Theology Today - Vol 28, No. 2 - July 1971 - BOOK REVIEW - The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930

245 - The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930

The Roots of Fundamentalism:
British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930
by Ernest R. Sandeen
328 pp. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970. $12.00.

Ernest R. Sandeen's book will be readily welcomed by those familiar with his important articles on the Princeton theology and on fundamentalism (Church History, September, 1962; and March, 1967). The book is, in the main, an extension and elaboration of those articles, which is to say that it participates in their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

By demonstrating that fundamentalism was geographically principally northern and urban rather than southern and rural and by arguing that it should be understood as a religious movement rather than a socio-economic phenomenon, Sandeen challenges the heretofore widely accepted interpretations of Stewart G. Cole (The History of Fundamentalism), H. Richard Niebuhr (The Social Sources of Denominationalism), and Norman F. Furniss (The Fundamentalist Controversy). Taking a genetic approach, Sandeen concentrates on essentially one identifiable root, one strand of ideas-British and American millenarianism. He shows and documents with extensive notes and bibliography how millenarianism developed into a movement which, with its annual conferences, occasional conventions, periodicals, and schools, "possessed a distinct identity and all of the characteristics of a new sect." The ideology which came to prevail within this movement was a dispensational millenarianism akin to that first developed by John Nelson Darby and eventually expressed in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible.

246 - The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930

When the Princeton theologians worked out their rigid doctrine of biblical inspiration late in the nineteenth century, they provided a prime support for the literalism of millenarians who were by then attracting large crowds to prophecy and Bible conferences. Indeed, Princeton's innovative doctrine of inspiration blended so well with the distinctively nineteenth century millenarianism that an alliance of Princeton-type conservatives and millenarians became possible. To Sandeen-and this is central to his whole presentation-this alliance is fundamentalism. He thus comes very close in this book to reducing fundamentalism to either Princeton-style biblicism or millenarianism or some combination of the two.

It is precisely here, where his book ought to be strongest, that it is weakest. For this thesis cannot be maintained in the face of a careful analysis of either The Fundamentals (Sandeen calls these books "the best and most auspicious example of that alliance.") or the crucial decade of the 1920's. For The Fundamentals include among their authors men who were neither millenarians nor advocates of the Princeton view of inspiration, and the same must be said of the constituency and sometimes the leadership of the peculiar coalitions that gathered under the fundamentalist banner in the 1920's.

Sandeen is conscious enough of the problem here indicated that he distinguishes in his preface between the fundamentalist movement and the fundamentalist controversy, affirms that "the movement existed independently of the controversy," and sprinkles qualifiers throughout his text, for example, "not everyone who called himself a fundamentalist in the twenties was a millenarian." But that he fails to appreciate the weight of this objection is clearly indicated by his assertions in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (vol. 387, January, 1970) that fundamentalism may be defined as "the name applied to certain millenarians during one phase of their history" and that he is "prepared to argue that the fundamentalist movement of the 1920's was only the millenarian movement renamed." This is disappointing and unfortunate, for Sandeen's book and articles are in so many other respects so helpful and important. In a way different from the typical liberal put-downs, this book seems to attempt once again to overcome fundamentalism by analysis and category; somehow that which is captured is not the real thing. The fundamentalists, only by being themselves, have proved elusive again.

Leroy Moore, Jr.
Hartford Seminary Foundation
Hartford, Connecticut