Post Progressive Religion and the Rise of Fundamentalism
- Feb 16, 2012
- Michael Streich
The waning years of American Progressivism following the end of World War One dramatically altered Protestantism, fusing evangelical denominations like the Baptists and Presbyterians into a movement defined as Fundamentalism. Although Fundamentalism focused on the perceived duality between science and religion, it was tied together by several cornerstone beliefs that included Bible inerrancy, orthodox Christology, and a premillennial eschatology rejecting the notion that human progress, particularly equated with an American mission founded on the “city on a hill” ideology, would result in global Utopia.
Post World War One Social and Religious Battles
For Fundamentalist American Christians, the battle between science and religious belief structures focused on Darwinism and Creation. This was a non-negotiable battle exacerbated by evangelical notions that faith and reason were diametrically opposed. The most dramatic expression of this duality was the 1925 Scopes Trial (Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes). This view fit into the new eschatological conclusions that the world was approaching the apocalypse, part of a detailed time line popularized by dispensational theology.
The idea that the “Great Commission” wedded to human progress would result in millennial peace, prosperity, and goodwill ended on the world war battle fields. The Great War shattered the Social Gospel, enabling American evangelicals to reassess long-held views. This change retooled the evangelical missionary motivation from an emphasis on community service and the carrying out of Social Gospel mandates. God was not only love, but a reconfiguration of Jonathan Edward’s “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”
Woodrow Wilson, despite his best efforts at the Versailles peace conference, had not made the world “safe for democracy.” If anything, the world of the 1920’s, as seen by evangelical Christians, was more in need of Christ than ever before.
Sin as a human state existing in the absence of God impacted Prohibition, social purity crusades, and concerns over Communism. Marxian beliefs were viewed as atheistic, making Socialism an integral part of end-of-time scenarios, a belief system working in tandem with Darwin’s insidious theory of evolution. Post war Progressive Protestantism transformed itself into militant Fundamentalism poised to combat, according to one historical writer, the “…loss of spiritual dynamic.” (Allen)
Prohibitionist and Anti Catholic
Unable to police its own faithful, Fundamentalists, much like evangelical Christians supporting various temperance movements in the 19th Century, turned to state governments to eliminate alcohol, eventually dragging the federal government into the debate. In the decade before the world war, President Taft was one of the more reasonable chief executives, vetoing Prohibitionist measures in order to avoid greater federal interference in state matters resulting in the creation of a larger federal bureaucracy. Woodrow Wilson, however, had strong Calvinist roots, beginning Cabinet meetings with prayer and supporting William Jennings Bryan, his first Secretary of State, in the banning of alcohol within the State Department.
Prohibition also enabled the federal government to tie the moral issue to patriotism. Consumption of beer and wine was most often tied to German and Italian immigrant groups frequently suspected of anarchistic actions and socialist leanings. Prohibition fit into the propaganda of war patriotism, helping pave the post-war thinking of white American nativist Fundamentalists.
These biases also affected views of Roman Catholicism. Anti-Catholicism was an historic byproduct of 19th Century American nativist beliefs. Ignorance and fear prompted some Fundamentalists to incorporate Anti-Catholicism into end-of-time scenarios, equating Catholicism with the apocalyptic anti-Christ. Dispensational theology called for a “revived Roman Empire,” an entity that included a complicit Catholic Church.
The Morality Crusade
Fundamentalism fought the expanding mentalities of “roaring twenties” freedom with as much vigor as the battle against science. Feminism contradicted biblical gender roles – or at least how such roles were perceived by conservative Protestantism. Progressivism attempted to limit the working hours of women and combat the transportation of females for “immoral purposes (Mann Act of 1910). Fundamentalists viewed the popular culture as a threat to the female as a wife and bearer of children.
Evangelical Protestantism in the 1920’s emerged out of Progressive ideals. Taken further and infused with the “old time religion” that incorporated new views of millennial expectations, Fundamentalism created a pattern that eventually evolved during the latter 20th Century into a cogent political force. What was lost in American Christianity, notably Protestantism, was what Francis Schaeffer, an evangelical mid-century thinker, called the “unity of thought.”
References:
- Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s (Harper & Row, 1964)
- Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992)
- James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (Yale University Press, 2003)
- Page Smith, America Enters the War: A People’s History of the Progressive Era and World War I, Volume Seven (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985)
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