Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 149
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, Second ed. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi + 351. $16.95.
Reviewed by Daniel K. Williams, University of West Georgia
George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, a study of conservative
American Protestant theology from 1875 to 1925, transformed the field of American
religious history when it first appeared in 1980. After this book’s publication, no scholar
could write about the history of American fundamentalism without referring to Marsden.
Christianity Today named it to their one hundred “Books of the Century.” Now, twentyfive
years after its publication, Marsden has updated his original text by adding a thirtypage
epilogue that suggests new approaches to understanding the resurgence of
“fundamentalistic evangelicalism” in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
The original edition of Fundamentalism and American Culture was revolutionary,
because it presented an intellectual history of fundamentalism, which most scholars had
previously assumed was a contradiction in terms. From H.L. Mencken’s snide
denigrations of fundamentalists in the 1920s to Ernest Sandeen’s historical research in the
early 1970s, most pundits and scholars who examined fundamentalism, including the
eminent historian Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963),
treated it as an anti-intellectual, reactionary movement that would likely fade away once
Americans had fully adjusted to the stresses of modernity, or else, like Sandeen, they
viewed it solely as a product of premillennial eschatology.
But Marsden went beyond these earlier interpretations by showing that
fundamentalism was broader than millenarianism and that, contrary to Hofstadter’s
assertion, it had roots in a philosophical tradition. Fundamentalists were not merely
reactionaries, Marsden argued; instead, they were adherents of the philosophy of Scottish
Common Sense Realism, a worldview that held that God’s truth was equally accessible to
every rational person through the revelation of nature and Scripture. Most American
Protestants had been Common Sense Realists before the Civil War, but in the 1870s
many of the nation’s leading Protestant ministers began championing a new liberal
theology that viewed much of the Bible as metaphorical, rather than literal, and that
identified the coming of the kingdom of God with scientific progress and the
advancement of “civilization.” Common Sense Realists, who maintained control at
Princeton University for a short time, and at Wheaton College for a much longer period,
objected to this new theology and were determined to resist it. At the same time, the rapid
spread of dispensational premillennialism and a Wesleyan holiness movement added a
theological framework and pietistic dimension to the emerging fundamentalist
movement. The horrors of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, followed by the
ascendancy of liberal Protestantism and the increasing emphasis on Darwinism in school
textbooks convinced fundamentalists that they needed to defend their denominations and
communities from destructive influences by championing the “fundamentals” of the faith.
But their failure to maintain control of northern Protestant denominations in the 1920s
signaled their inability to reclaim the culture that they had once dominated.