INTRODUCTION
Evangelicalism was the dominant force in American Protestantism during the late nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening (1790–1840) had firmly established doctrinal elements such as the divinity of Christ and his atoning death, the free will of an individual to choose salvation, and the corollary that an individual might lose their salvation if their faith became corrupt.Footnote 1 Some members of the evangelical community, however, began to incorporate into their faith new scientific and historical methods of viewing the world and of interpreting the Bible.Footnote 2 Those “liberal evangelicals” who incorporated into their faith these new beliefs – or at least were willing to consider doing so – were part of a much larger cultural and theological movement called modernism. The term “modernist” referred both to liberal evangelicals and to liberal and secular theologians who questioned previously inalienable religious truths. Such liberalization and doctrinal reinterpretation did not go unchallenged. The publication of A. C. Dixon (1854–1925) and Reuben Archer Torrey’s (1856–1928) edited collection The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth between 1910 and 1915 codified the position of conservative evangelicals against what they perceived to be the threat of modernism within and without America’s churches.Footnote 3 The neologism “fundamentalist” subsequently emerged to describe those conservative evangelicals who embraced The Fundamentals.Footnote 4 Critics refer to this period as the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, and its legacy may now be familiar to many as the cultural backdrop to Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry (1926) and to Richard Brooks’s 1960 cinematic adaptation starring Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons.Footnote 5
Against this developing backdrop of spiritual upheaval at home, the United States was attempting to navigate its involvement in World War I. In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, and, in response, the Ottoman Empire – in a state of existential crisis and nearing its own demise – refused to continue diplomatic relations with the United States.Footnote 6 The tensions of overseas engagement had the all-too-familiar effect of finding an outlet in attitudes towards America’s own minority communities. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri describes “general antipathy towards Muslims and Turks” in the United States during this period, and Matthew Avery Sutton explains how the war’s spread to the Middle East resulted in “anti-Muslim rhetoric” amongst fundamentalists who “blended racial and religious stereotypes.”Footnote 7 A cover illustration – entitled “The Moslem Menace” – for the December 1918 issue of the Christian Workers Magazine represents well this socioreligious and geopolitical unease.Footnote 8 It depicts a caricatured Ottoman Muslim sprawled over the continent of Africa.Footnote 9 The cartoon is also significant because it was the first time that the Christian cartoonist Ernest James Pace (1880–1946) – known as E. J. Pace – had represented an Islam-inspired theme in his work. Edward B. Davis and Alec Stevens provide by far the most comprehensive accounts of Pace and his cartooning.Footnote 10 Extensive archival research of Pace’s work, however, reveals a forgotten corpus of Islam-inspired cartoons in the literature. These most often appeared alongside the overt and sometimes implied theme of modernism. The socioreligious coding of these cartoons – the how and why of Pace’s work – is the focus of this article and its contribution to knowledge.
Pace’s corpus of Islam-inspired cartoons offers a way for the modern reader to understand how fundamentalists viewed the threat of modernism and how they interpreted Islam during a period of significant theological and social upheaval and reinvention. Pace allows the modern scholar to develop a deeper understanding of “the larger American and Islamic socio-historical context” in the early twentieth century that recent surveys of American society indicate are still so necessary today.Footnote 11 Pace was attempting to expose what he believed to be the shams of both modernism and Islam by constructing affinities between them that his readership could readily understand – even if his representation of Islam was incomplete. In doing so he continued a long history of Western representations of the Prophet Muhammad and of Islam itself that used the fear of the outsider – including the new theological outsider of modernism – to bolster fundamentalists’ interpretations of what the status quo should be.
In their reading of the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism in the work of the Christian cartoonist Jack T. Chick (1924–2016), Michael Ian Borer and Adam Murphree explain how “theological and ideological boundaries can be constructed between presumably allied religious populations.”Footnote 12 Pace, in contrast, deliberately constructed affinities between the theologies of Islam and liberal evangelicalism to warn his readers of their respective dangers to salvation. Somewhat unexpectedly, though, some members of America’s Muslim communities employed the same themes that Pace cartooned to introduce Islam to America and to provide evidential support for its theology. Pace looked to American religious history for his attacks on modernism, but America’s own religious history provided Muslims with a partial mirror of their own faith as they attempted to explain Islam and to establish lives as an American community.Footnote 13
The Islam-inspired cartoons of Pace, then, extend our understanding of the representation of Islam in American popular culture by recovering a hitherto forgotten corpus of work.Footnote 14 They reveal struggles and affinities within the certainties and uncertainties of faith and society that speak just as strongly as when Pace first represented the world as he saw it.
“THE DESCENT OF THE MODERNISTS” (1924) AND “NO MIDDLE GROUND ONLY A CHASM” (1924)
Like that of Frank Beard (1842–1905) before him, Pace’s work has great cultural significance in the discipline of Christian cartooning.Footnote 15 Sutton has recently described him as “the most popular fundamentalist cartoonist of the interwar era,” and Benjamin Lindquist refers to him in similar terms as “America’s leading fundamentalist cartoonist” after Beard’s death.Footnote 16 Pace, like Beard, regarded his cartoons as ministerial and educational tools for his fundamentalist readership, and they were reproduced worldwide.Footnote 17 Contemporary audiences, however, may be less familiar with his work. Even Jack Chick – whose own cartooning in Bible tracts is perhaps better known in contemporary culture – admits that he was unfamiliar with Pace, but he concedes that “Pace was ahead of us all.”Footnote 18
Pace began to cartoon as the fundamentalist–modernist controversy was starting to rage around him. His work appeared in the Christian Workers Magazine from 1917 to 1920 and the Moody Monthly from 1920 to 1921, but his work is synonymous with the Sunday School Times.Footnote 19 His cartooning first appeared there in 1916, and it would feature almost every week until his death in 1946, just over thirty years and 1,500 cartoons later.Footnote 20 Emerging from the Sunday School movement and directed towards a readership of church leaders, teachers, and evangelical congregations more broadly, the Sunday School Times was a weekly newspaper that ran from 1859 to 1966. It published news stories; surveys of religious thought; sermon plans; and advertisements for books, Bibles, and Christian paraphernalia. Around the time when Pace began cartooning for them, it reportedly had almost 100,000 readers in over a hundred countries worldwide.Footnote 21 The King’s Business, a monthly Los Angeles fundamentalist publication which ran from 1910 to 1970, described it as “the most influential Sunday School paper published in America,” in addition to being a newspaper that “consistently” defended the “[f]undamentals of our faith.”Footnote 22
Pace’s cartoons primarily stress the importance of these Christian fundamentals. They can, for example, also warn against personal ambition and the chasing of popularity, and they emphasize the dangers of a life without prayer or religious practice.Footnote 23 His work, then, “presented densely coded visual information that supported very particular interpretations” of the Bible and of Christianity, and these interpretations derived from the rich socioreligious context of his generation.Footnote 24 William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) – whom the journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) referred to as the “Fundamentalist Pope” and whom Clarence Darrow (1825–1938) opposed in the Scopes trial of 1925 – understood the cultural importance of Pace’s work. He commissioned him to cartoon a frontispiece for what would become Bryan’s best-known work, Seven Questions in Dispute (1924).Footnote 25 Pace’s cartoon entitled “The Descent of the Modernists” depicts three modernist scholars descending a staircase into a darkened cellar of “Atheism” (Figure 1).Footnote 26
“The Descent of the Modernists” (1924), public domain, at https://archive.org/details/sevenquestionsin011570mbp/page/n7/mode/2up.
On each of the steps – which also reflect the chapter structure of Bryan’s work – a denial of a fundamental of the Christian faith appears, including “no virgin birth,” “no deity,” “no atonement,” and “no resurrection.”Footnote 27 Even if the name of Pace may have slipped from memory, socioreligious histories of America and beyond continue to turn to the cartoon as a representation of the era’s religious change. It appears in an analysis of Danish secularization, an exploration of racism, and even a survey of Heaven’s artistic representations.Footnote 28 Pace still matters to researchers.
Pace’s cartoon and Bryan’s work speak, moreover, to the very theological reassessments that were causing such a stir amongst American evangelicals of all major denominations.Footnote 29 Bryan warned that “as modernism attacks all that is vital in the Christian religion, the real issue presented is: shall Christianity remain Christian?” He firmly believed that an individual’s salvation was under threat if they no longer believed that Christ was divine or if they engaged with unorthodox beliefs.Footnote 30 On the other side of the divide, Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) – an influential liberal minister and familiar sparring partner with Bryan, whom Bryan attacked in Seven Questions in Dispute – questioned, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” He argued that the fundamentalists aimed to “drive out of the evangelical churches” all those who held liberal, or modernist, viewpoints.Footnote 31
Pace’s work is a direct reflection of the tensions amongst the communities that both men represented. A key feature of his cartooning was to establish unassailable oppositions between fundamentalists and modernists. In the cartoon “No Middle Ground Only a Chasm” (1924), for example, a chasm separates “modernist theology” from “the Faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints.”Footnote 32 On the side of modernism are theological tenets that include “Jesus Christ is A Son of God in the sense which all men are” and “the birth of Jesus was natural,” and a denial of the atoning death of Christ upon the cross.Footnote 33 For the modernist, then, the divinity of Christ and the ultimate purpose of his mission were open to legitimate debate.
The cartoon is also significant because it bears both an obvious titular and thematic similarity to an article that appeared in the same issue of the Christian Workers Magazine as Pace’s “The Moslem Menace.” It is called “Bridging the Chasm between Mohammedism and Christianity,” and the Rev. Samuel Zwemer (1867–1952), an American missionary known as “the Apostle to Islam” because of his work in the Islamic world, wrote it.Footnote 34 Like “The Descent of the Modernists” and “No Middle Ground Only a Chasm” for their own core oppositional elements of fundamentalism and modernism, Zwemer intervenes in this same cultural space to explain to his readers the terms of difference between Islam and Christianity. He was likely an important source of Pace’s own understanding of Islam and a source of inspiration for Pace’s corpus of Islam-inspired cartoons. Zwemer explains that Islam rejects the divinity of Jesus.Footnote 35 He continues that Muslims believe that “Jesus is a prophet, a great man, born of the virgin, who worked miracles” and “who went up to heaven alive and that He will come back again.”Footnote 36 Zwemer also highlights the fact that the atoning death of Jesus upon the cross is not part of Islamic belief: “I have often said that the Cross of Christ is the missing link in the Moslem Creed,” he explains. “On every one of these points,” he concludes, “the Moslem stands with a great denial ever against the … Word of God.”Footnote 37
In “Behind the Bars of Satan’s Lies” (1935), Pace reveals the depths of theological enquiry that his Islam-inspired cartoons could reach. He uses the differentiators that Zwemer identified as the prison bars that hold a Muslim archetype in the jail of Islam.Footnote 38 The bars read, “Christ did not die for our sins,” “the fact is he did not die at all,” “it was Judas who was crucified,” “the New Testament is hopelessly corrupted,” and “Jesus Christ is not the Son of God.”Footnote 39 The subject of “Behind the Bars of Satan’s Lies” is obviously Islam, but without Pace’s earlier explorations of the relationship between modernism and Islam, “Behind the Bars of Satan’s Lies” is unlikely to have existed. And the beginnings of that exploration start much closer to home in the legacy of American Unitarianism.
In his “Baltimore Sermon,” William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), a founding Unitarian in American history, rejected the notion that Jesus was God and believed that “the father alone is God.” Channing stressed the humanity of Jesus, and he stated that Jesus is just as “equally distinct from the one God” as all other humans. For Channing, the orthodox teaching that a belief in Jesus’s divinity “furnishes … an infinite atonement” was fallacious.Footnote 40 But it is precisely through these two commonalities – derived from an American religious history that included Unitarianism – which Pace consistently, and in most of his works, chose to introduce Islam to his readers. Using Islam as a tool, his intention is to attack modernism – of which he had a “burning hatred” because of its effects upon his own faith as a younger man – and to alert his readers to the eschatological risks of both modernism and Islam. He is not concerned with developing interfaith dialogues; he cares about America’s souls.Footnote 41
“MAKING A ‘SHORTER’ BIBLE” (1919) AND “ONLY A CHANGE OF GARB” (1926)
Pace’s first cartoon to explore modernism and Islam appeared in the July edition of the Christian Workers Magazine of 1919. It was called “Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible,” and its theme is the historical Muhammad and the nature of the Qur’ān.Footnote 42 It accompanied an article entitled “Moslem Unitarianism.” Its author, John Newton Wright, refers to Islam as “Moslem Unitarianism” and writes that it was “inaugurated by Mohammed.”Footnote 43 In conjunction with Zwemer’s article of 1918, Wright’s work likely formed the foundations for Pace’s career-long exploration of the theological foundations of Islam in his cartoons prior to his 1934 tour of Morocco. Wright equates Muhammad with the German critics like Strauss, who “sought, with ruthless hands, to tear from the Bible every reference to the deity of Christ and that of the Holy Spirit.”Footnote 44 He overlooks the fact, however, that much closer to home a far better-known figure had already done the same. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), whose beliefs most closely aligned to Deism, used a knife, glue, and a blank notebook to edit several New Testament sources to create The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820), or the Jefferson Bible.Footnote 45 For Jefferson, Jesus’ life is devoid of any supernatural significance.Footnote 46 “There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed,” Jefferson closes his Bible.Footnote 47
“Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible” is unusual in the first instance because it contains a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Reactions to depictions of the Prophet in our own contemporary society reveal conflicts between the secular and the sacred born of recent sociopolitical events.Footnote 48 Gottschalk and Greenberg even explain how the Charlie Hebdo shooting of 2015 led to provocative responses in America that tempted others to “draw Muhammad.”Footnote 49 Pace’s depiction of Muhammad, derived not from the secular but from the sacred, occurred in a very different sociohistorical context altogether, when “semiotic and ethical norms” differed.Footnote 50 Pace is not concerned with ridiculing Muhammad per se, but rather with assessing the theology and message of Muhammad and their relationship to modernism.
Pace’s Muhammad, who appears as a bearded old man, somewhat naive-looking, but with a suggestion of trickery in his face, stands to the left of a moustached, spectacle-wearing scholar who cuts sections out of the Bible and adds them to a paper spike holder upon his desk. Muhammad speaks to the scholar: “go right on, my friend; that’s fine! Just what I’ve been doing these many centuries.” Sutton has interpreted the scholar as a Unitarian probably because of the cartoon’s relationship to Wright’s article, but he is better grasped as the beginnings of Pace’s “modernist” character, which this article discusses further below. Here, he takes on the role of Thomas Jefferson at work on his Bible.Footnote 51 The scholar’s first cutting reads “deity of Christ”; the second reads “Christ’s atonement,” and the last reads “the Lord’s coming.”Footnote 52 The first two are the very fundamentals that Zwemer described as appearing in the chasm between Christianity and Islam, although the final cutting obfuscates the fact that both Muslims and Christians believe in the return of Jesus.
The implication is that Muhammad fabricated the Qur’ān from the Bible and that he deliberately omitted the divine character and purpose of Jesus. Recent Qur’ānic and biblical research explores the originality of these books and the relationship between them in socioreligious and sociolinguistic contexts, and with a spirit of religious understanding and tolerance.Footnote 53 “Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible” has no such intention, as it seeks to disparage the Qur’ān as a plagiarized source free from divine inspiration. John V. Tolan has explored Western representations of Muhammad that have appeared since the twelfth century. He differentiates between Muhammad the historical figure and the “figure imagined and brought to life by non-Muslims.”Footnote 54 Tolan’s work has an immediate application because it allows the framing of “Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible” as a continuance of a once common Western tradition that viewed Muhammad as a “trickster” who attempted to distort the Christian message and who was the sole author of the Qur’ān.Footnote 55
Pace’s representation of Muhammad as a living entity capable of engaging with the contemporaneous scholar has an additional intriguing theological consequence in the context of Pace’s wider cartooning. Pace would often cartoon Jesus interacting with people in contemporaneous contexts.Footnote 56 That Muhammad can return from the dead and interact with the modernist clearly puts him on an equal footing with Jesus. In the twelfth century, the Western reception of Muhammad often held to the notion that Muhammad was divine, but it is unlikely that Pace adopted this viewpoint since neither Wright nor Zwemer make this crucial theological mistake.Footnote 57 Not surprisingly, Pace removed all interpretive ambiguity and never represented Muhammad in this way again, but the cartoon’s theological enquiry resurfaces a few years later in “Only a Change of Garb” (1926), which is a complex cartoon that teaches both a fundamentalist message and lessons in Church history that reveal a close relationship to the historical reception of Islam in the West (Figure 2).
“Only a Change of Garb,” Sunday School Times, 68, 11 (13 March 1926), 161. Biola University Library Special Collections (digitalcommons.biola.edu), https://digitalcommons.biola.edu/ejpace-cartoons/220.
The figure “old unbelief” wears an academic gown labelled “modernism,” and four discarded and chronologically arranged outfits hang behind him. “Mohammedanism” is the second outfit to appear. The outfit to appear before Islam is Arianism. It receives its name from Arius (250–336) – a priest of the Alexandrian Church who believed that Jesus was a creation of God and therefore not wholly Divine, or even God at all.Footnote 58 At Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea (325), early Church leaders finally decided that Jesus was, indeed, the son of God and that Christological interpretations like Arianism were heretical. Until that point, the deity of Christ was very much open to debate. Finally, Deism appears alongside Socinianism – a sixteenth-century belief named after the Italian theologians Lelio and Fausto Sozzini – which suggested that Jesus did not exist until Mary gave birth to him, thus denying his preexistence and equality with God.Footnote 59
Tolan reveals the historical relationships between Islam and these alternative accounts of Christianity in the West, and Pace incorporated these historical theological tensions to become relevant for an America of the 1920s.Footnote 60 But Pace always drew his cartoons for the layperson, not the theologian, and so he reduces the historical complexity to its underlying root cause: the secondary caption explains that “all agree in the denial of Christ’s deity.” For the fundamentalist, a belief in Christ’s divinity – which Islam denies – was inextricably linked to salvation, just as Bryan had explain to his readers, and this mattered most to Pace.Footnote 61
Pace’s cartoon may have adopted a specific Christian message, but some Muslims, who were trying to combat anti-Muslim xenophobia, used the same historical tools that Pace had. Pace was a white Protestant who provided his interpretation of Islam looking from the outside, and one group of Muslims who were attempting to reframe the wider dialogue about Muslims in America were the Ahmadiyya. Ahmadiyya Muslims are those who follow the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908) and who differ from most other Muslims because of the prophetic status they ascribe to Ahmad. They developed a significant presence in the United States in the early twentieth century through the work of the missionary Mufti Muhammad Sadiq (1872–1957) and had established a much earlier association with Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb (1846–1916) – an American diplomat and Theosophist who became America’s first known Anglo-American convert to Islam.Footnote 62
The Moslem Sunrise was the voice of the Ahmadiyya movement, but it also attempted to function as a voice for America’s wider Muslim community as it responded to misrepresentations of Islam in American society.Footnote 63 Webb himself had already criticized broader attitudes towards Muslims in America even before the outbreak of war and before Pace himself turned to Islam in his cartoons.Footnote 64 In a speech delivered to the World Congress of Religions 1893, he stated that “if a Mohammedan, Turk, Egyptian, Syrian or African commits a crime the newspaper reports do not tell us that it was committed by a Turk, an Egyptian, a Syrian or an African, but by a Mohammedan.”Footnote 65 Gottschalk and Greenberg explain how contemporary American Muslims have begun to reframe narratives about Islam and what it means to be a Muslim, and so the Moslem Sunrise was certainly ahead of its time.Footnote 66 Sadiq explains in the publication’s first issue that “the Moslems do not worship Muhammad. Muhammad is only a man and messenger of God. We worship God alone. One God like the Jews and Unitarian Christians believe.”Footnote 67 The Australian convert to Islam C. F. SievwrightFootnote 68 – who wrote several articles for the Moslem Sunrise – added that Muhammad was “the first Unitarian.”Footnote 69 An article of July 1922 even suggested that the reader explore Arianism and Socinianism for an understanding of Islamic theology.Footnote 70
The coding of Pace’s cartoon retains cultural significance because some contemporary Islamic sources continue to refer to Arianism as an older, and perhaps “truer,” manifestation of the Christian faith that provides evidential support for Islamic theology.Footnote 71 Conversely, evidence exists that some of the first European Christians to encounter Muhammad’s message interpreted it through the lens of Arianism.Footnote 72 Contemporary evangelical sources also use Arianism as a means by which to question Islam’s theological foundation, just as Pace had done.Footnote 73 Pace may have used Islam as a tool with which to attack modernism, but to the readers of the Moslem Sunrise it is possible to imagine that Pace’s work would have had quite the opposite effect. Unfortunately, no such record of reader reception exists in their or other archives. “Only a Change of Garb” is, however, a deeply significant snapshot of the theological maelstrom in which liberalism and modernism struggled for supremacy against the backdrop of America’s growing Muslim population.
Pace was attempting to create a chasm between Islam and Christianity, but the effectiveness of “Only a Change of Garb” rests on there being comparable elements of contrast. In trying to divide, “Only a Change of Garb” has had the unintended consequence of uniting previously disparate groups because of what they have in common – in this case a denial of Christ’s divinity. Pace would use this technique often to frame his attacks upon modernism, and other faiths, like Islam, that shared similar doctrinal elements.
“WHERE ALL THREE STAND TOGETHER” (1921), “THEY GLORIFIED HIM NOT” (1923), AND “ONE THING WE ARE DETERMINED NOT TO KNOW” (1921)
Bryan explains that the redemptive death of Christ, or atonement, is a “hotly contested” topic.Footnote 74 Indeed, Fosdick argued that the atonement of Christ’s death does not have to be a fundamental of faith for the enjoyment of “Christian fellowship.”Footnote 75 Zwemer, too, highlighted “the cruciality of the Cross” as the main theological differentiator between Islam and Christianity, and Pace explores the theme in three cartoons that appeared consecutively in his corpus of Islam-inspired cartoons.Footnote 76 In each of them, the modernist from “Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible” now bears the all-important label “modernist” in addition to a more comedic appearance. Pace would return to this iteration of the modernist in his subsequent cartoons.Footnote 77
Pace’s choice of character to represent Islam is also revealing of the cultural context from which he cartooned. Gottschalk and Greenberg explain that when “physical and behavioral characteristics” of the individual begin to represent an “entire people,” then a stereotype is the result.Footnote 78 We can add theology to this list when discussing the work of Pace because in these three cartoons he continues to represent Islam with an Ottoman Muslim – although he is no longer the sinister caricature who first appeared in “The Moslem Menace.”Footnote 79 Moreover, in the early 1920s, America’s Muslim population included large communities from Ottoman Syria and significant communities from Punjab, Yemen, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia, but Pace ignored, or was unaware of, this diversity closer to home. He relies on the recognizable stereotype that Rhett has also identified in this period from sources like Puck, the Evening Star, and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.Footnote 80
In “Where All Three Stand Together” (1921), which appeared as the cover illustration of the Moody Monthly, the modernist stands and embraces the shoulders of a Muslim and a Jew. They share a platform that bears the words “Jesus Christ is not God, neither does his blood atone for sin.”Footnote 81 Pace may have borrowed the thematic concept for this – his first cartoon to use Islam as a foil for modernist criticism – from the political cartoon entitled “The New Teutonic Alliance,” which appeared in the Evening Star in May 1918. The German kaiser holds a banner that reads “We’ve Decided to Hang Together” as he secures the necks of an Austrian and a Bulgarian between whom he stands. He restrains a Turk with a chain.Footnote 82 The sacred and secular coexist.
Pace uses a similar formation in “They Glorified Him Not” (1923). The caption is from Romans 1:21: “they glorified him not as God, neither were they thankful” (Figure 3).Footnote 83 An atheist – who resembles the then still popular and influential critic of organized religion Robert Ingersoll (1833–99), although technically agnostic – now joins the Jew, the Muslim, and the modernist.Footnote 84 In his lecture Orthodoxy (1884), Ingersoll categorically stated, “I do not believe that any God ever was the author of the Bible, or that any God was ever crucified.”Footnote 85 In Voltaire (1895) he suggested that Voltaire was “the apostle of common sense,” and Ingersoll imagined the delight of the young Voltaire discovering that Constantine murdered his wife the year before convening the Council of Nicaea.Footnote 86
“They Glorified Him Not,” Sunday School Times, 65, 3 (20 January 1923), 40. Biola University Library Special Collections (digitalcommons.biola.edu), https://digitalcommons.biola.edu/ejpace-cartoons/60.
Like Ingersoll, Voltaire was no friend of Christianity, and he turned his attention to Islam in Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet (1736). In this play he presented Mahomet, or Muhammad, as a fanatical leader who uses his power to control the lives of others. Some critics, however, believe that Voltaire’s true target is the Catholic Church and that he used Islam as a tool with which to attack its power and corruption.Footnote 87 Pace’s comparable use of Islam to attack liberal Christianity, then, frames his work in this larger, and much older, tradition of the Enlightenment. Moreover, a common device of seventeenth-century Christians was to insult each other’s theological viewpoints using the figure of Muhammad and Islam.Footnote 88 At this point in time the Ottoman Empire was at its height and so Pace’s recourse to the same device reveals the continuity of Ottoman threat and a Christian willingness to capitalize on that threat to make theological claims. Pace’s Islam-inspired cartoons are not esoteric artefacts of the 1920s but part of America’s continuing cultural response to Islam.Footnote 89
In Pace’s cartoon, then, we see the characters encapsulate a richly coded history as they stand on a sign with the words of 1 John 1:9: “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” They each share the same response: “Bah!” The caption may use the word of Romans 1:21 to remind the viewer that “they [Pace’s characters] glorified him not as God, neither were they thankful,” but modernism is the focus because only its name appears in bold. The names of the Muslim, Jew, and Atheist do not. Similarly, in “One Thing We Are Determined Not to Know” (1921) it is the modernist who hurls a cross that bears the inscription “redemption that is in Christ Jesus” into a “dumping ground.”Footnote 90 The Muslim, the Jew, and an unlabelled character (who may be the atheist who would appear in “Where All Three Stand Together”) stand in the back of a cart and cheer on. The caption derives from 1 Corinthians 2:2: the “one thing” that the Jew, the Muslim, and the modernist are “determined not to know” is the atoning death of Christ (Figure 4).Footnote 91
“One Thing We Are Determined Not to Know,” Sunday School Times, 63, 38 (17 September 1921), 501. Biola University Library Special Collections (digitalcommons.biola.edu), https://digitalcommons.biola.edu/ejpace-cartoons/300/
A much later cartoon called “Enemy Tactics” (1935) revives the theological theme of these three earlier cartoons.Footnote 92 The cross of Christ is prominent atop a hill, but the modernist and a Muslim block “the way of Salvation” with barbed wire. The Muslim states that “Christ did not die at all,” and the modernist argues “nor did he rise again.” In each of the cartoons, then, Pace foregrounds his target of modernism whilst using Islam – and in the case of the 1920s series, Judaism – as a cultural and theological tool with which to achieve his aim of highlighting the flaws of liberalism.
But in our own contemporary society, which often highlights the divisions between nations of Islamic and Judaic heritage, Pace’s intervention offers an asynchronous reminder of the theological relationship between faiths whose adherents are often politically and culturally opposed. It may well be a naive analysis, but Pace’s cartoons do exhibit this intriguing facet. Pace’s recourse to non-Christian religion, moreover, was the beginning of another important sequence of cartoons that explored the relationship between Islam and other world faiths.
“JUST ONE OF MANY” (1923), “THE JESUS WAY IS THE SWAY OF JESUS” (1941), AND “THE ONLY EMPTY GRAVE AMONG THEM” (1942)
We have already seen how Zwemer reminds the reader that “the evangelization of the Moslem world” is a matter of grave importance.Footnote 93 But China was also an important evangelizing ground for American missionaries. Noll explains that over three thousand missionaries were at work in China by the 1920s, and they would likely have gained a knowledge of Chinese religion and philosophy: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.Footnote 94 The impact of liberalism within the evangelical church furthermore impacted upon missionary work.Footnote 95 Marsden suggests that “more extreme liberals” argued that “God revealed himself in non-Christian cultures,” thus building upon the earlier suggestion of theologians such as A. H. Strong (1836–1921), who raised the concept of an “implicit faith in Christ” in followers of non-Christian religions.Footnote 96
These tensions continued to develop during the 1920s, as liberals began to question the purpose and effectiveness of overseas evangelism. Closer to home in “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”, Fosdick had already referred to Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-Tze, Confucius, and Muhammad as “the founders of great religions” in his wider discussion of the nonexclusivity of Jesus’ supernatural birth.Footnote 97 Bryan even lamented that modernism had reduced Jesus to “merely a good man and a great teacher.”Footnote 98 These overlapping themes emerge in “Just One of Many,” Pace’s first cartoon to explore Islam and modernism in a wider context of global faith.Footnote 99
In “Just One of Many,” a sign reads “Hall of Religious Teachers,” and five busts sit lined up on a shelf: Confucius, Lao-Tze, Zoroaster, Buddha, and, most importantly for this article’s purposes, Muhammad. Pace’s modernist is about to add the bust of Jesus to join Muhammad and the others. The caption reads “just one of many.” Pace distorts 1 John 4:14 to read “and we do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the teacher of the world,” rather than “the saviour of the world.”Footnote 100 Tolan explains that, in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, artists began to see Muhammad as a “political genius, military hero, sage lawmaker, and moral model.”Footnote 101 Pace makes use of this critical legacy in “Just One of Many.”
The cartoon’s depiction of Muhammad is less naive than the one in “Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible” because of a greater recourse to realism that Pace employs in the work. This Muhammad is no trickster who fabricated the Qur’ān from the Bible. If the Muhammad of “Making a ‘Shorter’ Bible” were an active force, capable of interacting with Pace’s modernist, this new Muhammad is consigned to history. He appears as a Socratic character, a wise old man whom Jesus, himself consigned to history, is about to join on the modernist’s shelf. The viewer must interpret the cartoon from the perspective of the modernist. He is the one, Pace is explaining to his readers, who regards Jesus as a historical figure.
Pace would return to this thematic representation of comparative religion over twenty years later in two cartoons. By this time the Sunday School Times regularly included comments on Islam and the Islamic world, but it always did so with the intention of highlighting the theological and moral exclusivity of Christianity.Footnote 102 The interwar period saw a significant rooting of Islam in America through first- and second-generation immigrant childbirth, further immigration, and the founding of organizations like the Nation of Islam in the 1940s.Footnote 103 The same period saw a rise in religious practices and cults to such an extent that an anticult movement even appeared in the 1940s to combat the perceived threat to American Christianity.Footnote 104 Jenkins explains, moreover, that the Nation of Islam and other African American Muslim groups received the disparaging title of “cult” during this period, which was also a common interpretation of Islam much earlier too.Footnote 105 Pace incorporates this rich historical context in “The Jesus Way Is the Sway of Jesus” (1941).
The busts of the prophets in “Just One of Many” have become road signs that bear their names. The modernist scholar appears again, looking somewhat younger and more muscular, and he nails a sign that reads “Jesus” to a post containing signage for “Buddha” and “Mohammed.”Footnote 106 A gathered crowd bear the labels “cults” and “isms.” Pace’s caption reads “Jesus Christ is not a way-shower, He is THE Way (John 14:6).” The cartoon’s main caption reads, “there arose no small stir about that Way,” the implication again being that modernism has reduced Jesus to a prophet of God among many other candidates (Figure 5).
“The Jesus Way Is the Sway of Jesus,” Sunday School Times, 83, 26 (28 June 1941), 530, public domain, at https://archive.org/details/sim_sunday-school-times_1941-06-28_83_26/page/530/mode/2up.
Shortly after in “The Only Empty Grave among Them” (1942) a woman wearing a sash labelled “the Church” looks to the heavens and to a sign that reads “Founders of Religion,” a phrase that Fosdick had used twenty years earlier in “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”.Footnote 107 Two monuments, one of Buddha and one labelled “Mohammed,” appear alongside vertical bursts of light that escape Christ’s tomb. Crowds gather at the foot of Buddha’s and Mohammed’s tombs, but no crowds exist outside Christ’s (Figure 6).Footnote 108 The message is clear: Buddha and Muhammad are dead; only Christ lives. The caption, Romans 1:4, reads, “Declared to be the Son of God with power … by the resurrection from the dead.”
“The Only Empty Grave among Them,” Sunday School Times, 84, 22 (30 May 1942), 438. Biola University Library Special Collections (digitalcommons.biola.edu), https://digitalcommons.biola.edu/ejpace-cartoons/39.
During the 1920s, Pace was a lone voice in his Islam-inspired work, but no longer in the 1930s and early 1940s. “The Only Empty Grave among Them” was part of a larger trend in Christian cartooning that further spoke to the reception of Islam and other religions in America’s landscape during this period. Urban Serano Abell’s “Christ Is Not Here” (1934), which appeared in the Moody Monthly, depicted an angel standing outside Christ’s empty tomb whilst pointing to the cartoon’s title. The four corners of the cartoon, likely drawing from “Just One of Many,” read “Confucius, Still Here,” “Buddha, Still Here,” “Zoroaster, Still Here,” and “Muhammed, Still Here.”Footnote 109 Charles Lowe Ramsay (1911–94), who drew for the Pentecostal Evangelical, re-creates the theme in “History’s Graveyard” (c.1943). “Christ’s Tomb” is empty, and its caption reads “He is not here; He is risen.” Tombs in the distance read “Here Lies Confucius,” “Here Lies Buddha,” and “Here Lies Mohammed.”Footnote 110
CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
Pace would continue to cartoon for the Sunday School Times for another four years before his death, but he never represented Islam in his cartoons again. Charles L. Ramsay explained in his “Monument to Dr. E. J. Pace” how Pace “is still drawing men to Christ.”Footnote 111 The truth of this statement may still resonate for some today, but this article – with the benefit of generational hindsight and written in a spirit of sensitivity to both the Christian and Islamic faiths – has demonstrated how Pace developed a series of Islam-inspired cartoons that he used as a tool with which to attack the far greater threat of modernism. Frank Beard, Urban Serano Abell, and Charles Lowe Ramsay all targeted modernism in their work, but Pace was unique because he did so on repeated occasions using the foil of Islam.Footnote 112
A complex relationship exists between Islam, Islamic “religious culture,” and Western sociopolitical norms that can lead to misunderstandings and much worse in our own societies, and cartoons that explore Islamic themes have become extremely contentious.Footnote 113 Pace, whilst no friend of Islam, tended not to be as overtly critical of it and its theology as the later Jack Chick tracts Allah Had No Son (1994), Is Allah Like You? (2010), and Camels in the Tent (2012) are.Footnote 114 In these, Chick introduces the trope of the abusive Muslim husband and uses pejorative phrases about how Americans should fear Muslims because “a Muslim flag” will “fly over the White House in the Future.”Footnote 115 Pace, however, was not immune to this tendency, and it would be remiss to obfuscate the fact. “The Old Story of Romans 10:2–4” (1935) and “The Listening Ear” (1936), both emerging just after Pace had returned from Morocco, do something similar.Footnote 116 They include attacks upon the morality of Muslims and bring Pace’s work very much into the research domain of Islamophobia that Gottschalk and Greenberg have explored in their work.
Moreover, “Behind the Bars of Satan’s Lies,” which also appeared in this period, departed from the representation of Muslims in works like “Where All Three Stand Together” and instead represented Muslims as victims of theological deception and as incapable of empathy. Each of these cartoons reflects a much older historical legacy of the European travelling to the Middle East to bring back subjective accounts of Muslims in their art, and in these later works Pace certainly develops an unsettling theme that his final Islam-inspired cartoon, “The Only Empty Grave among Them,” did not perpetuate.Footnote 117
For the most part, however, Pace did not concern himself with the perceived moral behaviour of Muslims. He did care about the moral behaviour of Christians who may be tempted – like he almost was – to embrace modernism, and it is this facet of Pace’s work upon which this article has built its analysis. Despite his laudable knowledge of Islam that even “The Listening Ear” exhibits, Pace was not concerned with educating his readers about Islam and its relationship to the Christian faith. If he had been, then he would have explained that Islam believes in the virgin birth of Jesus, too; that Jesus was raised to heaven; and that Jesus will return once more. He would also have reminded readers that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Moreover, Islam, like Pace himself, is no friend of modernism. “Behind the Bars of Satan’s Lies” and “Only a Change of Garb” have demonstrated that Pace certainly had the knowledge to reflect the more complete work of Zwemer, who did recognize interfaith similarities, but he chose not to. Pace’s main theological contribution in his cartoons derived from modernism and Islam’s shared interpretations of Christ’s deity and his atoning death upon the cross.
So what can we conclude from this article’s analysis of Pace’s Islam-inspired cartooning? First, Pace’s Islam-inspired cartoons have extended our knowledge of the reception of Islam in American popular culture by providing scholars with a new tool with which to better understand the reception of Islam by the readers of the Sunday School Times and the associated wider fundamentalist culture of 1920s and 1930s America. Second, Pace’s Islam-inspired cartooning, designed as it is to highlight the differences between fundamentalism and modernism, allows contemporary viewers to explore affinities between Christianity and Islam that our own increasingly diverse, and perhaps even secular, societies can learn from in a spirit of religious tolerance and academic endeavour.
