Religion and Society in
America
Week 9 – Lecture 1
Conflict in Interwar America (continued);
Fundamentalism & Modernists
Conflict in Interwar America;
Fundamentalism & Modernists
 Voices of Conflict (continued)
 Yellow Peril
 Fundamentalists & Modernists
 Protestants – A House Divided
 Four View circa 1910
 Example Billy Sunday
 The Character of Fundamentalism
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Changing immigration policy of the U.S. is
but one reflection of America’s new
weariness of immigrants in the 20th century
 1921 & 1924 – legislation is passed
effectively shutting down legal immigration
to the United States (3% and 2% ratios)
 First victims of the nation’s new
restrictionist policies were the Chinese and
Japanese in 1902
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Immigration Act of 1917 demanded literacy
of all newcomers
 1923 – Calvin Coolidge asserts in his
annual message to Congress on December
6th, that “America must be kept American”
adding, “those who do not want to be
partakers of the American spirit ought not
to settle in America.”
 What is the American spirit and how is it
defined religiously speaking?
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 America’s Protestant denominations were
mixed in sentiment concerning immigration
restrictions
 1925 Northern Baptist Convention passed a
resolution against the Congressional act of
the previous year, stating, “Neither the
‘Nordic’ nor any other groups has the ear of
the Almighty to the exclusion or injury of
any other race…”
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 “…The question of race relationship must be
honestly faced.” the Baptists asserted
 Northern Baptists’ based conviction on idea
of race, no specific mention of questions
related to religious toleration
 Nevertheless, voicing such an opinion
largely stood out from the political and
social sentiment of the day
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 While on the east coast, restrictionists kept
a watchful eye on the population of
Catholics and Jews, out west the concern
was Chinese and Japanese
 Much of the fear and hatred expressed
toward of immigrants from the east was
couched in the language of race
 Following World War I, the former editor of
the Sacramento Bee began to refer to
Japan as “the Germany of Asia”
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Representative MacLafferty of
California stated in a speech in 1924
and published in the Congressional
Record: “Every Japanese believes
that he is a child of the sun goddess,
that the world belongs to Japan, and
that Japan can possess any part of
the world rightly by any means she
may see fit to take. That is their
belief.”
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 What was Japanese immigration so
disconcerting to many 20th-century
Americans?
 Shinto (the way of Kami)
 The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki are accounts of
the creation. They begin with Chinese
expression of the Yin and Yang, then record
the role of the gods (Kami) in creating
Japanese islands and imperial line
 “Foreign” cosmology
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Sun Goddess is divine antecedent of
emperor
 Accounts tell of kami as dwelling in heaven
and inhabiting the earth as sacred forces of
nature
 Ritual prayers (norito) akin to incantations,
especially the (harai) which is the rite of
exorcism and purification
 “Foreign” to the reasonable religion most
Protestants were attempting to maintain
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Meiji Restoration (1868 – 1911) –
period in Japan in which “state
Shinto” was declared “nonreligious” in
an attempt to maintain the country's
religious freedoms; however, the
teachings of Shinto were required in
public schools
 Protestant America suspicious of such
seemingly surreptitious activity
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Discussion of Japanese Shintoism or
Buddhism was usually secondary to
issues of race and economics
 Most Americans simply dismissed
these religious expressions as idolatry
or paganism
 Fear led them to ignore the fact that
many Japanese, once in America,
converted to Christianity
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
Example: 1936 – Seattle Washington
Estimated 6,000 Japanese immigrants
1,200 Christians
960 Buddhists or adherents of other
Eastern religions
 Adaptive quality: “Buddha loves me,
this I know”




Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Harry Emerson Fosdick – prominent
preacher, author, and national figure
in New York City
 Response to immigration question
and legislative moves by Congress
typified the ambivalence many openminded Protestants held at the time
Voices of Conflict – Yellow Peril
 Prior to Congressional act of 1924, Fosdick
maintained – “I am a restrictionist in
immigration because I am not a
sentimentalist.”
 Following the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924,
Fosdick apologized over the radio to
immigrants of Japanese ancestry, “The
Exclusion Act stands as one of the most
senseless, needless, intolerable pieces of
racial prejudice ever perpetrated by a great
nation.”
Fundamentalists & Modernists
Photograph of the World’s Columbian Exhibition 1893, taking place
in Chicago, Illinois
Fundamentalists & Modernists
On “Chicago Day” (October 9, 1893) at the Exposition, 716,881
people were in attendance
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 “Fundamentalism in America, a complex
emergence which also inevitably eludes
precise definition, was at base a reactionary
movement against Protestant liberalism and
the Modernist party. As such it appeared
as a revanchist force, after the challenges
of modernity had become corrosive,
abrasive, and threatening in the eyes of
millions of believers. The pioneers of this
movement first began gathering at major
Bible conferences already before the turn of
the century.” (Martin Marty)
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 1920 – Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the
Baptist Watchman-Examiner decided the
term “conservative” was too pejorative a
label and chose the name “Fundamentalist”
to describe this loosely formed constituency
 Laws maintained: “Fundamentalism, then,
is a protest against the rationalistic
interpretation of Christianity, which seeks
to discredit supernaturalism.”
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 Baptist fundamentalist and militant
Minneapolis cleric, William B. Ripley,
“A fundamentalist is a person who
unreservedly believes in the
fundamental doctrines of
supernatural, evangelical Christianity.
A modernist is a person who reject
any or all of these doctrines.”
Protestants – A House Divided
 1926: 232,000 Churches in America
vs. 256,000 Schools
 21,000,000 Sunday-school pupils vs.
24,700,000 public school students
 55% of the nation’s adult population
were on the membership rolls of
churches and synagogues
 44% of nation’s youth were on
Sunday-school roosters
Protestants – A House Divided
 1910s - Baptists, Methodists, and
Presbyterians who had split over the
American Civil War (North/South) had not
reconciled
 Protestants painfully aware of what
divisiveness over theological could bring
 Protestant camps (conservative, liberals
and those in between) willing to overlook
differences in order to reform society
Protestants – A House Divided
 The decade prior to America’s entry into
World War I marked the end of an era of
American evangelical establishment
 Vision of establishing a “Christian America”
in 19th century was becoming more and
more of an illusion for many
 Question facing conservatives: Should the
movement attempt to reshape the culture
and its churches from within or condemn
them and separate from them?
Protestants – A House Divided
 By the turn of the century,
interdenominational agencies
supported both liberals and
conservatives
 Protestants had learned to live with
differences and work cooperatively
toward common reform agenda
 Emerging conservative coalition
within Protestantism
Protestants – A House Divided
 On this question, there was no
consensus among conservatives but
these tensions were temporarily
obscured or overlooked by the antimodernist agitation of the 1920s
Fundamentalists & Modernists
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 The Fundamentals, a twelve volume
paperback testimony by conservative
evangelical Protestants was conceived and
funded by a Southern Californian oil
millionaire, Lyman Stewart
 Published between 1910 – 1915, it was
intended as a “Testimony to the Truth”
describing contributing authors as “the best
and most loyal Bible teachers in the world”
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 A. C. Dixon, a well-known evangelists and
minister of the Moody Church in Chicago
was hired as the editor of the text
 The Fundamentals was freely distributed to
every pastor, missionary, theological
professor, theology student, YMCA and
YWCA secretary, college professor, and
Sunday school superintendent in the
nation.
 Some 3 million individuals were published
in all
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 While the origins of what religious
historians call “the FundamentalistModernist Controversy” were socially
diffuse, these forces dramatically
collided in 1925 at the trial of John
Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee.
 During the late-1920s and 1930s
there are divisions among
fundamentalists and conservatives
Fundamentalists & Modernists
 Central to the debate was biblical
hermeneutics
 The “inerrancy of scripture” is a position
formalized among Fundamentalists during
the 1940s. In 1949, the Evangelical
Theological Society, a gathering of leading
evangelical scholars, established the
doctrinal basis for inerrancy. Inerrancy
meant that when “correctly interpreted,”
the Bible is “truthful” regardless of the topic
it broaches and does not contain material
errors.
Four Views circa 1910
 premillennial extremism – small
group of dispensationalists
spokesmen who pushed the cultural
pessimism of premillennialism to its
logical extreme
 The predicted “end of the age” and its
telltale signs were readily available to
fundamentalist interpretation
Four Views circa 1910
 Prophecies concerning “heaping treasure
together” seemed to be evident in the new
wealth of America’s entrepreneurial and
capitalist classes (Carnegies, Vanderbilts,
etc.)
 Commercial ties to Europe with their
shipping and railroad ties to the Middle East
were interpreted as a literal revival of
Babylon
Four Views circa 1910
 “Grasping after more, never content,
and determined to rule, their wealth
is a minister to corruption, an
inspiration to official dishonesty, and
a menace to the peace and comfort of
society” wrote Isaac M. Haldeman
 Democracy and socialism faired little
better
Four Views circa 1910
 Socialism was seen as “lawless”
 Fundamentalists argued Jesus rebuked
Judas for his suggestion of giving to the
poor arguing, Judas was “the only Socialist
among professed Christians of whom the
New Testament gives us record.”
 Democracy was interpreted in light of
prophetic dreams (Nebuchadnezzar) and
understood as weak and ungodly
Four Views circa 1910
 Science and technology were viewed
as the “increase of knowledge, the
running to and fro” in the last days of
judgment
 Science, fundamentalists argued, was
“impotent” in answering the “great
riddles [of life] which laugh in the
face of the most accomplished
science.”
Four Views circa 1910
 Examples: Isaac M. Haldeman, pastor of
First Baptist Church of New York City in
1910 wrote comprehensive
dispensationalist volume entitled The Sign
of the Times
 Argued the Devil would led the 20th Century
“into a drunken orgy of sin and shame and
out breaking vice” similar to the French
Revolution. This growing debauchery
would ultimately result in religious revival
Four Views circa 1910
 Haldeman did not go as far as he
might in working out this radical antiworldly position, remaining in the
Northern Baptist Convention
Four Views circa 1910
 Example: Arno C. Gaebelein was the
editor and a regular contributor to the
conservative publication Our Hope
 Gaebelein ran a regular feature
entitled “Current Events and Signs of
the Times—in the Light of the Word of
God”
 Gaebelein separated himself the
“apostate” Methodists in 1899
Four Views circa 1910
 Addressing the Prophetic Bible Conference
of 1914, Gaebelein demanded his audience
to follow in his footsteps: “How dare you
support men and institutions who deny
your Lord? How dare you keep fellowship
with the enemies of the cross of Christ?
Oh, listen to his call! Who is on the Lord’s
side? If He tarry a little while longer you
will find that you must either follow this
solemn call of God or go along with the
apostasy.”
Premillennial Extremism
Four Views circa 1910
 Revivalistic character – evangelistic
commitment among those who would
become viewed as fundamentalists ran high
 Evangelicalism ran counter to the
premillennial dispensationalism of
fundamentalists
 Men like Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday
employed increasingly diverse revivalistic
techniques and strategies to convert
America to Christianity
Four Views circa 1910
 Moody Bible Institutes focused the
attention of its students on the study
of the bible, missions, and practical
work
 Two traditions, despite apparent
contradictions, were fused together
among fundamentalists
Four Views circa 1910
 Christian Civilization – commitment among
evangelicals and conservatives to preserve
traditional Christianity (broadly interpreted)
 Emphasis on the practical and social
 Initially fundamentalists were willing, to
some extent, to work with persons holding
various views in order to forward their
efforts toward a “Christian Civilization”
 Pragmatic defense of “old time religion”
(William Jennings Bryan)
Four Views circa 1910
 Transforming Culture by the Word –
involved three characterizations or
assumptions about American culture
 Pessimistic assessment of cultural
achievements
 Strict separation of church and state
 Christianity fostered “right belief” among
a nation
Four Views circa 1910
 Benjamin B. Warfield (1851 – 1921) was
perhaps the chief articulator of this idea
 Warfield expected Christianity “to reason its
way to its dominion”
 Reasonable faith, he was convinced, shall
triumph
 Revelation 19 – “the sword of victory
proceeds out of the mouth of the
Conqueror” he concluded was modern-day
Christianity’s task
Example: Billy Sunday
 Sunday was flamboyant
in his presentation
 His “simple talk”
appealed to the masses
who were increasingly
weary of the times and
the Federal Government’s
growth and intrusion into
their lives
Example: Billy Sunday
 Sunday’s ordination examine
before the Presbyterian church
evoked several “standard”
answers to theological
questions including:
 “That’s too deep for me”
 “I’ll have to pass that up”
 “I don’t know any more
about theology than a jackrabbit know about ping-pong,
but I’m on my way to glory.”
Example: Billy Sunday
 Somewhat ironically,
Sunday was one of the
most advanced and
gifted preachers to
utilize new technologies
(radio) to reach the
masses
 Sunday on prohibition
Fundamentalism & Modernists
 New York Evening Post (1924) – with
“the Fundamentalists and modernists
explaining things to each other, it is
getting to be more interesting to go
to church than to stay at home and
read the newspapers.”
The Character of Fundamentalism
 Defining Fundamentalism:
 Fundamentalism is “the militant exposure
of all non-Biblical affirmations and
attitudes.” (George Dollar)
 A fundamentalist is “an evangelical who is
angry about something.” (George
Marsden)
 “A more or less organized coalition of
militants” which first developed in the
North. (George Marsden)
The Character of Fundamentalism
 Fundamentalists are oppositional to the
cultural forces of modernism. (Ernest
Sandeen)
 Fundamentalists are cultural “outsiders”
who hold a “minority self-image” and
demand obligatory adherence among all
Christians to their religious positions. (R.
Laurence Moore)
 “Fundamentalism was born in an era of
anxiety over gender roles.” (Margaret L.
Bendroth).