Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective by Lawrence Kaplan Read Free Book Online Page B

for revivals, but they expanded the fundamentalist infrastructure, founding magazines, Bible colleges, and summer camps. Some joined Rev. Charles Fuller of "The Old Time Revival Hour" in making effective use of radio. Cosmopolitan intellectuals, many of whom had moved to the left, paid scant attention to such prosaic activities. Rather, they focused on Winrod and his fellow far-right activists whom they usually regarded as native fascists. Nowhere was the exaggerated fear of a domestic fascist triumph greater than among New York's liberals and radicals. In the context of this Brown Scare, fundamentalists looked like a serious national threat instead of a perplexing local annoyance.
Cosmopolitan clichés about fundamentalistsoriginally disseminated by debunkers during the 1920s and by the political left during the 1930s and 1940swere incorporated into social science during the 1950s. We return, then, to city college's noted alumni, Professors Bell, Lipset, and Glazer who, along with many other prominent post-World War II intellectuals, were nurtured as young men in the political culture of the New York left (currently immortalized in countless bitter, sweet, and bittersweet memoirs). There they had learned to distinguish among Stalinists, Trotskyists, and Lovestoneites without a scorecard; subsequently even their most engaged writing about the left recognized the importance of such divisions as well as the power of ideas"ideology"during the Great Depression. On the other hand, the political culture of New York radicalism had rendered them ill-prepared to understand the complexity of American Protestantism. When they wrote about the right, "fundamentalism" served as a catch-all synonym for moralism and reaction rather than as a name for a coherent movement marked by internal divisions and

 

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complicated relations with Pentecostals or theological liberals. Reducing theological conservatives to crude sociological categories, Bell, Lipset, and Glazer also ignored the impact of ideas. Apparently, dispensational premillennialism did not even qualify as ideology. This pluralist scholarship reflected the assumptions of the 1950s as well as the legacies of the 1930s. Sharing the prevailing belief that society was growing increasingly secular, Bell, Lipset, and Glazer naturally regarded unfamiliar, fervent religiosity as a sign of reaction.
Curiously, the pluralist view of fundamentalism as a vestigial element in the body politic won wide acceptance among cosmopolitan intellectuals, this during a decade marked by an extraordinary religious revival in which theological conservatives played a prominent part. Instead of fading away, fundamentalism was largely transformed into "evangelicalism," a transformation best symbolized by Billy Graham, still our foremost evangelical. Graham's fundamentalist origins are unmistakable. He had been converted as a youth by Mordecai Ham, attended Bob Jones University and Wheaton College, and was chosen by the aging William Bell Riley to head his Minneapolis religious empire. As late as 1955, Graham criticized Life magazine for accepting Darwinism. By the late 1950s, however, the changes looked more significant than the continuities. Graham was not only more polished than Riley or Winrod but also less strident. Though convinced of Jesus' ultimateperhaps imminentreturn, he named no candidates for Antichrist from the list of European statesmen. Minimizing theological differences, Graham shunned anti-Semitism, reached out to Pentecostal preacher Oral Roberts, and never compared the papacy to the biblical whore of Babylon. Wary of a Roman Catholic president, he nonetheless behaved better than theological liberals Norman Vincent Peale and Daniel Poling when John F. Kennedy sought the office in 1960.
In 1957 Graham brought his crusade to New York City, saying that he was prepared to be "crucified" in this capital of cosmopolitanism. The closest thing to a driven nail came from Union Theological