Prof. Worthen let us begin. My name is molly worthen. We are at the university of North Carolina at chapel hill and todays lecture is on the history of american fundamentalism and pentecostalism. I will try to answer three Big Questions today. Number one, what is protestant fundamentalism . What does the term mean . Second, how did fundamentalists relate to mainstream culture . And third, why has fundamentalism been so much more influential in the United States than in any other society in the western world . I am curious, is fundamentalism, fundamentalists are these terms that you hear today . Do you know people who call themselves fundamentalists or use this label . I can see some nodding. Any examples . Is that how they describe groups that do terrorist attack . It is a term that you hear more often in the context of islam. What about here, among American Christian groups . I am from up north. And many of the christians down here we call fundamentalist christians. Often as a perjorative. Prof. Worthen that lines up with my own experience. There are exceptions. Proud,certainly met independent baptists that claim the term fundamentalist but generally, it seems to be used as an insult. It is not a label that most christians would want applied to themselves. I think that the history of that connotation, a kind of negative sense in which we hear the word today, it really became crystallized in one particular historical episode, and that is 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. Now, the scopes trial has a certain status in popular culture. You are probably at least vaguely aware of what it involved, but let me tell you the basic facts of the trial. The state of tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of the theory of evolution in tennessee public high school. The aclu, the American Civil Liberties union, wanted to challenge the constitutionality of this law. And so they put together and financed a case. They recruited a Tennessee High School teacher, a substitute science teacher, a young 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. To get him in trouble so he would be charged with this crime and it would go to trial. That is exactly what happened. This turned out to be an amazing publicity opportunity for the little town of dayton, tennessee. 200 reporters descended on the town in july, 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 you would have seen trained chimpanzees playing on the courthouse lawn. Billboards featuring a picture of a chimp drinking a local variety of soda pop. 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. On the Prosecutions Team was William Jennings bryan, the great commoner, the populist democrat who had run for president three times. He had been Woodrow Wilsons secretary of state and was known as the 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 that was Clarence Darrow. He was known for his bold politics. Here he is in his characteristically flush making his opening arguments. Here is darrow and bryant. Here is a sample of the street scene, this is a table set up with antievolutionary tracts. Both the sides saw this as an opportunity. The aclu wanted to challenge the law on the grounds of academic freedom. That was the tact that they wanted to take. But Clarence Darrow veered in a different direction. He decided to put traditional religion on trial. And he summoned to the stand for cross examination, William Jennings bryant himself, which was very unorthodox. For one of the attorneys for the prosecution to be summoned for cross examination. Darrow wanted to make a great fool of this great statesman. He wanted to showcase the conflict between science and religion. He asked William Jennings bryant questions like, how could joshua possibly have compelled the sun to stand still . Or, can you tell us the exact date of the flood . And bryant did his best to remain firm in defending his use, though in many cases he did not really have a clear and sharp answer to rebut darrow. I will say that bryant refused to defend the 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 kind of came off as an old man a bit out of his depth. The judge ended up throwing out the testimony and in fact most of the testimony for the defense as irrelevant to the question of whether or not this High School Teacher had broken the law. It was pretty clear that he had. In the end, the jury found scopes guilty and he was ordered to pay a fine. Although the commission was later thrown out on a technicality. Now, inside the courthouse, the crowd was definitely on bryants side. On the side of the prosecution, cheering for bryant. 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, a guy named hl mencken, was dispatched to cover the trial and he wrote some incredibly searing, mocking reports about the people that he met there. I just want to read an excerpt of one of his reports. The net effect of Clarence Darrows closing arguments yesterday seemed to be the same as if he had bawled it up a rain spout in the interior of afghanistan. The morons in the audience when it was over simply hissed. Bryan has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. , indeeds earliest days come his chief strength has been among the focus of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. His nonsense is there a deal of sense. His chief strength had been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. They rejoiced like pilgrims sporting in the river of jordan. Jordan. Holy cow. Matter what you might think of hl menckens ideology, key had a certain genius for comic condescension. And reports like this had powerful effects. 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 whennada pam canada, the presbyterians, the congregationalists, and the methodist joined together to make one big denomination. And it was this lovely , historical coincidence that it happened at the very same time that American Protestantism was so clearly polarizing and breaking apart. Very handy. A give you it gives you one date to give you to memorize for the final. And it showed you that the divergent set of paths that canadian and American Protestantism was heading down. We have to ask, what are the historical reasons for the very different character of American Protestant conflict . Who are these fundamentalists . Who are we really talking about when we use this label . First, we have 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 very historically precise way. Fundamentalists, i am giving you a definition now, fundamentalist s are conservative protestants who militantly opposed, militantly opposed. Ce is important. New ideas about the bible, science, and society. And often, although not always, broke away to found their own churches, schools, and religious organizations. Militant protestants that really opposed in an aggressive way the new changes and in many cases they broke away and found their own groups. Now, we can talk about an organized fundamentalist movement from roughly 1900 to these30, when conservatives were fighting brutally to retain control of the old, established, northern denominations that we call the main line. Now, this week, you are reading a famous sermon by a liberal baptist preacher. I think that gives you some sense of the conflict. Here he is. He appeared on the cover of time magazine. I think that gives you a sense of the cultural status of liberal princes of the pulpit back them. The First Presbyterian church in manhattan is where he originally gave this sermon. Shall the fundamentalist win. When you read it, i think you will see that his sermon was not a fight over doctrine, at least not explicitly. You might need to talk with your classmates about whether actually that is what was going on beneath it. I think at least on the surface, his approach was very different from Clarence Darrows. Essentially, he says if a person is a true liberal, they should have no problem with other christians believing, say, that god created the universe in six days even if they themselves do not happen to believe that. He says the problem with these fundamentalists is not their theology, they can believe what they like, the problem is their beliefs about church. The fact that they think liberals like him do not belong in any truly christian church. This sermon was a sensation. His brother ran the Rockefeller Foundation for 30 years. And the foundation funded the nationwide distribution of this sermon as a pamphlet. So it had much wider reach by direct mail than just the people who happened to hear it preached. But i have been reading his autobiography and it is really interesting. He gave this sermon and he called it a failure even though it was really widely read. To him, it failed in his main hope, which was to stop the fighting and restore harmony. Maybe that is a bit naive, really, thinking about it. But it is true that after about 1930, the fundamentalist movement as an organized movement disintegrates. The conservatives basically lost their bid to control the mainline churches, which is why we so often say no the liberal mainline, its how people typically refer to those denominations. Fundamentalism did not go away , though. At this point, we can describe fundamentalism as maybe not an organized movement but as a set of networks. A subculture. Fundamentalists built their own world of bible colleges, denominations, prophecy conferences, anticommunism crusades, lady ministries. A really powerful network of religious and political groups that for quite a long time, i mean maybe up until the 1960s and 1970s, was not really on the mainstream medias radar. It seems like after the scopes trial, fundamentalists had crawled into a hole somewhere and never appeared from the perspective of the average reporter at the New York Times or Something Like that. In fact, fundamentalism was growing into a powerful subculture. One more point about terms. In these years, 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 instead to mean a conservative protestant who is still doctrinally awfully fundamentalist but is not so militant about it. I am talking about people like billy graham. And evangelical was someone who wanted to engage mainstream culture, maybe collaborate a bit more with other christians, rather than separating from the world in an extreme way or picking a lot of fights over doctrine. That is what evangelical comes to mean and it is still how it is used today, i believe. This then is a big arc of the fundamentalist movement in our story. I want to turn briefly to the matter of theology, and say a little bit more about what fundamentalists believed and what they believe today. Fundamentalism looked slightly different in Different Church traditions. A baptist fundamentalist would believe slightly different things, worship differently than a mennonite fundamentalist, but they are called fundamentalist because they did tend to share a set of fundamentals. We can make some broad comments about that. They tended to have a pietistic concern for personal holiness. For good behavior. Many of them came in some way out of the puritan tradition. And retained that puritan combination of interest in rigorous doctrine, systematic theology with pietism. That personal feeling of the spirit. Lots and lots of fundamentalists, though by no means all of them, were also premillennialists in their view of the end times. 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 book of revelation and eventually after the battle of armageddon and all of that jazz, the kingdom of the saints. We can move down to a more basic level of fundamentals. You wouldve had some disagreements among fundamentalists on things like 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 is so handy. The fundamentals. This comes from a list drawn up by some conservative presbyterians in 1910 who wanted to figure out what are the most important things that we cannot cannot compromise on . M miracles. A belief that the miracles were reported in the bible really did happen. A for atonement. 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 handy moral example for us. He really did take our place on the cross and die for our sins. R for resurrection. He was actually, bodily resurrected. V, christ was born of a virgin. In for inerrancy. The doctrine of biblical inerrancy, meaning the bible is totally without error 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 could call them the thinking mans 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 warfield, who was a scholar at princeton. You are reading an excerpt from one of his sermons this week. He was born in 1851. He was the son of a welltodo Cattle 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 familys 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 modernism by defending this doctrine known as biblical inerrancy. And we need to spend a little time with the idea of inerrancy. This idea that everything in the bible is true, no matter what scholars might say, that scripture has no error in it. The basic idea is very old. Christians have always been concerned to defend the bible as a perfect source of truth. But inerrancy as warfield understood it, and 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 what is going on. To tell the story of the doctrine of inerrancy, i need to backtrack from where we are in this course back to the early, mid17th century. Bear with me. In these years, a couple of generations after the start of the protestant reformation, a group of protestant theologians found themselves in a bit of a bind, surrounded on the intellectual battlefield. And i am talking primarily about thinkers in the reformed tradition. Theologians that followed john calvin and those guys. On the one hand, they had to deal with the scientists and the philosophers of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment who are using new scientific methods to raise awkward questions about the bibles accounts of the miraculous and supernatural doctrines. And on the other hand, they had to face the great theologians of the catholic counterreformation. These scholastic thinkers who were annoyingly adept at logically, systematically picking apart protestant arguments about authority. These protestant thinkers were caught in the middle and they responded by essentially trying to turn their enemies weapons back upon them by creating a highly rationalistic, 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. It is not clear that it is. But these conservatives said that if that is true, it follows logically that gods revelation is perfect and unchanging as well. Not just in matters of salvation but in every scientific and historical matter from the scope of the flood to the most granular details of ancient israels politics. So, what this means is that religious truths and scientific truths are the same. The bible is equally reliable on both matters. Benjamin warfields mentor at princeton, a theologian named charles hodge, had a great way of putting this. He said the bible is a storehouse of facts. Think about that phrase. A storehouse of facts. And a theologians job is to arrange and harmo