Part One: Before Fundamentalism -- Evangelical America at the brink of crisis -- The paths diverge -- D. L. Moody and a New American Evangelism -- Part two: The shaping of a coalition: this age and the millennium -- Prologue: the paradox of Revivalist Fundamentalism -- Two revisions of millennialism -- Dispensationalism and the Baconian ideal -- History, society, and the church -- Holiness -- The victorious life -- The social dimensions of holiness -- "The great reversal" -- Holiness and fundamentalism -- The defense of the faith -- Tremors of controversy -- Presbyterians and the truth -- The Fundamentals -- Christianity and culture -- Four views circa 1910 -- Part Three: The crucial years: 1917-1925 -- World War I, Premillennialism, and American Fundamentalism: 1917-1918 -- Fundamentalism and the cultural crisis: 1919-1920 -- The Fundamentalist offensive on two fronts: 1920-1921 -- Would the liberals be driven from the denominations? 1922-1923 -- The offensive stalled and breaking apart: 1924-1925 -- Epilogue: dislocation, relocation, and resurgence: 1925-1940 -- Part Four: Interpretations -- Fundamentalism as a social phenomenon -- Fundamentalism as a political phenomenon -- Fundamentalism as an intellectual phenomenon -- Fundamentalism as an American phenomenon -- Part Five: Fundamentalism yesterday and today (2005) -- Part Six: What happened to American Fundamentalism in the twenty-first century?.
Summary:
Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements. In the twenty-first century, militantly conservative white evangelicals have become more prominent than ever in American life. Marsden's volume, which now takes the history through the end of the Trump administration, remains the essential starting point for understanding the degree to which that militancy militancancy has been shaped by the fundamentalist heritage of the twentieth century. For Marsden, fundamentalists are, in the broadest sense, conservative evangelicals who are willing to take a stand and to fight. Yet their militancy needs to be understood in the light of some specific aspects of their heritage. In the late nineteenth-century, American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. Often the "traditionalists" were also innovators in affirming apocalyptic prophesies of the imminent destruction of modern civilization and the return of Christ. By the 1920s, a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches, the teaching of biological evolution in schools, and changing mores in the culture. Fundamentalists often were conflicted by impulses to separate from condemned modern culture or to take back America as a Christian nation. Even with such tensions, fundamentalists built networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and mission agencies. These coalesced into major religious movements that proved to have remarkable staying power. Beginning in the 1970s, fundamentalist impulses led to increasing overt political mobilization and the rise of the religious right. In the twenty-first century, militant fundamentalist zeal to preserve Biblicist doctrinal and behavioral purity in churches remained strong, but often was overshadowed by more widely popular impulses of Christian nationalism and political partisanship.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.