249 - Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism

Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism
By George M. Marsden
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1991. 208 pp. $12.95.

George Marsden undertakes two tasks in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Gathering essays published in the 1980s, he surveys the history of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism and reexamines the interpretation of their relationship to politics and science.

This book will be most useful to readers already familiar with other works in the field (such as Marsden's own Fundamentalism and American Culture) that provide a fuller narrative than Marsden can include here. Nonetheless, this book sheds bright new light on what one had thought was familiar territory.

One example will suffice. In chapter one, Marsden reexamines the liberal-conservative split that so troubled American Protestantism by the 1920s. Protestant liberalism, according to Marsden, stressed the importance of history, emphasized morality as the essence of religion, and focused on the significance of religious feelings instead of doctrine. For its part, the evangelical movement embraced, among others, premillennial dispensationalism, the holiness movement, and pentecostalism. Marsden then suggests a fascinating parallelism in this tripartite typology. Premillennial dispensationalism, like liberalism, took history seriously but insisted on interpreting history by means of the Bible. The holiness movement, like liberalism, took morality seriously but insisted that only God brought true righteousness. Pentecostalism, without liberalism's attachment to romanticism, also emphasized the role of religious feelings in religious experience.

Marsden's opening sentence declares that "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." That is, fundamentalists are a sub-group of evangelicals, characterized by a militant opposition to liberal theology, "secular humanism," or both. Although not all elements of the evangelical movement share this fundamentalist militancy (indeed they are sometimes the target of it), they do share a common history. Indeed, Marsden reminds us that our understanding of both the evangelical past and its present is enriched by an awareness that evangelicalism is a complex, and sometimes fragmented, religious movement, not a monolithic entity marching as to war.

Marsden's interpretive section, chapters three through seven, concentrates on evangelicalism, politics, and science. Chapter three claims

250 - Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism

that the political involvement of American evangelicals (a matter of concern when this essay appeared in 1983) reflected a long tradition of evangelical political involvement, a tradition only temporarily eclipsed by a liberal consensus from 1928-1968. Renewed evangelical political activity, therefore, was more a recovery of an American tradition than a revolution in church-state relations. Chapter four focuses on some of the paradoxes of the fundamentalist role in American life, such as its combination of otherworldliness and intense patriotism.

Turning to science, Marsden reminds us that evangelicals, far from being anti-scientific, have endorsed a version of Enlightenment science widely shared in nineteenth-century America. In chapter six, he explains the origins and appeal of "creation science," a distinctive fundamentalist stance against evolutionary science, not shared across the evangelical spectrum.

Marsden concludes by reassessing the leading intellectual in American evangelicalism - J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) - emphasizing his views of history and truth and his Southern heritage as keys to understanding him. He concludes by urging modern interpreters not to dismiss Machen hastily as an anachronistic crank. According to Marsden, Machen, like Karl Barth, identified implications of theological liberalism that have challenged Christian faith in the late twentieth century. We may, Marsden concludes, "be grateful to persons such as Machen and many others who, whatever their faults, insisted that traditional Christianity still had an important role to play in the twentieth century."

We may, in turn, be grateful to George Marsden who has enriched our understanding of those traditions in American religious history which, with all their faults, have made, and continue to make, much the same point.

James W. Lewis
Louisville Institute for the Study of Protestantism and American Culture
Louisville, KY