Battle for God by Armstrong Karen

Author:Armstrong, Karen [Armstrong, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2000-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

PROTESTANT FUNDAMENTALISTS in the United States would eventually launch a counteroffensive against the modernity that had defeated them, but during the period currently under discussion, they concentrated, like Haredi Jews, on creating their own defensive counterculture. After the Scopes trial, Protestant fundamentalists retreated from the public arena and withdrew to their own churches and colleges. The liberal Christians assumed that the fundamentalist crisis was over. By the end of the Second World War, the fundamentalist groups seemed marginal and insignificant, and the mainstream denominations drew most of the believers. But instead of disappearing, the fundamentalists were putting down strong roots at the local level. There was still a considerable number of conservatives within the mainstream denominations; they had lost all hope of expelling the liberals, but they had not relinquished their belief in the “fundamentals” and held aloof from the majority. The more radical formed their own churches, especially the premillennarians, who believed it to be a sacred duty, while waiting for Rapture, to separate themselves from the ungodly liberals. They began to found new organizations and networks masterminded by a new generation of evangelists. By 1930, there were at least fifty fundamentalist Bible colleges in the United States. During the Depression years, another twenty-six were founded, and the fundamentalist Wheaton College, in Illinois, was the fastest-growing liberal arts college in the United States. Fundamentalists also formed their own publishing and broadcasting empires. When television arrived during the 1950s, the young Billy Graham, Rex Humbard, and Oral Roberts began their ministries as “televangelists,” replacing the old traveling revivalist preachers.41 A huge, apparently invisible broadcasting network linked fundamentalists together all over the nation. They felt themselves to be outsiders, pushed to the periphery of society, but their new colleges and radio and television stations gave them a home in a hostile world.

In the counterculture that Protestant fundamentalists were creating, their colleges were safe, sacred enclaves amid the surrounding profaneness. They were attempting to create holiness by means of segregation. Bob Jones University, founded in 1927 in Florida, and moving to Tennessee before finding its final home in Greenville, South Carolina, epitomized the ethos of the new fundamentalist institution. The founder, an early-twentieth-century evangelist, was no intellectual, but wanted to found what he called a “safe” school, which would help young people preserve their faith while they prepared to fight the atheism which, he believed, now pervaded the secular universities.42 Students were taught “common sense Christianity” alongside the liberal arts. Everybody was obliged to take at least one Bible course each semester, to attend chapel, and to adhere to a “Christian” lifestyle, with strong rules governing dress, social interaction, and dating. Disobedience and disloyalty were, Bob Jones insisted, “unpardonable sins” and were not tolerated.43 Staff and students alike had to conform. Bob Jones University was a world unto itself: it made the difficult decision not to seek academic accreditation, believing any such compromise with the secular establishment to be sinful.44 This sacrifice enabled the university to exert tighter control over admissions, curriculum, and library resources.

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