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9. “We’re All Evangelicals Now”: The Existential and Backward Historiography of Twentieth- Century Evangelicalism
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9 “We’re All Evangelicals Now” The Existential and Backward Historiography of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism Barry Hankins The vast majority of the historiography of twentieth-century American evangelicalism has been produced since 1980, and that historiography has been done backward. Rather than several monographs written on particular aspects of evangelicalism followed by a synthesis that brings the parts together and makes sense of the whole,recent evangelical historiography began with the synthesis, then saw the details filled in later. Moreover, as illustrated in this essay, the vast majority of scholars who focus their attention on fundamentalism and evangelicalism are either evangelicals or former evangelicals .Both types seem to work existentially in an effort to understand the subculture that produced them. The Marsden Paradigm The historiographical synthesis was George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925, which first appeared in 1980. It was not only the most important book published on the history of evangelicalism but also one of the most important books ever published in the field of religion and America. Marsden defined evangelicalism and fundamentalism,setting the stage for the flood of books that appeared over the next quarter century.Published by Oxford University Press, Marsden’s book moved the historical study of fundamentalism and evangelicalism firmly into the mainstream of historical scholarship.1 The groundwork for Marsden’s book had been laid in 1970 by Ernest Sandeen ’s The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism. Sandeen shifted the interpretation away from the view that fundamentalism was a last-gasp attempt to preserve a dying way of life. Instead, Sandeen took the ideas of fundamentalism seriously and attempted to account for Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 197 the fact that the movement was flourishing in the final third of the twentieth century. For this reason, Sandeen’s book was immensely valuable historiographically , but it also served as Marsden’s foil. Sandeen argued that fundamentalism developed primarily from dispensational premillennialism as articulated by conservatives who adopted the Princetonian doctrine of inerrancy .2 Marsden countered that Sandeen had found one root of fundamentalism and mistook it for the whole tree. Marsden argued to the satisfaction of nearly everyone that there were several roots of fundamentalism, among them nineteenth-century evangelicalism, Scottish Common Sense Realism, revivalism, Holiness impulses, pietism, Reformed confessionalism, Baptist traditionalism,dispensational premillennialism,and Baconian science.In the face of intellectual and cultural change, these elements coalesced as the militant defense of Protestant orthodoxy against theological modernism and the cultural changes modernism endorsed.Marsden’s account helped explain the broad coalition of traditional conservatives that existed before fundamentalism became militant in the 1920s. Before the flurry of dissertations could be completed, revised, and published to elaborate on Marsden’s argument,he burnished his own work in the 1987 book Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism .3 This work is underappreciated because it can be mistaken as merely an institutional history of Fuller. In the book Marsden showed how a segment of the militant fundamentalism that emerged after the Scopes trial of 1925 gave way to neoevangelicalism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neoevangelicals were essentially nonseparatist, nonmilitant, more culturally engaged heirs of early twentieth-century fundamentalism. Marsden had prepared the way for this argument in the conclusion to Fundamentalism and American Culture , where he said that by 1960 only the most militant evangelicals still called themselves fundamentalists, and most of them were dispensationalists. Although Marsden’s interpretation of evangelicalism has hardly been revised , it was directly challenged, largely because the interpretation worked quite well for the Reformed wing of evangelicalism, but not as well for Holiness Arminian evangelicals. The 1980s saw a spirited debate, primarily between Donald Dayton and Marsden. Dayton emphasized the Holiness and Pentecostal wing of evangelicalism,arguing that Marsden’s theological interpretation should give way to an understanding that sees the essence of evangelicalism as its social and political radicalism,not its theological particularities .In contrast to what he called Marsden’s“presbyterian paradigm,”Dayton posited a “pentecostal paradigm.” In this view “evangelicalism is related to the rest of Christianity more as the Pentecostal or Charismatic movements [are]—that is as a specific and modern form of Christianity that disrupts the 198 Barry Hankins traditional and conservative churches—and less as the orthodoxy from which the mainstream churches have departed.” Dayton’s analysis draws on Marxist categories in which key identifying components of evangelicalism are not theological ideas but rather class awareness. The true evangelical spirit, for Dayton, has not...