Download or read book Social Thought in American Fundamentalism 1918 1933 written by Robert E. Wenger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when "fundamentalist" evokes an image of a militant social reactionary, it is important to examine the original nature of historical American fundamentalism, from which the term originated. Rejecting as simplistic the stereotypes of fundamentalism in social, political, regional, economic, or psychological categories, this study argues that in the 1920s it was a complex social composite unified by common theological concerns. Among all the social issues confronting Americans in the rapidly changing and uncertain 1920s, fundamentalists reached a consensus only on those that had a direct connection with their biblical faith. The only theme that approximated their theological agreement was their nationalism, and only to the extent that it added urgency to their task of saving America from spiritual ruin. Even in this fundamentalists differed among themselves as to how biblical truth should affect the nation. An examination of fundamentalists' viewpoints toward the intellect, the minorities, and social reform further demonstrates that their common denominator was not a set of cultural characteristics or ideas. It was, rather, a biblically based core of Christian theology. A loose alliance by nature, fundamentalism would have had no cohesiveness at all apart from this core. While fundamentalists by no means escaped cultural influence, the "fundamentals of the faith" shaped their view of culture far more than culture shaped their theology. In a generation when the religious faith of many was becoming little more than "the American way of life," they purported to speak to their contemporaries from an external authority--a divinely-inspired Bible.
Download or read book Social Thought in American Fundamentalism 1918 1933 written by Robert Elwood Wenger and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Thought in American Fundamentalism 1918 1933 written by Robert E. Wenger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when fundamentalist evokes an image of a militant social reactionary, it is important to examine the original nature of historical American fundamentalism, from which the term originated. Rejecting as simplistic the stereotypes of fundamentalism in social, political, regional, economic, or psychological categories, this study argues that in the 1920s it was a complex social composite unified by common theological concerns. Among all the social issues confronting Americans in the rapidly changing and uncertain 1920s, fundamentalists reached a consensus only on those that had a direct connection with their biblical faith. The only theme that approximated their theological agreement was their nationalism, and only to the extent that it added urgency to their task of saving America from spiritual ruin. Even in this fundamentalists differed among themselves as to how biblical truth should affect the nation. An examination of fundamentalists' viewpoints toward the intellect, the minorities, and social reform further demonstrates that their common denominator was not a set of cultural characteristics or ideas. It was, rather, a biblically based core of Christian theology. A loose alliance by nature, fundamentalism would have had no cohesiveness at all apart from this core. While fundamentalists by no means escaped cultural influence, the fundamentals of the faith shaped their view of culture far more than culture shaped their theology. In a generation when the religious faith of many was becoming little more than the American way of life, they purported to speak to their contemporaries from an external authority--a divinely-inspired Bible.
Download or read book Fundamentalism and American Culture written by George M. Marsden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-23 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many American's today are taking note of the surprisingly strong political force that is the religious right. Controversial decisions by the government are met with hundreds of lobbyists, millions of dollars of advertising spending, and a powerful grassroots response. How has the fundamentalist movement managed to resist the pressures of the scientific community and the draw of modern popular culture to hold on to their ultra-conservative Christian views? Understanding the movement's history is key to answering this question. 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. For Marsden, fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives; they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight. In Marsden's words (borrowed by Jerry Falwell), "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." 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. By the 1920s a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches and changing mores in the culture. Building on networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies, fundamentalists coalesced into a major protest movement that proved to have remarkable staying power. For this new edition, a major new chapter compares fundamentalism since the 1970s to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, looking particularly at the extraordinary growth in political emphasis and power of the more recent movement. Never has it been more important to understand the history of fundamentalism in our rapidly polarizing nation. Marsen's carefully researched and engrossing work remains the best way to do just that.
Download or read book Saving the Protestant Ethic written by Andrew Lynn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Going back to the Puritans, Protestant orientations to work and economics have shaped religious practice and wider American culture for several centuries. But not all strands of American Protestantism consistently yielded frameworks that elevated secular work to the highest echelons of spiritual significance. This book surveys the efforts of a religious movement within White Protestant Fundamentalism and their Neo-Evangelical progeny that steer tremendous resources and energy toward "making work matter to God." Today bearing the name the "Faith and Work movement," this effort puts on display the creative capacities of religious and lay leaders to adapt a faith system to the changing social-economic conditions of advanced capitalism. Building from the insights and theory of Max Weber, Saving the Protestant Ethic draws on archival research and interviews with movement leaders to survey and assess the surging number of new organizations, books, conferences, worship songs, seminary classes, vocational programming, and study groups promoting classically Protestant and Calvinist ideas of work and vocation with American Evangelicalism. Such efforts are traced back to early 20th century business leaders and theologically trained leaders who saw a desperate need for a new "work ethic" for religious laity occupying professional, managerial, and creative class work"--
Download or read book Ungodly Women written by Betty A. DeBerg and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As regards both academic historians and popular understandings since the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s, analysis of American fundamentalism has neglected a large body of literature about gender roles and social conventions. Betty A. DeBerg's groundbreaking study fills that important gap, analyzing the roots and character of fundamentalism in light of rapid changes and severe disruptions in gender-role ideology and actual social behavior in America between 1880 and 1930. Unlike interpreters such as George Marsden -- who has seen the contemporary Religious Right's concerns over feminism, abortion, and the breakdown of the family as recent developments -- DeBerg convincingly argues that these concerns were central in the "first wave of American fundamentalism."--Back cover.
Download or read book Fundamentalism written by Simon A. Wood and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-05-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays considering how global fundamentalism influences our understanding of modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution and more than a decade since the events of 2001, the time is right to examine what the discourse on fundamentalism has achieved and where it might head from here. In this volume editors Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt offer eleven interdisciplinary perspectives framed by the debate between advocates and critics of the concept of fundamentalism that investigate it with regard to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The essays are integrated through engagement with a common selection of texts on fundamentalism and a common set of questions about the utility and disadvantages of the term, its varied application by scholars of particular groups, and the extent to which the term can encompass a cross-cultural set of religious responses to modernity. Although the notion of fundamentalism as a global phenomenon dates from around 1980, the term itself originated in North American Protestantism approximately six decades earlier and acquired pejorative connotations within five years of its invention. Since the early 1990s, however, many scholars have endorsed the view that the notion of fundamentalism—as relying on literalist interpretations of the scriptures, firm commitment to patriarchy, or refusal to confine religious matters to the private sphere—facilitates our understanding of modern religion by enabling us to identify and label structurally analogous developments in different religions. Critics of the term have identified problems with it, above all that the idea of global fundamentalism confuses more than it clarifies and unjustifiably overlooks, downplays, or homogenizes difference more than it identifies a genuine homogeny. The editor's rigorous exploration of both the usefulness and the limitations of the concept make it an excellent counterpoint to the many books that have a great deal to say about the former and very little to say about the latter. It will also serve as an ideal text for religious studies, history, and anthropology courses that explore the complex interface between religion and modernity as well as courses on theory and method in religious studies.
Download or read book Antifundamentalism in Modern America written by David Harrington Watt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Harrington Watt's Antifundamentalism in Modern America gives us a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of analysis, and Watt scrutinizes the various political purposes that the concept has been made to serve. In 1920, the conservative Baptist writer Curtis Lee Laws coined the word "fundamentalists." Watt examines the antifundamentalist polemics of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Talcott Parsons, Stanley Kramer, and Richard Hofstadter, which convinced many Americans that religious fundamentalists were almost by definition backward, intolerant, and anti-intellectual and that fundamentalism was a dangerous form of religion that had no legitimate place in the modern world. For almost fifty years, the concept of fundamentalism was linked almost exclusively to Protestant Christians. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the establishment of an Islamic republic led to a more elastic understanding of the nature of fundamentalism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans became accustomed to using fundamentalism as a way of talking about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, as well as Christians. Many Americans came to see Protestant fundamentalism as an expression of a larger phenomenon that was wreaking havoc all over the world. Antifundamentalism in Modern America is the first book to provide an overview of the way that the fear of fundamentalism has shaped U.S. culture, and it will lead readers to rethink their understanding of what fundamentalism is and what it does.
Download or read book Fundamentalists in the Public Square written by Madison Trammel and published by Lexham Academic. This book was released on 2023-12-13 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A myth-busting work on fundamentalists and culture The Scopes Trial of 1925 is often regarded as a turning point in the history of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism. It is claimed that Scopes was a public relations defeat that sent fundamentalism into retreat from mainstream culture. In Fundamentalists in the Public Square: Evolution, Alcohol, and the Culture Wars after the Scopes Trial, Madison Trammel argues that such a characterization is misguided. Using documentary evidence from newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, Trammel shows that fundamentalists remained fully active in seeking to transform the culture for Christ, and they remained so through the rise of Billy Graham's ministry. Grounded in historical evidence, Fundamentalists in the Public Square offers a fresh take on the relationship between fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and the public square.
Download or read book The Scofield Bible written by R. Todd Mangum and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-12-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scofield Reference Bible was responsible for popularizing dispensational theology, eventually making dispensationalism the theology assumed by English-speaking Christians for much of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Pious Passion written by Martin Riesebrodt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For all who want to make sense of fundamentalism as a long-term consequence of the modern world, Pious Passion will be required reading. It is also enjoyable, abounding in cogent arguments set forth in lucid prose and supported by compelling examples."—Bruce B. Lawrence, author of Defenders of God "Riesebrodt's trenchant analysis brings the comparative study of religious activism to a new level of sophistication, exploring not only the ideological development of fundamentalist movements but also the changes in social structure that produced them. Pious Passion is a signal event in the modern social sciences, for it helps to establish a new academic field—the comparative study of fundamentalism."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of The New Cold War?
Download or read book Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans written by R. Laurence Moore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1987-12-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In light of the curious compulsion to stress Protestant dominance in America's past, this book takes an unorthodox look at religious history in America. Rather than focusing on the usual mainstream Protestant churches--Episcopal, Congregationalist, Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran--Moore instead turns his attention to the equally important "outsiders" in the American religious experience and tests the realities of American religious pluralism against their history in America. Through separate but interrelated chapters on seven influential groups of "outsiders"--the Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Christian Scientists, Millennialists, 20th-century Protestant Fundamentalists, and the African-American churches--Moore shows that what was going on in mainstream churches may not have been the "normal" religious experience at all, and that many of these "outside" groups embodied values that were, in fact, quintessentially American.
Download or read book American Evangelicalism written by Darren Dochuk and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this faith tradition as it has developed between the eighteenth century and the present. Moving through five sections, each centered around one of Marsden’s major books and the time period it represents, the volume explores different methodologies and approaches to the history of evangelicalism and American religion. Besides assessing Marsden’s illustrious works on their own terms, this collection’s contributors isolate several key themes as deserving of fresh, rigorous, and extensive examination. Through their close investigation of these particular themes, they expand the range of characters and communities, issues and ideas, and contingencies that can and should be accounted for in our historical texts. Marsden’s timeless scholarship thus serves as a launchpad for new directions in our rendering of the American religious past.
Download or read book Disseminating Darwinism written by Ronald L. Numbers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-12-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection of original essays focuses on the ways in which geography, gender, race, and religion influenced the reception of Darwinism in the English-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributions to this volume collectively illustrate the importance of local social, physical, and religious arrangements, while revealing that neither distance from Darwin's home at Down nor size of community greatly influenced how various regions responded to Darwinism. Essays spanning the world from Great Britain and North America to Australia and New Zealand explore the various meanings for Darwinism in these widely separated locales, while other chapters focus on the difference it made in the debates over evolution.
Download or read book The Dispensational Covenantal Rift written by R. Todd Mangum and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study explores how the fight between dispensationalists and covenant theologians started and how a unique dynamic of personalities and sociological factors enflamed it. Readers may be surprised to discover that even the terminology of "dispensationalists" and "covenant theologians" originated in the 1930s' disputes; that the majority of the original protagonists on both sides were Presbyterians; and that soteriology, rather than eschatology, was the original bone of contention between them. This study examines how two respective strands of fundamentalism came to identify one another as theological rivals as they each vied for position in their recently formed separatist bodies. The significance of disagreements over "dispensationalism" is explored in the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian and Bible Presbyterian churches. And then, as the debate traveled southward, the response of the PCUS is examined, with special attention given to the consummative reports of an ad hoc committee that found "dispensationalism" to be out of harmony with the Westminster doctrinal standards. Significant misunderstandings that impeded fruitful dialogue from the beginning are clarified, particularly those that have persisted most stubbornly to the present day. Perhaps most surprising of all, the reader will discover that nearly all of the original points of debate between dispensationalists and covenant theologians have since been resolved, as each side has honed its position in light of pertinent critiques. Why has this development gone almost unnoticed? This study suggests an answer, and proposes that understanding how the feud began may hold the key to rapprochement today.
Download or read book Strangers in Zion written by William Robert Glass and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This story has been virtually ignored by historians of fundamentalism and historians of religion in the South. Glass has written a history that fills a significant gap in the historical literature on fundamentalism and on religion in the American South. As such, he lays the groundwork for understanding the South's contribution to the growth of the religious right in second half of the twentieth-century."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Red Dynamite written by Carl R. Weinberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Red Dynamite, Carl R. Weinberg argues that creationism's tenacious hold on American public life depended on culture-war politics inextricably embedded in religion. Many Christian conservatives were convinced that evolutionary thought promoted immoral and even bestial social, sexual, and political behavior. The "fruits" of subscribing to Darwinism were, in their minds, a dangerous rearrangement of God-given standards and the unsettling of traditional hierarchies of power. Despite claiming to focus exclusively on science and religion, creationists were practicing politics. Their anticommunist campaign, often infused with conspiracy theory, gained power from the fact that the Marxist founders, the early Bolshevik leaders, and their American allies were staunch evolutionists. Using the Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a starting point, Red Dynamite traces the politically explosive union of Darwinism and communism over the next century. Across those years, social evolution was the primary target of creationists, and their "ideas have consequences" strategy instilled fear that shaped the contours of America's culture wars. By taking the anticommunist arguments of creationists seriously, Weinberg reveals a neglected dimension of antievolutionism and illuminates a source of the creationist movement's continuing strength. Thanks to generous funding from Indiana University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
