outside of the family home. The area 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 individualization of people through empowering them to find personal decisions about where they would live, marry and pray.Within the cities many people began to explore new forms of spiritual expression, with substantial total of people returning to traditional branches of a Protestantism whi ch 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. â€Å"The growth of fundamentalist churches…was largely through conversion” of individuals within the metropolis seeking the assurances offered by the theological assertions of the most radical Protestant sects.The position of the Bible as the unerring word of God had come under goodish pressure from science through 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 it’s role of containing an ultimate truth. piece of music nominally this would affect all Christianity’s, including Roman Catholicism, the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, the individual ability to interpret the word of God withou t an intermediary, left them particularly venerable to the accelerate pace of scientific progress.While many liberal Protestant theologians were willing to concede to â€Å"lower criticism”, or the critique of the human authorship of the Bible, Fundamentalists could not prevaricate 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 â€Å"hard” empiricist philosophy of Darwin or the â€Å"soft” theorizing of the Humanities, that ultimately upset the Fundamentalists as much as the aggregate of suspicion that now hung over the entire Christian project.Religion was â€Å"challenged less by specific scientific discoveries than by the underlying logic of science (indeed, rationality)” which had come full circle with the technical ability that had allowed America to enter into a world war as a super power. The social power to drive the new century was emaciated 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 blase ability.Protestant Fundamentalism arose as a response to modernity during the late 19th and early 20th century. Faced 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 native in Protestantism since the reformation, it attracted adherents through a militant defence 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 fundamentali sts were able to successfully challenge the American establishment through a highly publicized court trial that pitted modernity’s champions against religion’s staunchest defenders. At the same time their political incline was such that their dream of public moral novelty through the wholesale ban on alcohol consumption demonstrated their ability to mount effective campaigns, and win.These victories turned out to be Fundamentalism’s undoing, at least where the general public was concerned, as the promotional material generated by the Fundamentalists engendered public ridicule and resentment towards this new group. American society had changed radically from the victorian religious society, placed on the principles that had once been clearly silent through a thorough individual instauration 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 throu gh their own separate nstitutions, they would later reemerge to compensate their challenge to modernity within American society. 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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 origin USA, p. 2887 [ 3 ]. Marsden G. M. , 1980, Fundamentalism and American Culture: 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: Polity Press, p. 12 [ 6 ]. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 6 [ 7 ]. Lawrence, B. B. 1989, Defenders Of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt A gainst 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\r\n'