Paraphrasing Jerry Falwell, the historian George Marsden once quipped that “a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.” But he knew that a fundamentalist was much more than that. Marsden's pathbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980) has done more than any single work to shape the ways in which we understand American Christian fundamentalism. For thirty-five years, few historians challenged Marsden's arguments and those who did had little success. But in recent years, a new generation of scholars is upending what we think we know about fundamentalism. Their work promises to overturn the Marsdenian paradigm in two ways: first, they are questioning Marsden's definition of fundamentalism and who that definition properly describes; second, they are challenging Marsden's description of the relationship between fundamentalism and the broader American society.Footnote ¹

The term “fundamentalism” as a religious descriptor arose in the early twentieth century around the publication of twelve booklets entitled the Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. Wealthy oilman Lyman Stewart launched the project. He and his editors sought to call Christians back to the supposed “fundamentals” of the Christian faith. Many respected scholars, influential ministers, and evangelists from around the English-speaking world (all white men) contributed to the volumes. The Fundamentals included personal testimonies and covered such topics as the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible, higher criticism, Catholicism, and new religious movements. Stewart sent copies of the booklets free of charge to every English-speaking Protestant minister, evangelist, professor, theology student, YMCA and YWCA leader, Sunday school superintendent, and religious-periodical editor whose address he could track down.

The publication of the Fundamentals revealed that American Christendom was facing a series of challenges, which, unbeknownst to the editors of the Fundamentals, became a full-blown crisis in the context of World War I. During the war, Christians debated the purpose of the conflict as well as their duty to their nation. Theological divisions quickly became political divisions. Theologically liberal Protestants accused their more conservative counterparts – who sometimes refused to bear arms and who believed that Wilson's crusade to make the world safe for democracy was a sham – of undermining the nation at its moment of greatest peril. The conservatives blamed the liberals for promoting the same theology that the Germans were supposedly using to justify their aggression. Out of this conflict, the lines between those calling for a return to the fundamentals and those demanding that the Christian faith evolve with modern intellectual trends began to harden.

Shortly after the war, many of those who claimed to espouse the fundamentals formed a new organization led by evangelist and firebrand William Bell Riley. He launched the World's Christian Fundamentals Association to organize those Christians from many different denominations who believed that their churches and seminaries had abandoned the true faith. The following year, Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws helped organize a “fundamentals” conference where attendees settled on the adjective “fundamentalist” to describe their burgeoning movement. “We suggest,” Law summarized, “that those who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal for the fundamentals shall be called ‘Fundamentalists.’” Finally, in 1922, liberal Protestant minster Harry Emerson Fosdick preached what soon became one of the most famous sermons in American history, entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”. His answer was no. By the early 1920s, then, the term “fundamentalist” had emerged as an adjective to describe a particular group of Christians spread across multiple denominations who claimed that they, and they alone, represented the true faith.Footnote ²

But who were they? What was the true Christian faith that they represented? What united them? These are the questions that have troubled scholars for decades. In 1970, Ernest Sandeen published the first serious study of fundamentalism. One of his goals was to counter the stereotype that had been promulgated since the 1925 Scopes antievolution trial. During that case, famous attorney Clarence Darrow and popular journalist H. L. Mencken had used the term “fundamentalist” indiscriminately as a pejorative to describe anyone perceived to be rural, anti-intellectual, reactionary, and often southern (despite fundamentalism's urban, northern, and western origins). Other writers, journalists, and public intellectuals followed suit. From then on, the term quickly evolved from a specific theological label that described a relatively small group of people to a broad, poorly defined term of opprobrium. Sandeen's goal was to return to the pre-Scopes origins of the fundamentalist movement and to trace its development in British and American intellectual life. To that end, he offered a narrow definition of fundamentalism that identified millenarianism as its defining doctrine. The “fundamentalist movement possessed a self-conscious identity and structure,” he writes, and “it is millenarianism which gave life and shape” to it.Footnote ³

A decade later, George Marsden sought to supplant Sandeen's work with a new, more expansive book on fundamentalism. In Fundamentalism and American Culture, which according to Publisher's Weekly has sold “tens of thousands of copies” since its publication, Marsden characterized fundamentalism as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism.” Fundamentalism, he further explained, was a “loose, diverse, and changing federation of co-belligerents united by their fierce opposition to modernist attempts to bring Christianity into line with modern thought.” Fundamentalism, according to Marsden, had deep intellectual roots, but it was also reactionary. It was inherently antimodern and the faithful organized in response to perceived modernist threats to the faith. For Marsden, Christianity had split into two factions: fundamentalists (or conservatives) and modernists (or liberals).Footnote ⁴

The role played by another group, “creedal conservatives,” in Marsden's work reveals much about how he defined fundamentalism. Creedal conservatives are those men and women – often from Reformed or Lutheran churches – who believe in the authority of the church and who look to classic doctrines and especially the historic creeds as the foundation of their faith. For Marsden, creedal conservatives rejected religious modernism, which made them fundamentalists by default. But for other scholars like D. G. Hart, fundamentalists and modernists were really just two sides of the same coin. Hart argued that both groups drew from pietist traditions and focussed on the individual and the individual's relationship with God. For Hart, the true conservatives were not the fundamentalists, but those who upheld the authority of the church and the traditional creeds. While his argument has many strengths he has failed to overturn Marsden's perch atop the fundamentalist historiography.Footnote ⁵

Others tried to supplement but not necessarily challenge Marsden by looking beyond the white men who dominated Marsden and Sandeen's studies. Both had done their research alongside rather than within the rise of the new social history, and neither focussed on issues of race, gender, or class, oversights that Marsden has long since acknowledged. Thanks to the work of a handful of scholars, the most important of whom is Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, we know a lot about how gender functions in fundamentalism. Scholars still need to tackle more comprehensively issues of race and class.Footnote ⁶

In the last few years, a series of new books has come out that promises to overturn the Marsden consensus. They are challenging him in two primary ways. First, they are calling for different understandings and definitions of fundamentalism; second, they are forcing scholars to better understand fundamentalists’ relation to the broader culture.

Two excellent new books promise to redefine the category “fundamentalism.” Both agree that fundamentalism is not a “conservative” movement that looks to the past or an antimodernist reaction, but instead is very much a modern product of its time and place. Timothy E. W. Gloege's Guaranteed Pure focusses on the many varieties of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evangelicalism. He argues that fundamentalism cannot be understood apart from concurrent changes in the economic marketplace. As middle-class consumers began to celebrate staunch individualism, they fashioned a new kind of faith to match. The result was a new expression of Christianity they dubbed fundamentalism. Although many of its leaders, including prominent businessmen, branded “fundamentalism” the historic, traditional faith, it was actually innovative, modern, and current.Footnote ⁷

B. M. Pietsch also focusses on the prehistory of fundamentalism to challenge interpretations that describe the movement as a conservative reaction to modern trends in American life and thought. He examines the rise of dispensationalism – one of the subgroups at the heart of Sandeen's millennial tradition and one that played a prominent role in Marsden's text. But rather than see the rise of dispensationalism as reflecting a reaction to modernism and a return to Christian fundamentals, Pietsch argues that it was in every way a product of modernity. Dispensationalism grew out of Americans’ late nineteenth-century obsession with technological methods – especially quantification, classification, and interpretations of texts and time. “Through technological methods,” Pietsch argues, “dispensationalists sought to imbue religious ideas with the same quality of factuality that increasingly buttressed the cultural authority of scientists and other experts.” The result was a new, modern form of religion that played a significant role in the rise of fundamentalism.Footnote ⁸

A third recent book has also challenged Marsden's preeminence. My own research, published as American Apocalypse, challenges Marsden in a few key ways. I draw on Sandeen's emphasis on millennialism while acknowledging – as do both Gloege and Pietsch – the distinctions between fundamentalists and creedal conservatives. Fundamentalism, I conclude, is not a widespread reaction against theological modernism but a term that best describes a network of interconnected men and women who believed that the global chaos and turmoil they saw around them indicated that the end was nigh. Their shared magazines, support for specific Bible institutes, prophecy conferences, evangelistic organizations and radio stations established a distinct, definable, interdenominational movement. At the heart of the movement was their conviction that the biblical apocalypse and the return of Jesus to earth were imminent. So for me, “fundamentalism best defines radial, apocalyptic evangelicalism.” Together, these three books are challenging traditional theological definitions of fundamentalism, the equation of fundamentalism with conservatism, and characterizations that depict the movement as a reaction to modernism. Instead, the new literature shows how the movement emerged as very much a product of its place and time that had little to do with returning to an “old-time religion.”Footnote ⁹

The second area where historians have challenged Marsden in recent years has to do with his understanding of the relationship between fundamentalism and the broader culture. Marsden argues that fundamentalism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, peaked in the 1920s, and then disappeared from mainstream culture and life until after World War II. For Marsden, the 1925 Scopes trial represents a major turning point. “It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of ‘the Monkey Trial’ at Dayton, Tennessee, in transforming fundamentalism,” Marsden writes, “The strength of the movement in the centers of national life waned precipitously.” Joel Carpenter's excellent Revive Us Again builds on Marsden's work, arguing that “fundamentalists were in many respects determinedly sectarian and isolated from the American cultural mainstream” between the mid-1920s and early 1950s, at which point their separatism gave way to a “reawaking of American fundamentalism.” Together, the Marsden–Carpenter rise–fall–rebirth narrative has dominated the literature on twentieth-century American religion. It has become so ingrained in textbooks that most religion scholars and historians simply assume it is indisputable.Footnote ¹⁰

However, a series of books is seriously challenging this paradigm. The flood of work seeking to identify the roots of the modern religious right has driven historians to look at the nature and evolution of fundamentalist politics. What they have found will overturn the old chronology. Darren Dochuk and Daniel K. Williams, in their excellent histories of fundamentalist and evangelical political activism, and especially my own findings in American Apocalypse, reveal that cultural engagement rather than sectarian isolation remained both a priority and a reality between the late nineteenth century and the present. Fundamentalists’ reactions to the 1928 Al Smith campaign and their attacks on the New Deal – to cite but two examples – reveal that they were anything but withdrawn in the aftermath of Scopes. Despite the claims of post-World War II evangelicals, fundamentalists never expressed indifference to the world around them, nor did they ever lack interest in influencing the broader culture. They never retreated. Fundamentalists and evangelicals have consistently insisted that God has called them to use their talents to occupy, reform, and transform their culture in ways that matched their beliefs and ideologies.Footnote ¹¹

In sum, for thirty-five years George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture has dominated the historiography. But in the last half-decade a series of excellent books by a new generation of scholars is challenging many of his foundational assumptions. We now know that fundamentalism, far from being a backwards-looking reaction to religious modernism, was instead just another variant of modernist faith. Adherents, just as ambitiously as their liberal counterparts, sought to shape a Christianity that represented and spoke to the needs of its time. Furthermore, the Christianity they developed was not a sectarian and isolationist faith, but one that sought to transform the United States in every way – from politics to social issues to mass media to religion. Nevertheless, there is a reason why Marsden's work has carried the day for so long. It is certainly one of the best and most influential books in American religious history and it is still the standard by which to judge all others.