Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

The Pangea Blog

Home

Home
Progressive Christian
Emerging From Fundamentalism (Andrew Himes)

Emerging From Fundamentalism (Andrew Himes)

Last updated on: October 3, 2011 at 5:00 am by Kurt Willems

Emerging From Fundamentalism (Andrew Himes) 2011-10-02T19:56:09-07:00 Kurt Willems

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Last Thursday marked the 77th anniversary of the founding of the Sword of the Lord newspaper in Dallas, Texas in 1934. The Sword, founded by my granddad, John R. Rice, became the most influential fundamentalist publication of the twentieth century. In addition to editing the Sword until his death in 1980, John R. Rice preached thousands of sermons, wrote scores of books, and mentored hundreds of younger preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham.

Granddad went at his task with single-mindedness, discipline, certainty of results, and a conviction that he was divinely blessed. He brooked no opposition. He seldom entertained or expressed any doubts about his course.

I was the first of his grandsons. I was his first male descendant, and the third eldest of all his grandchildren. Early in my life, I felt a powerful expectation from my grandmother, my parents, and other relatives that I would follow in his footsteps and inherit his mantle of ministry, his passion for preaching and for soul winning. As I became a teenager and started having notions of my own, I inevitably came into conflict with my grandfather’s notions of right and wrong, of morality and mission.

There were two problems, really.

First, more than anyone else in our family, more perhaps than any of his daughters–my aunts and my mother–and more than any of my cousins or siblings, I inherited some of my grandfather’s strongest personal characteristics. I had an innate and overweening self-confidence. I was perfectly certain that when I expressed an opinion it was the right one. If you disagreed with me it was probably because I needed to explain a little more to you, or you hadn’t yet thought things through, or you needed to get some clarity or do some studying or pray about it to let my God set you straight.

Second, Granddad presented his way of looking at things as a package. I knew that I was expected to agree with each judgment or opinion he expressed, from the proper length of my hair to the correct interpretation of any single verse in the Bible. I was expected to agree with him about the need to resist the desegregation of schools and other public institutions in the South. I was expected to support the war in Vietnam as a holy crusade against communism. I was expected to disapprove–with him–of the public company that Billy Graham kept with those whom my grandfather termed liberals or modernists.

I don’t remember any doubt Granddad ever expressed, at least in my presence, or any need to get anybody else’s point of view–other than God’s–before he made a decision. But as a teenager in the early 60s, I began to have my own doubts. First about various small matters, and then about larger ones. I began to interrogate my ideological and theological inheritance.

When two black children tried to integrate my 8th-grade classroom and were met with a hate-filled mob of my fellow students, I began to perceive that black people in my small southern town of Millington, Tennessee were victims of a cruel and historic racial injustice. Then I began to question everything else I had been taught about history or politics or minor details of daily life.

I suspected that Martin Luther King, Jr. might not truly be an agent of communism and an evil troublemaker and infidel, after all. I wondered whether a deck of fifty-two playing cards was truly an excrescence of evil. I questioned whether the Bible was inerrant because it had been literally dictated by God. I began to ask whether women should be allowed to cut their hair or wear pants rather than skirts. I wondered whether going to a theater to watch a movie was truly a sin against God as I had been taught. I asked whether going to a high school dance would deliver me into the hands of the Devil.

When I came home from high school each afternoon to watch as CBS’s Walter Cronkite reported on yet another day’s casualties in Vietnam–10 or 20 more US soldiers killed in yet another ambush, another hundred or more Vietcong soldiers or civilian sympathizers killed in yet another US airstrike–I started to question all of my grandfather’s theological, and political assumptions. Soon I determined that the war in Vietnam was immoral, a criminal enterprise, and a genocidal abomination, and that I was obligated to protest the war.

By the time I was 17, I could no longer believe in my grandfather’s God, and I had become my grandfather’s self-righteous critic. I suddenly found that I was bound by no constraints whatsoever. I could begin to seriously regard the thoughts of Sartre and Lincoln, Baruch Spinoza and Germaine Greer, Malcolm X and Karl Marx, Joseph Conrad and Joseph Heller. I entertained the illusion that I was free of my grandfather altogether – free of his religion, free of his politics, free of his culture, free of his belief in God, and free, almost, of my family.

Decades later, paradoxically, it was my grandfather’s compassion that has drawn me back to a more generous reconsideration of him. As a child, I remember when I was privileged to stay overnight with my grandparents and then to get up and have breakfast with Granddad and Gram early in the morning. After breakfast we had family devotions. Every morning, he prayed that God would bless, keep and protect scores of people, naming them by name, praying for them individually and in detail. He prayed for preachers and missionaries, friends and family members scattered across the world. As he prayed he wept tears of joy and sorrow, leaving me amazed by the depth and power of his emotions.

I always had a feeling that he cared for us as individuals because we were an expression of his love for the whole world, rather than the other way around. He was most interested in finding new souls to win, new targets to reach. He was always interested in selling another ten thousand subscriptions to the Sword of the Lord, printing another million copies of his Bible tract What Must I Do to be Saved? in yet another language, opening yet another letter from someone thanking him for a sermon he’d printed in the Sword and reporting that they had just gotten saved and were now headed for heaven.

He kept careful track of the number of souls he had won to Jesus, the number of letters he’d received from people who said they’d gotten saved while reading a copy of the Sword of the Lord or one of his Bible tracts–28,250 such letters between 1934 and his death in 1980. The statistics mattered a great deal to him as an index of how he was doing with his mission of saving the world.

My grandfather’s religion was no academic religion, no intellectual exercise in theology or disputation–though he was a theologian who engaged in many polemics about dogma, faith, and belief. He was driven by a profound compassion for the masses of frail, flawed, lost human beings. His was a religion of the heart and the soul, a religion of the poor and the humble, the brokenhearted and the lost. And he was a preacher because he loved his fellow humans.

As I was growing up, I heard my grandfather preach hundreds of sermons, and each of them was a string of stories–one story or parable or illustration after another. As he preached, he recited poetry, recited long passages of scripture, sang scraps of hymns, and talked to people alive and dead, from his wife sitting in the front pew to his own long-gone mother looking down on him from heaven. In every sermon, he broke into tears a half dozen times as he spoke of his passion for winning lost souls to Jesus.

Over 30 years after his death, my grandfather’s compassion is what links me to him. It pulls me back into communion with the man who more than anyone else shaped me into who I am. My grandfather’s love for poor lost souls, his desire to find a true religion of the heart, is what gives me hope as I move beyond his narrow fundamentalism toward a larger vision of the kingdom of God.

—————————————————————————————-

Andrew Himes is the author of the new book, ‘The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family.’

Previous Post

September 30, 2011

Hell on Earth and the Kingdom of God (Greg Dill)

Next Post

October 4, 2011 A Vision of Worship: Pete Rollins, Rob Bell, and Encountering the Divine (Mike Krause)

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category (Series) All Out War-Spiritual Warfare (Series) Church Plant Journal (Series) Dear Reader... (Series) Earthquakes...Signs of the Times? (Series) Entering the... Conversation (Series) Evangelical Culture Myths (Series) Everything is Meaningless [Pete Enns] (Series) Evolving Evangelicalism (Series) Hell Yes. Hell No! Who Cares? (Series) Hidden Worldviews (Series) If Evolution is Right, what about Adam? (Series) in less than 300 words (Series) Jesus and Nationalism (Series) Liberating Women for Ministry? (Series) Life-Changing Books (Series) Markers of Church Plant Movement (Series) Nonviolence 101 (Series) Philemon - Reconciliation (Series) Quote to Ponder (Series) Red Letter Dialogues (Series) Resource of the Week (SERIES) Revelation Sermons (Series) Share Something Sundays (Series) Simplicity in the Burbs: $2 a day (Series) The Binding of God [Open Theism] (Series) The Creed: Anabaptist Reflections (Series) Values for Church Leadership (Series) Video to Ponder Anabaptism Animal Advocacy Books Church Ministry Church Planting Community Culture Eschatology Eucharist Evangelical Reject Evolution Fundamentalism Greek Greg Boyd Guest Contributors Hell Holy Spirit Israel/Palestine Kingdom of God Lent Missional N. T. Wright Nationalism New Creation Nonviolence Open Mic Open Theism Parenting Passover Paul Philemon Podcast Politics Restorative Justice Revelation (the book of) Rob Bell Ron Martoia Sermon Shane Claiborne Social Justice Speaking Engagement Spiritual Warfare Spirituality Temple Theology Tim Geddert Tribulation Uncategorized universalism Video Blog Women in Ministry Worship Music Youth Ministry

Select a Month August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 October 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 December 2016 October 2016 August 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does the name "Abraham" mean?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Blessed man Father of many Shelter Strong leader

Support this
Column