Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture by Abrams Douglas Carl;

Author:Abrams, Douglas Carl;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 6

Pluralism

Beginning in the 1920s, journalists and historians labeled the founding generation of fundamentalism as intolerant, mainly as a result of prohibition, the Scopes trial, and the bitter Hoover-Smith presidential campaign of 1928. A more careful examination of fundamentalists and politics between the wars, however, reveals a more complex narrative. Modernist culture involved accepting pluralism, an idea introduced in the 1920s by anthropologist Margaret Mead and others. Fundamentalists participated in secular political battles and exhibited an openness to diversity. By the late 1930s, before the Cold War, they were of one mind with Catholics in the fight against communism. Ironically, Marx—another modernist—brought fundamentalists and Catholics together. In the coming decades anticommunism echoed antislavery of antebellum evangelicals. Many fundamentalists also would be strong defenders of Jews between the wars. Earlier in the 1920s, most of their leaders had vigorously opposed the Ku Klux Klan. Orthodox religious groups worked together and anticipated the political battles after the Protestant consensus of the 1950s in which they would find some success in pluralist America.1

Fundamentalist leaders disagreed about the nature of politics; some were more elitist while others were more open to democracy and the possibilities for diversity. “What is good government?” James Gray asked in the Moody Monthly. “Primarily it is a government by good men. Not necessarily deeply religious men, but good men ethically considered.” He continued: “the men to govern us must come up from among us.” Secular education, he believed, could not alone “make good people.” “No, religion only can make good people,” and specifically “the religion of this country, the Christian religion only.” Modernism, according to Gray, struck not merely at the Bible, but at the heart of the republic, by undermining the education system, religion, and politics. Gray agreed with the principle of the French Third Republic, the indirect election of the president. He believed “limitations on majorities” prevented tyranny. America, he reminded readers, was a republic, not a democracy. Democracy, he suggested, might pave the way for “a supreme dictator,” the Antichrist. At the close of World War I Gray had worried that President Wilson’s increased powers during the war potentially endangered the republic.2

Another fundamentalist leader did not fear direct democracy. Lawrence Levine pointed out that Bryan, at least in his last decade, “championed the doctrine of majority rule with a vehemence.” Bryan held that the majority view was morally superior and showed divine purpose. For Bryan, the Scopes trial was about an “insolent minority” forcing “irreligion” upon public school children. While Gray undoubtedly agreed with Bryan on church governance, he did not share Bryan’s views on the republic. Twice, shortly after Bryan’s death, the Moody Monthly distanced itself from Bryan’s politics. While Bryan had been correct on moral issues, Gray noted, “we never voted for him for President. His politics were not ours.” Evangelist M. B. Williams agreed: “I was never his follower politically, but . . . I followed him spiritually. For there he never failed.”3

One fundamentalist, while a Democrat like Bryan, resisted the blending of morality and civil government and by example accepted some diversity.

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