Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History 20th Century Fundamentalism And Pentecostalism 20240712

Creationism in Public Schools and gained national attention. Later, she talks about the origins and growth of pentecostalism which strives for the divine and faith healing and speaking in tongues. All right. Lets begin. My name is molly worthen, were at the university of North Carolina at chapel hill and its american fundamentalism and pentecostalism and ill try to answer three Big Questions today. Number one, what is protestant fundamentalism . What does the term mean . Second, how did fundamentalists relate to main street culture . And third, why has fundamentalism been so much more influential in the United States than in any other society in the western world . Im curious, is fundamentalism, fundamentalist, are these terms that you hear today . Do you know people who call themselves fundamentalist or use this label . I see some nodding. Any examples . Yes. Trying to describe alternate groups. It is a term that you hear more often in the context of islam. What about here among American Christian groups do you hear the label . Im from up north and many people who are christians down here we would call fundamentalist christians often as a pejorative, i dont think often at least in my experience its not often used by the fundamentalists themselves. Thats interesting. That lines up with my own experience. Today there are exceptions. I have certainly met some proud, independent baptists who claim that term fundamentalist and generally, it seems to be used as an insult. Its not a label that most christians would want applied to themselves, and i think that the history of that connotation, kind of negative sense in which we hear the word today really became crystallized in one particular historical episode and thats the infamous or famous, depending on your view, scopes trial there we go of 1925. The monkey trial that dominated newspaper headlines in the summer of 1925. The scopes trial has a certain status in popular culture. Youre probably at least vaguely aware of what it involved, but let me tell you the basic facts of this trial. The state of tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of the theory of evolution in tennessee public high schools. The aclu, the American Civil Liberties union, wanted to challenge the constitutionality of this law, and so they put together and financed a case. That recruited a Tennessee High School teacher and a substitute science teacher, a guy named john scopes who agreed to purposefully incriminate himself by making a point of teaching the chapter from their textbook on the theory of evolution, and then urging his own students to testify against him, to rat him out and get him in trouble so that he would be charged with this crime and it would go to trial. So thats exactly what happened and this turned out to be just an amazing publicity opportunity for the little town of dayton, tennessee. 200 reporters descended on a town in july of 1925. A few thousand spectators from various parts of the south and further afield if you had walked down the street of dayton in july she would have trained chimpanzees playing on the lawn, drinking the local variety of soda pop and local merchants were trying to capitalize on this moment in the sun. The trial itself was pretty sensational because both sides, the defense and the prosecution managed to recruit a star for their side. So on the Prosecutions Team was William Jennings bryant, the great commoner, and the populist democrat who had run for president three times. Hed been Woodrow Wilsons secretary of state. He was known as this great defender of traditional protestantism and a great lawyer joined the defense team, as well, probably the most famous leftwing lawyer of the time and famously agnostic on the matter of religion and thats Clarence Darrow who was very known for his bold politics. Here he is in his characteristically flourish making his opening arguments. Here is darrow and brian on the upper right here and here is sort of a sample of the street scene, too. And this is a table set up with antievolution tracks and books. Both sides of this debate really seeing this as an opportunity, and now the aclu wanted to challenge the law on the grounds of academic freedom. That is the track they wanted to take, but Clarence Darrow veered in a very different direction. He decided to really put traditional religion on trial, and he summoned to the stand for crossexamination bryant himself. This was very unorthodox for one of the attorneys for the prosecution to be summoned for crossexamination and darrow aimed to make a fool of this great statesman. He really wanted to showcase the conflict between science and religion, and so he asked brian questions like how could joshua possibly have compelled the son to stand still or can you tell us the exact date of the flood, and brian did his best to remain firm in defending his views, although in many cases he didnt have a clear and sharp answer to rebutt darrow . I will say that brian refused to defend young earth creationism. He would not defend the view that each day of creation described in genesis literally means 24 hours. He said it could mean a longer period of time, but in general, he defended the conservative traditional reading of scripture and he didnt he kind of came off as an old man who was a bit out of his depth. The judge ended up throwing out this testimony and in fact, most of the testimony for the defense as irrelevant to the question of whether or not the teach her broken the law. It was pretty clear he had. The jury found scopes guilty and he was ordered to pay a fine, although the conviction was later thrown out on a technicality. Now, inside the courthouse, the crowd was definitely on brians side, on the side of the prosecution cheering for brian, but darrow and the defenders of evolution really seemed to win over the Mainstream Press in the big cities. A journalist for the baltimore sun, h. L. Minkon was dispatched to cover this trial and he had searing, mocking reports of the people he met there, and i just want to read us an excerpt of one of his reports. The net effect of Clarence Darrows speech, meaning his closing arguments yesterday seemed to be preciously the same as if he had balled it up in a rain spout in the interior of afghanistan and more on the audience when it was over simply hissed it. Brian had these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of the remote hills and the forlorn and lonely farms. His nonsense is their ideal of sense when he deluges them with his theologic bilge. Holy cow no matter what you might think of minkins ideology he had a certain genius for comiccon dissension and reports like this had effects and this trial came to be widely seen as a cultural defeat for fundamentalism. As the moment that made famous the caricature of the fundamentalist as the uneducated redneck and the scopes trial has become this icon of the clash between fundamentalism and modernism, and i think it is so telling that 1925 was also the year of the creation in canada of the United Church of canada. Remember, i told you about that great moment of protestant unity in canada when the baptists, the congregationalists sorry, not the baptists, the presbyterian, the congregationists and the methodists joined together to make one big denomination and its this lovely, historical coincidence that that happened at the very same time that American Protestantism was so clearly polarizing and breaking apart. Its very handy. It givious one date that you have to memorize for the final, you know . And it shows us this divergent set of paths that canadian and American Protestantism were headed down. So we have to ask then, what are the historical reasons for this very different character of American Protestant conflict and what who are these fundamentalists . I mean, who are we really talking about when we use this label . So first, weve got to be clear about what fundamentalism means because this word is used pretty carelessly, i think in todays culture and media. In this class we will use it in a historically precise way. Fundamentalists, im giving you a definition now. Fundamentalists are cop serve tiff protestants who militantly opposed, militantly opposed. Th that, militance is important, about the bible, science and society, and often, although not always, broke away to found their own churches, schools and religious organizations. So these are militant protestants who really oppose in an aggressive way these new changes and in many cases they broke away to found their own groups. We can talk about an organized fundamentalist movement, from roughly 1900 to, say, 1930, and when these conservatives were fighting, just brutally to retain control of those old, established northern denominations we call the main line. Now this week you are reading a famous sermon by a liberal baptist preacher, Harry Emerson fosnick, and i think that gives you some sense of the conflict. Heres Harry Emerson fosnick. He appears on the cover of Time Magazine and the cultural status of the liberal princes of the pulpit and the Presbyterian Church is where he originally gave this sermon, shall the fundamentalists win in 1922. When you read it, i think youll see that his sermon was not a fight over doctrine. At least not explicitly and you might want to talk with your classmates about what is going on beneath it, at least on the surface. Fosnicks approach was very different from Clarence Darrows. Essentially, hes if a person is a true liberal, then they should have no problem with other christians believing, say, that god created the universe in six days even if they themselves dont happen to believe that. Fosnick says the problem with these fundamentists is not their theology. They can believe what they like. Their problem are their beliefs about church. The fact that they believe that liberals like fosnick dont belong in any truly christian church. This sermon was a sensation. His brother, fosnicks brother ran the Rockefeller Foundation for 30 years and the foundation funded the nationwide as a pamphlet. So it had much wider reach than the people who read it, preached. Ive been reading his autobiography. He refers to this srl op and he calls it a failure, be even though it failed in what his main hope was which was to stop the fight ing and restore harmony. After 1930 the fundamentalist movement as an organized movement disintegrates. The conservatives basically lost their bid to control those main line churches which is why we so often say now the liberal main line. Thats how people defer to those nominations. Fundamentalism did not go away, though. So at this point we can describe fundamentalism as not an organized movement, but as a set of networks, a sub culture. Fundamentalists built their own world of bible colleges, denominations, and conferences and empty communist crusades and radio ministries and a really powerful network of religious and political groups that for quite a long time, maybe up to the 60s and 70s was not on the mainstream medias radar. It seemed like after the scopes trial fundamentalists had crawled in the hole somewhere and, you know, never appeared from the perspective of the average reporter at the New York Times or Something Like that. In fact, fundamentalism was growing into this powerful subculture. Now one more point about terms. In these years, so the first half of the 20th century, the terms fundamentalist and evangelical were more or less interchangeable. People would use them both to talk about the same individuals, to talk about themselves, but in the 1940s that starts to change and the term evangelical comes to mean a conservative protestant who is doctrinally often fundamentalist, but is not so militant about it. So im talking about people like billy graham. An evangelical was someone who wanted to engage mainstream culture, maybe collaborate a little bit more with other christians rather than separating from the world in an extreme way or picking lots of fights over doctrine. So thats what evangelical comes to mean and its still how its used today, i believe. This, then, is the big arc of the fundamentalist movement in our story. I want to turn to the matter of theology to say more about what fundamentalists believed and believe today. Now, fundamentalism looked slightly different in Different Church traditions. So a baptist fundamentalist would believe Different Things and worship differently than an mennonite fundamentalist. They did tend to share a set of fundamentals. We can make some broad comments about that. They tended to have a piutistic concern for holiness, for good behavior. Many of them came in some way out of the puritan tradition and maintained the rigorous doctrine, systematic theology with piutism and the spirit. Lots and lots of fundamentalists, although by no means all of them were premillennialist in their view of the end times and you remember from last week that means they thought that jesus was going to return probably pretty soon in the flesh to inaugurate the prophecies predicted in the group of revelation and eventually after the battle of armageddon and all that jazz, the kingdom of the saints. We can move down to the more basic level of fundamentals, and you can have disagreement among the end times. I struggled for a long time to come up with a good acronym to help students remember the fundamentals until just a couple of years ago when i put this out as a challenge to some of your predecessors in this class, and one lovely student, a woman named Miranda Rosser who graduated last spring came up with marvin which was so handy. And i came up with ivam, and how do you remember ivam . Its not even a word. This was a list brought up by conservatives in 1910 who said what are the most important things we cannot compromise on. M for miracles, that the miracles in the bible really did happen. A for atonement and that is a belief in the traditional doctrine of christs substitutionary atonement on the cross. That is jesus was not just a nice guy, he was not just a moral example for us and he did take our place on the cross and died for our sins. R for resurrection. He was actually bodily resurrected. V, christ was born of a virgin and i for inerancy. The doctrine of innerancy meaning the bible is totally wouter ror no matter what scientists and historians may say. Now i want to push back a bit against the scopes trial caricature of fundamentalists as country bumpkins by talking about i guess you can call them the thinking mens fundamentalists at princeton theological seminary. Princeton in the late 19th century was one of the intellectual powerhouses behind the conservative response to modernist theology, and i want to focus on benjamin b. Warfield who was a scholar at princeton and you are reading an excerpt from one of his sermons this week. He was born in 1851. He was the son of a welltodo kalth breeder in kentucky. He came from pretty aristocratic stock. His greatgrandfather was a u. S. Senator. One of his uncles was a confederate general in the civil war and his family was presbyterian and warfield really threw himself into serving his family faith. He went to princeton as a student and he returned to the seminary about a decade later in 1887 to teach there and to spend his life fighting against modern ifrm modernism by defending this doctrine as biblical innerancy. We need to spend time in the idea of innerancy. So this idea that everything in the bible is true no matter what scholars might say, that scripture has no error in it, the baseball idea is very old. Christians have always been concerned to defend the bible as a perfect source of truth, but in errancy as warfield understood it as fundamentalists and evangelicals have come to understand it in many cases has a more recent history and we need to unpack this a bit to really understand whats going on. So to tell the story of the doctrine of inerrancy and i need to backtrack to the early and mid 17th century, okay . So bear with me. In these years, so a couple of generations after the start of the protestant reformation, a group of protestant theologians found themselves in a bit of a bind, found themselves kind of surrounded on the intellectual battlefield and im talking primarily about the thinkers in the reformed tradition. These are theologians who followed john calvin and those guys. On the one understand that, they had to deal with the scientists and philosophers of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment who were using new scientific methods to raise awkward questions about the bibles account of the miraculous and supernatural doctrines, and on the other hand, they had to face the great theologians of the catholic counter reformation, these scholastic thinkers who were annoyingly adept at logically, systematically picking apart from the stand aurps about authority. So these protestant thinkers were caught in the middle and they responded by essentially trying to turn their enemys weapons back upon them by creating a highly rationalistic, and highly logical method of defending the authority of scripture. These protestant thinkers took as their starting point the philosophical principle that god is perfect and unchanging. And christians debate about whether that principle is actually explicit in scripture, its not clear that it is. If thats true, then it follows logically that gods revelation is perfect and unchanging, as well. Not just in salvation, but in every matter from the scope of the flood to the most granular details of ancient israels politics. So what this means is religious truth and scientific truth are the same. The bible is equally reliable on both matters. Benjamins Charles Hodge had a great way of putting this, said the bible is a storehouse of facts. Think about that phrase. A storehouse of facts. And a theologians job is to analyze these facts by arranging and classifying data from the natural world, and a theologian is a kind of scientist and this really drives home the point that these princeton thinkers followed that model of common sense realism that i told you about a couple of weeks ago and how they thought about science and that science is about using your godgiven common sense to make sense of the data in gods creation, very different view from the idea of science that we started to see emerge with Charles Darwin and the thinkers who come after him who develop more sophisticated methods for dealing with uncertainty in their scientific endeavors. Warfield and his colleagues were not dummies. These guys were sophisticated thinkers who kept abreast of the latest scholarship coming out of european universities and they were well aware of the discrepancies in the bible, the parts that seemed to not quite line up and seemed to contradict each other, but they argued that the appearance of these problems in scripture was simply the result of our mortal imperfection, human misunderstandings. Its not a reflection of gods error. Now warfield, unlike some of his colleagues, was even open to some version of theistic evolution, that is evolution driven by god. If you think about his biography this makes sense. Remember, his dad was a cattle breeder. So hed spend a lot of time in kentucky, working on the family ranch and he had observed first hand how breeding works, how inherited traits can change over time. He died a few years before the scopes trial, but im pretty sure he would have been very uncomfortable with the all or nothing debate about evolution that took place there. However, warfield and his colleagues at princeton were really worried about the presub sessions, the assumptions beneath this modernist scientific work and biblical scholarship and thats really what hes getting at in the sermon youre reading this week. Any scholar in any field has got to start with the assumption that the bible is free from all error. They said by definition, and, you should try to accept this assumption and they worried that liberal scholars who said okay, maybe you can grant that perhaps the miracles and the gospels didnt happen, maybe christ didnt really raise anyone from the dead, but you can still believe christ is your savior, you know . You can still have the core christian faith. Warfield and his buddies said no way, not at all and it is a slippery slope and if you give up the socalled details, eventually you give up the reliability of the whole bible. So they were prepared to fight very hard for these details. They didnt see them as details at all. There are few reasons why warfields approach became so dominant in the United States. But first is that america had always had many more churches of warfields tradition, the reformed protestant tradition than you would have found in the United Kingdom or canada and reformed protestants historically have just been really into fighting over doctrine, really systematic thinkers. Youll remember i told you how john calvin was just so systematic in how he reasoned out predestination, same with the puritans. So these guys were itching for intellectual fights and they were very sensitive to any intellectual challenge and thats different from other protestants who tended to put more emphasis on personal spiritual experience or Church Tradition or using the bible more as a guide for daily living rather than some kind of textbook. For the popularity of the rationalistic view of an errancy and the fundamentalist attitude toward compromise is revivals. Revivals became more popular in america than anywhere else in the western world and they encouraged a kind of black and white view, and christianity, an attitude that uncertainty is bad. That you must either reject new science entirely, and then you know youre saved or you can embrace it and be among the damned and if youre not sure, well, thats a sign that youre not really saved. A historian named George Marsden has suggested that these are some of the Important Reasons why fundamentalism became so prominent in america. Now warfield would never have approved about how they picked up the cost of inerrancy and ran with it. We see how sophisticated scholarship filters down into Church Newspapers and radio broadcasts. It doesnt retain its complexity or nuance generally and thats what happened with the doctrine of inerrancy and i think it became a kind of banner to rally around, to proclaim belief in inerrancy, i reject these awful things about modernity. I reject women wearing shorter skirts and i reject these weirdlook, weirdsmelling, weirdtalking immigrants coming interest our cities. I reject these prideful, arrogant scholars who are tearing down or holy books. I want to assert the authority of the bible over america. Thats what inerrancy came to stand for, i think. We gain some perspective on this when we think about canada. Canada had a small fundamentalist movement of its own especially baptists who paid a lot of attention to what the baptists south of the border were up to, but generally, fundamentalists were not as influential in canadian protestantism, and i want to focus briefly on one nonfundamentalist evangelical because i think his story tells us a lot more about what makes canadian evangelicalism different and thats this guy, nathaniel burrwash, who was a con temporary of warfields. He showed up in your textbook a couple of weeks ago, i believe. Burwash was a methodist minister and educator. He was born in 1839 in lower canada, and what is now quebec. He was the great grandson of loyalists who fled from vermont during the revolution. His parents were devout methodists and burwash had his own conversion experience when he was a student at Victoria College in ontario, and later on victoria asked burwash to come back and teach, not theology. They wanted him to teach natural science. And theyd studied science and they studied the philosophy that was so influential and common sense realism and in a broad sense, burwash drew from that old view the same sort of conclusions that warfield did. He thought, okay, evolution is simply a theory, just a theory. Its not really it doesnt meet my standards of scientific proof so i dont have to take a strong position on it, but his approach to kind of the big picture of culture and education was very different, very nonfundamentalist. He wanted to find a way to accommodate christian theology to new, scientific discoveries and he thought that churchrun colleges, protestant colleges could continue to teach the humanities and theology. They would shape students souls. But he thought it would be fine for Secular University faculty to take over the sciences and professional education. When it came to scripture, burwash had ideas about how christians should read the bible. So the view that john wesley had was that understanding gods will requires bringing scripture into conversation with Church Tradition, reason and personal religious experience is known as the wesleyan quad rilateral and it had the potential to be a more moderate guide for thinking about these things. Burwash was also part of a british north American Intellectual world that remained more connected with the mother country, with the United Kingdom and the homeland of darwin, of course, and this is really important. Canadian christian intellectuals had more relationship personal relationships in britain, and they more frequently studied there. They had more institutional links with british denomination and even though, geographically speaking, theyre just as far, right . From what was happening, the universities of the United Kingdom and germany as American Protestants were, culturally speaking, canadian christians felt much closer. So they experienced Something Like Charles Darwins discoveries, less as a Foreign Invasion and more as a gradual development and their own intellectual culture and this is another reason why canadian canadian protestantism didnt fracture to the same degree and fundamentalists didnt gain the same kind of authority. So burwash and warfield shared some of the same training and had the same fundamental goals. Really, they both wanted to defend the authority of christianity in the modern world, but they approached that goal very differently and in canada, it was the burwash types and the moderate, the more compromise minded christians, willing to rethink their ideas about scripture and perhaps to accommodate new science. It was these guys who retained control over main street evangelicalism, while in america the more aggressive stance that we see in warfield came to be more influential. Now ive been describing fundamentalism as this really intellectual thing so far. Really obsessed with dogma and scientific knowledge, and in some ways, it was that, but there is another movement in conservative protestantism at this time, that will lapse somewhat with fundamentalism and its really its own thing and thats the Holiness Movement. Heres a couple of images of the Holiness Camp back in the day and today. Now you may recall my talk of holiness from the early parts of the semester. Holiness beliefs emerged mainly in methodist circles in britain and in north america among christians who got really interested in the holy spirits work in a christian after conversion, what they called the Second Blessing. This feeling of spiritual power and the total suppression of sin by the holy spirit. John wesley had argued that since scripture demands that humans fulfill gods law. The state of what he called christian profession must be attainable even if it takes us our whole lives and you remember that what you read of wesley. Holiness christians really focused on this and they took wesleys idea and they kind of ran with it and said, well, sin must not be inevitable then. It must be possible to totally suppress it in the course of this Second Blessing and they came to hold this experience of a Second Blessing as being conversion because it could bring to you what they called entire sanctification. Gods grace can free one, not just of the perversion of original sin, but the tendency to commit individual sins. So they had a much higher view of what the holy spirit could do. The Holiness Movement is kind of our bridge to the last big group i want to talk about and thats the pentecostals and i think it can be easy at this point to lose track of where we are in sort of the family tree of protestantism. Lets refresh our memory. Maybe youre maintaining a growing family tree in our notebook. That would be a great thing to do, and lets go and start with the church of england, right . Church of england. Remember the church of england as kind of lots of influences and it has the reformed influence and its got a little bit of lutheranism and of course, it retains a lot of catholicism and down here because we have to think about wesleys background, lets remember the piut ants and the moravians. Remember how they were for wesley. Remember, wesley was himself a church of england minister. The Holiness Movement comes out of methodism for the most part. There are some other varieties of holiness christianity, but for the most part, methodist and then this is where we are now. Now were talking about pentecostals. Who are the radical left wing of holiness protestantism, okay . This is what it looks like. At least in a general way. Now, pentecostal revival first came to the attention of kind of a Mainstream Press in 1906 when newspapers started covering the azusa street revival. Here is an image of the mission on azusa street in los angeles. The Los Angeles Times reporting these new tongues and new fanatics are breaking loose. Wild seen last night on azusa street, gurgle of wordless talk of a sister. What is this bewildered reporter talking about . All right. Well pentecostal heed hers been traveling the country for a few years at this point. When an africanamerican hotel waiter, a guy named William Seymour picked up this message of the radical power of the holy spirit to work in you and through you. Hed gotten this from a revivalist. He heard teaching in houston and he traveled to los angeles and brought it with him. Now he probably wouldnt have been most peoples pick for likeliest e vafrjellisevangelis wasnt even raised as a protestant, but as a young man he had fallen in with the Holiness Movement and he felt called to preach, and like many, he almost died of smallpox and lost an eye and he believed that god yanked him back from the brink and wanted him to do this work. Seymour is second from the right in the front row and these were where his revivals were based initially. He came to l. A. With no money, no followers and he started holding prayer meetings at the house where he was staying and pretty soon he was drawing huge audiences to the front porch. So big that they had to move to this abandoned warehouse on azusa street, and every day for weeks there were revival meetings kind of happening off and on at this mission house. People came to sing, to hear sermons and hear testimonies from those who said they had been baptized in the spirit. Thats the phrase, and if you had gone, sort of looked like no revival you would have ever seen, i think. People were just losing control of their bodies. Gyrating, dancing, falling to the floor, slaying in the spirit and laying on hands and claiming to heal people of all kinds of illnesses and states of paralysis and other extreme physical ailments and you would have heard them speaking in tongues. A werd babble of tongues. Some early witnesses said they heard people actually speaking in Foreign Languages that they had never studied. This is called xenolalia. You have the term on your handout. Xenolalia. Although reports were very rare and have never been confirmed by scholars. Midwest of the time you would have heard what theologians call glossolalia which is spontaneous sounds that dont resemble human speech. Not a recognizable language. Has anyone here witnessed people speaking in tongues . Heard it . Yes . What was the context . It was like a church event and they just were overcome with the spirit. And were people at this church event were they speaking really loudly or emotionally or was it a calmer, quieter kind of speech . Ive seen people do it quietly, but most are loud. Almost as a message to the congregation and sometimes a more private experience. Has anyone else witnessed this or participated in it . Yeah . The church i used to go to the pastor is pretty loud and hed start to speak in tongues and it was viewed as if he only had the power to do so. Like he was doing it, no one else would speak in tongues except the pastor. He would do it as part of his sermon . Thats interesting. Its a way to exert authority the holy spirit working through him and the indwelling of the holy spirit in you is an echo of the Second Chapter of the book of acts in which the holy spirit descended on christs apostles like a mighty wind at the feast of pentecost called pentecost because its 50 thais after the jewish holiday of passover and according to scripture, the purpose of this was to empower the apostles with the gift of speaking in Foreign Languages that they could go to the ends of the earth and convert more people to christs message. Now, pretty much this was a thing that christians thought of as limited to the new testament. There were exceptions. There had been some reports of speaking in tongues before. Brigham young, the great mormon leader claimed to have spoken in tongues. It might have happened during the second great awakening. Its hard to say, but it took on a new significant now at the beginning of the 20th century. Pentecostals believe that the spiritual gifts mentioned in the new testament, not just tongue, but the gift of healing, for example, as well had been restored to earth because christ was about to return. They had a real sense of the imminence of the end times and so this was gods one last appeal to humans to convert before the terrible events of prophecy began to unfold. This revival on azusa street coincided and the front page was april 18, 1906, which was the date of the great San Francisco earthquake, a totally devastating earthquake that for believers really drove home the point that god wanted this revival to be taken very seriously. These early revivals, too, you may have noticed it in this picture racially integrated in their leadership and the people who came to worship and these azusa street revivals. This is los angeles at the turn of the century, booming, full of immigrants and full of migrants coming from all parts of the country as well as parts of asia. So you had blacks and whites and latinos and asians worshipping together at a time when the vast majority of religious events were segregated. You had women disproportionately represented. Women coming forward, testifying preaching, participating in these Healing Services, breaking all kinds of social taboos. Tell me, how do you think other christians reacted to reports of these revivals . What would be your guess when they read these newspaper reports of what was happening on azusa street . Yes, in the back. Im sure they probably thought it was some false form of christianity and the racial integration and the role of women was, like, not the original intention of the church, like crazy people. Absolutely. That was a dominant reaction, a sense that both in the breaking of the social taboos, these christians were defying gods rule of how humans should associate and all of this new testament, miraculous stuff they thought was just not believable, this cannot be. This was not something that respectable christians did. It had to be the work of charlatans or the work of the devil. Pentecostalism, for much of its early history was totally scandalous even to fundamentalists, even to most fundamentalists. If we did a diagram of pentecostals and fundamentalists there would, of course, be some overlap because these pentecostals were doctrinally conservative and they were founding their own churches and all of that, but fundamentalists wanted nothing to do with this pentecostal holy roller stuff. No way. By 1920, pentecostal revival had spread to every inhabited continent. It remains today the biggest and most vibrant strain of protestant christianity in the world. Although despite the hopes for unity and equality, by 1920, pentecostals, too, had started breaking into different sects that disagreed about doctrine and they had begun to really conform to the mainstream practices of racial segregation and rolling back opportunities for women. However, now i want to tell you about a famous pen costal woman. One of the early e vafrjellists was a woman named amy mcpherson. She was canadian and made most of her career in california. Shed been converted at a revival as a young girl. She married young and she really tried to play the role of dutiful housewife. She accompanied her housewife who was a missionary to china, he became ill and died very soon after they arrived and she was increasingly feeling that god was speaking to her to preach, so she came back to north america and got remauried. There is the top left with who i think was her first husband and she good to married and started touring north america preaching at revivals and writing in the lower left her, her gospel car which was emblazoned with slogans, jesus is coming soon. Get ready. Her second husband wasnt crazy about this. He didnt want to play second fiddle to her. He wrote her letters demanding that she take care of the house and act like other women and pretty soon he got fed up and filed for divorce, so she was on her own for a time. She drove around with her mother. She was so determined that when the car got stuck in the mud she got out and wrapped her clothes from her suitcase around the wheels to gain traction as they continued crisscrossing canada and the United States. She was a little bit like lorenzo dowel or George Whitfield in just having a genius for winning an audience. There was a story i love about her. She was preaching in a small town in ontario. Shed been preaching at this church for a couple of nights and no one was showing up so she was discouraged and she went out to the town square and she put a chair in the middle of the square and she stood silently in prayer. It makes you feel kind of awkward when im doing that, right . It made onlookers feel kind of awkward, too, and they started gathering around her and after around a half hour watching this woman someone reaches out and touches her arm and she sprang to life and she said come with me, people, come with me and she leads them back to the church and they came and she preached and it was the start of a great revival. She had this sense of how people would respond, and how to maybe get them to evovercome their skepticisms. She had two children by this point and she brought her broug family, her mother came along, to settle in los angeles where she decided to make her career. This was after she did things like go up in an airplane to drop leaflets advertising her revival in san diego. Really, she was on top of sort of the cuttingedge of technology and things that would wow people. She built the huge angelos temple. It was one of the first mega churches. She held three services a day, seven days a week. On sunday afternoons, there would be a line stretching for two blocks with people eager to get in for the evening service. She had a huge Radio Ministry at a time when that was just becoming a thing and her church evolved into its own protestant denomination. The International Church of the four square gospel. Its a reference to the four fold ministry of christ as savier, baptister, healer and coming king. Meaning, second coming. Now mcfer son is full of contradictions. She was all about condemning mainstream, sinful culture. She condemned theaters, movies, but she borrowed a lot of hollywood techniques. She would walk on stage carrying a bouquet of roses to great applause and was famous for her illustrated sermons which were giant broadway productions. This is the inside of the temple and here is an image of one her illustrated sermons, costumes, choirs, where she and her colleagues would act out bible stories, often there were live animals. At least once she drove a motorcycle on stage. Her critics dismissed it as religious vaudeville but it was effective. She was in her pentecostal theology, there was room for healing. She held Healing Services frequently. But its interesting, the reports of her own comments on this make it clear that she was pretty nervous about doing this. Especially when she did it for a huge audience in a los angeles stadium. She was worried that, you know, the person would not get up from their wheelchair. But often enough, often enough to sustain her credibility, as a vehicle for the holy spirit, people did have some sort of evidence response to her healing. And there was a museum that she kept at her church of the canes and the crutches and the wheelchairs that people had left behind. Its hard to know what to make of this. From the perspective of a professional secular historian, i think its important to take it very seriously and to recognize that Something Real happens in that space and that encounter between mcfpherson an the people shes healing. She had a deep awareness of the respectability problem that pentecostalism had and she wanted this powerful vision of the holy spirit but she wanted to keep it reined in. As she tried to maximum her mainstream appeal, if someone got a little too carried away, speaking in tongue in the aisle of her revival, she would have them removed. She wanted to appeal to a wider range of people. She was also contradictory on the questions of social justice and human suffering. She always taught that spiritual healing comes first but during the great depression, her church opened up a food pantry that served all people, at a time where most charities in los angeles did not serve any immigrants. On race, she was full of contradictions. She preached to mixed audiences but she also sometimes endorsed the klan and they endorsed her. So its very hard to know what to make of her. Here is a one of her characteristic outfits. She dressed as a Florence Nightingale character. Here is her mansion built like a castle. We could call her a fundamentalist. I suppose you could call her a feminist. Its very hard to wedge her into boxes like modernist, antimodernist, because she crosses all of these lines. And shes interesting to us because she reflects these broader patterns weve been studying. Like lee, here is a woman claiming through divine inspiration a source of authority that lets her do an end run around the men, the men in the media as well as in the churches. She was a masterful selfpromoter who was rewarded by americas religious marketplace like all of the evangelical entrepreneurs weve met. And she shows us the way in which fundamentalists and pentecostals could save worldly sins but they were not cordoned off from mainstream culture. They were embedded in that culture. It was mcpherson, was she an insider or outsider . She was a little of both. Lets summarize this with three big points about fundamentalists and pentecostals. Between 1880 and 1920 fundamentalists started to draw on that framework of commonsense realism and biblical inerrancy to form a movement. And many broke away and founded their own churches and their own subculture of organizations with this militant posture of resistance. Second, the movement was stronger, the polarization was more severe in america than in canada because of the strength of reformed churches, because of revivalism, and the relative cultural isolation from europe. And last we can understand the holiness and pentecostal movements also like fundamentalism as reactions against modernity that pushed aside the authority of reason in favor of direct personal contact with divine and proof of that contact in the form of tongues, healing and other miracles. But we should also see these as thoroughly modern movements embedded in mainstream culture and very, very savvy about using it. Fundamentalists and pentecostals were both insiders and outsiders, you know, profiphets crying in the wilderness as well as savvy entrepreneurs and that paradox is part of the lasting success, i think, of these movements. Thats it for today. Weeknights this month on American History tv were featuring the contenders, our series that looks at 14 president ial candidates who lost the election but had a lasting effect on u. S. Politics. Tonight we feature eugene debs who was a fivetime president ial candidate for the socialist party. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern and enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights and u. S. President s to 9 11. Thanks for your patience and for logging into class. With most campuses closed due to the impact of the coronavirus, watch professors transfer teaching to a virtual setting to engage with their students. But reagan met him halfway, reagan encouraged him, reagan supported him. Freedom of the press, madison called it freedom of the use of the press and it is indeed to print things and publish things. Its not for a freedom for what we refer to now institutionally as the press. Lectures in history on cspan3 every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Lectures in history is available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Youre watching American History tv. Cspan3 created by americas Television Companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Good evening and welcome to the third installment of cspan3 the contenders series. We look at the life,