Saturday Afternoon Book Review: John Fea

Last updated on: December 4, 2010 at 4:05 pm by Scot McKnight

Saturday Afternoon Book Review: John Fea 2010-12-04T16:05:16-06:00 Scot McKnight

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John Fea, a professor of history at Messiah, has an excellent blog — and I encourage you to bookmark it and join in on his conversation. John is also a columnist at Patheos — and to add to this, John was an excellent basketball player. This review examines a pressing issue: the rise of the Christian Right, and what role evangelicals have played in American politics in the 20th-early 21st Centuries.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was a student of John Woodbridge at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I wrote a thesis on American Fundamentalism. At that time there were a growing number of outstanding studies of Fundamentalism out there, including George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture and a series of influential articles by Joel Carpenter that would he would later expand into Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism.

Questions: What are the major factors at work that led to the Christian Right? Who were the prime players? Do you think the Christian Right was something new, something old?

Like any good graduate student, I wanted to find an aspect of the Fundamentalist movement that had been underexplored. I chose to direct my attention to those mid-century conservative Protestants who clung to the “Fundamentalist” label even after it had become a rather negative and derogatory term.

My research focused on people like Bob Jones Jr., Carl McIntire, Robert Ketcham, and John R. Rice. These were Christians who thought the “Neo-Evangelicals”–a movement of former Fundamentalists such as Billy Graham, Carl F.H. Henry, and Harold Ockenga who championed a less caustic and militant form of evangelical faith–had compromised their Christian beliefs by cooperating with mainline Protestants in revival campaigns and by engaging so-called “modernists” in theological conversation.

At the time I was writing this thesis, the dominant historical narrative for understanding the political and cultural engagement of early twentieth-century conservative American Protestants went something like this:

During the 1920s Fundamentalists had fought to maintain their cultural dominance in American life and their ecclesiastical control of the major Protestant denominations, but they ultimately lost control of both. The turning point was the Scopes Trial of 1925. William Jennings Bryan may have won his case during that hot summer in Dayton, Tennessee, but the defenders of creationism, along with the entire Fundamentalist movement, was embarrassed by Bryan. In response they retreated into their own enclaves and shunned any and all attempts to have an influence in politics or culture. Yet, as Joel Carpenter argued in Revive Us Again, more moderate Fundamentalists would break away from their cantankerous past and eventually, in the 1930s and 1940s, begin the Neo-Evangelical movement. These post-Fundamentalists thrived in their own subculture of periodicals, radio-stations, Bible conferences, and colleges, but it would not be until the 1970s that they would leave their enclaves and return to the public square.

While some of my own study of twentieth-century conservative Protestantism confirmed much of this narrative, I also came to the conclusion that this story looked slightly different when viewed through the eyes of the self-professed Fundamentalists like Jones, McIntire, and Rice. Fundamentalists were much more active and engaged in the political sphere than their neo-evangelical cousins at Christianity Today and Fuller Seminary. In fact, much of the Christian Right of the 1970s and 1980s seemed to find their roots in this early Fundamentalist political activity.

I finished my thesis, published a few articles from it, and then headed off to graduate school in early American history. I did not see a solid historical treatment of the Christian Right that was sensitive to the role played by these Fundamentalist agitators until I picked up Daniel K. Williams’s recent book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.

Williams’s central thesis is that conservative Protestants entered the public square in the early twentieth-century and never left it. According to Williams, “what was new in 1980 was not evangelicals’ interest in politics, but, rather, their level of partisan commitment.” At the time that Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, evangelicals—both in their Neo-Evangelical and Fundamentalist manifestations—had been speaking out on political issues for decades. What was unique about the Christian Right was its connection to the GOP, which eventually became “God’s Own Party.”

Williams argues correctly that conservative Protestants have been trying to use politics to build a Christian nation ever since the 1920s. (I would actually argue, as I do in the first two chapters of my forthcoming Was American Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction, that one can trace Protestant efforts to develop a Christian America all the way back to the founding of the republic). Fundamentalists like Bryan, a loyal member of the Democratic Party, fought valiantly for Prohibition and against evolution. During the Cold War fundamentalist empire-builders like Bob Jones, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis were on the front lines in the fight against communism. Many of them opposed the Civil Rights movement and thus tended to support political candidates such as Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater. McIntire and Hargis were connected to the right wing John Birch Society.

Meanwhile, evangelicals, led by Billy Graham, leaned toward moderate Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. For example, Williams points out that conservative Protestants split their vote in the 1964 presidential election. Evangelicals supported Lyndon Johnson, while Fundamentalists backed Goldwater. The differences were based largely on race. It was not until the late 1960s, as the Civil Rights movement came to an end, that Evangelicals and Fundamentalists were able to lay aside their differences on race and unite behind Richard Nixon and the Republican Party. Both Evangelicals and Fundamentalists made up Nixon’s so-called “Silent Majority.”

Jerry Falwell, who obviously plays a major role in Williams’s narrative, was a product of southern Fundamentalism. In other words, he was not a product of the Graham-led neo-evangelical movement and seldom used the term “evangelical” to describe himself. Falwell cut his ministerial teeth in a Baptist world that was separatist, segregationalist, and anti-communist. This was a world of Biblical literalism and strict moral codes. Yet Falwell was enough of a visionary to realize that the only way to bring a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and Christian nationalist agenda to America was to break from his Fundamentalist past and make an appeal to Evangelicals as well as Catholics and Mormons.

Williams is evenhanded in his chronological history of the Christian Right. While he does not ignore the small triumphs that the movement has made in their fight for a more moral America, he also notes that their efforts to orchestrate legislative victories to end abortion or pass a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage have almost always failed.

The legacy of the Christian Right has been mixed. While they have come to be a major force in shaping the agenda of the Republican Party, they have also been manipulated by presidential candidates and other politicians along the way. Williams’s treatment of the relationship between Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority is particular revealing in this regard. Reagan comes across as a president who appears to legitimately sympathize with the Moral Majority’s agenda while at the same time disappointing Falwell and his colleagues at every turn.

God’s Own Party stands as the definitive work on the history of the Christian Right. Williams covers all the major players, including Bauer, Bright, Colson, Dobson, Falwell, LaHaye (both Tim and Beverly), Land, and Schaeffer (both Francis and Franky).

Jesus Creed readers interested in politics will find this book absolutely fascinating—a real historical feast.

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