Abstract
Christian Fundamentalism in America: A Cultural History
David S. New
Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. Vi + 259 pp. $35.00
David S. New’s Christian Fundamentalism in America refutes any notion that the genre of providential history is extinct. “The history of America, as a religious nation, a nation ‘under God,’” the author writes, “begins in 1620 when a tiny vessel arrived at a new continent filled with brave souls seeking freedom and religious liberty” (4). Clearly, this is not a book that means to break new ground, to alter our perceptions of American religious life, or to complicate in any way the standard interpretations of the past. The Pilgrims “attributed the preservation of their numbers to the watchful care of their heavenly Father,” he writes,” and the Puritans laid the foundation “for what in the centuries to come would become the preeminent Christian nation” (10, 15).
New begins the story of fundamentalism in America with the Puritans, an odd, albeit defensible, choice. He curiously shrugs off the Puritans’ millenary petition to James I as ineffectual, neglecting to mention the King James Version, hardly an inconsequential byproduct of the petition, especially for fundamentalists. (The Fundamentals, whence the movement derived its name, a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915, do not appear in the narrative until page 117.) What makes New’s strategy defensible is that he wants to argue for a lineage, one that would presumably validate fundamentalism by linking it with earlier movements in American history. It’s not exactly a straight path between the Mayflower and Carl McIntire, but the author struggles to make the case, using millennialism as the connecting thread.
New’s survey is Anglocentric. His pantheon of heroes of the Great Awakening, for example, includes Jonathan Edwards, but not Gilbert Tennent or Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen. The Camisards, who were acutely apocalyptic, also fail to make the cut. The author is on surer footing when he reaches the nineteenth century, where he spends an inordinate amount of time on the Millerites (far more coverage than Charles Finney) and then turns to John Nelson Darby and the Princetonians—all fitting precursors of fundamentalism.
When New arrives at the Fundamentals, he expends little effort on the texts themselves, far less than he devoted to William Miller’s writings. William Jennings Bryan receives hagiographical treatment in the author’s account of the Scopes trial, and he dispatches the ensuing fifty years in a few paragraphs. New acknowledges the rise of the religious right, and he attributes current political divisions to “differing concepts of the millennium” (215). The final chapters celebrate the vitality of megachurches, homeschooling, and various fundamentalist institutions while castigating liberal theologians “who make no reference whatsoever to the Bible” (171).
By the time Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Jim Jones make their appearance, even New seems to realize that not all species of millennialism are benign. Here would be a good place to remind readers that Martin Luther thought the Book of Revelation did not belong in the canon, or to introduce the writings of Elaine Pagels, but New resists any secondary authority after about the mid-1970s, preferring sources like Perry Miller, Sydney Ahlstrom, and Whitney Cross. In classic fundamentalist fashion, New closes with an altar call. “If the concept of the American millennium could forge a new independent nation two centuries ago,” he writes, “they should be able to do so now” (215).