American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton (review)

In American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, a highly readable historical corrective to George M. Marsden’s classic book Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980), Matthew Avery Sutton defines an American fundamentalist as an evangelical who is worried about something, namely, the end of the world. For Sutton, millennialism, not anti-modernism, distinguishes the fundamentalist evangelical movement. Sutton argues that fundamentalists’ premillennial dispensationalist focus on the end times paradoxically spurred them to engage the present world around them. Fundamentalists reconciled the apparent contradiction between the apocalyptic inevitability of world history and the personal agency of political reform in their biblical mandate to “occupy” until Jesus returns (p. 5). Paying close attention to this often overlooked biblical mandate of American fundamentalism, Sutton demonstrates how the call to occupy entailed a “new kind of politics, one infused with absolute moral stakes” (p. 4).

Employing a wide range of printed sources, including sermons, written correspondence, periodicals, and newspaper accounts, American Apocalypse contributes most directly to the historiography of American religions, revising long-standing historical narratives of fundamentalism as otherworldly and politically disengaged during the years between the 1925 Scopes trial and the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s. By contrast, Sutton convincingly demonstrates that World War I is much more important than the Scopes trial for understanding the development of fundamentalism, since “[t]he war pushed the premillennialist-liberal battle beyond questions of theology and on to questions of lived religion” (p. xiii). In eleven chapters, Sutton offers an alternative historical chronology that tracks how, over the course of the twentieth century, American fundamentalists transformed an obscure Christian tradition of millennialism into a cultural practice of using the Bible to decode history.

What emerges is a story of political connections between early-twentieth-century fundamentalists and post–World War II evangelicals. Historians generally disjoin these two groups, emphasizing that postwar evangelicals distinguished themselves from prewar fundamentalists. But Sutton argues that they shared similar political tactics, evidenced in their continued concern for the end of the world. The major difference between the two groups, he asserts, is that postwar evangelicals were more politically successful than their fundamentalist forebears. To understand the political influence of moral evangelicals in the late twentieth century, then, is to understand the cultural frames of apocalyptic fundamentalists of the early twentieth century, most clearly displayed in their anti-Catholic and anti–New Deal end of days prophetic witness.

While Sutton offers a national story of fundamentalism, southern historians should find much of interest in this book. The book primarily deals with “elite white fundamentalists and evangelicals,” but unlike previous surveys of American fundamentalism, Sutton addresses the racial views of white fundamentalists and evangelicals, beyond more than passing mention (p. xi). He also describes how African American Protestants engaged with apocalypticism while often distinguishing themselves from white fundamentalists. Many of the sources and subjects in Sutton’s discussion of race engage the South. Sutton also addresses political themes related to the South, showing how fundamentalist John Roach Straton used anti-Catholic fears and Prohibition platitudes to encourage southerners to vote Republican in the 1928 presidential campaign. Among many things the book does well, it uses the apocalyptic theme of American fundamentalism to show continuity, not just within the religious movement, but also across national politics. In doing so, American Apocalypse helps southern historians better understand the role of religion in the regional restructuring of political patterns, showing how such restructuring began earlier in the twentieth century than some scholars have anticipated.