The interpretation of American Fundamentalism has undergone considerable development since the 1960s. An earlier generation of scholarship understood it both theologically and culturally as a movement in the backwaters of American society that sought to deny the advances of modern culture in general and of science in particular. Academic interpreters recognized that it had something to do with religious faith but suggested it also reflected the sociological alterations in a society undergoing industrial and urban transformations. In the eyes of these historians the Fundamentalists were viewed primarily as opponents of modernity who left their mark on denominational machinery of many Protestant bodies. Religiously, in this view, Fundamentalists expressed resistance to scientifically informed thought. Politically they expressed attitudes of alienation and distrust. Psychologically they tended toward authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism.

Historians in more recent analyses have suggested that these cultural explanations of Fundamentalism were caricatures of something that was also theological and stood in a legitimate intellectual and theological tradition. The work of Ernest Sandeen, The roots of Fundamentalism, provided a corrective by noting the Fundamentalist rootage in 19th-century theology, particularly a millenarian tradition and Princeton [Seminary] theology. He provided a theological definition of Fundamentalism by describing it as an alliance between dispensational premillennialism and a doctrine of inspiration that guaranteed an inerrant Scripture. This interpretation of Fundamentalism suggested not so much anti-intellectualism but rather intellectualism of a different sort.

The most recent scholarship, specifically the work of George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American culture renders a much more complex interpretation that recognizes Fundamentalism as a variegated phenomenon that embraced many strands of the American religious past. It represented the confluence of lingering forms of 19th century revivalism, Pietism, Evangelicalism, Presbyterian theology that was congealing at Princeton Seminary, historic Methodism as influenced by the holiness movement and Pentecostalism, new millenarian interpretations, Common Sense or Baconian science, and many forms of denominational conservatism.

For Marsden the story of Fundamentalism centers on how people of diverse strands who commonly thought of themselves as evangelical Christians were influenced by and responded to the religious and intellectual crisis of the late 19th and early 20th century. These evangelicals were the heirs of the respectable Christians who had hoped to fashion a Christian society. They sensed that the culture in which they were located was clearly turning away from its religious past and from the shared assumptions that they and other Americans had long sustained.

The evangelical assumptions were fast corroding under the impact of modernity. Modernism comprised both a new theology and the cultural changes which that theology endorsed. It was the banning of God from the creation of the universe and thereby implicitly from his continuing role in the world, together with the social and cultural changes sustaining this new scientism. Fundamentalism was the militant opposition to modernism in both forms. These changes threatened the Puritan and early 19th-century evangelical ideal of building a Christian civilization. The Fundamentalists alternatively wished to redeem America and restore the ideal or to abandon the social order even to the point of withdrawing from it. For Marsden it was a movement of both cultural and theological opposition to the drift of North American culture.

The Marsden interpretation suggests that while Fundamentalism was certainly a defense of the faith, it was also part of the larger search for the relationship between culture and Christianity within the American context. The agonizing reappraisal required by both the cultural and theological changes produced theological and cultural Fundamentalism.

For Mennonites Fundamentalism was also a way to reassess cultural and theological issues. The dialogue that Mennonite Fundamentalists engaged in paralleled the national discussion in various ways but was also modulated by historic Mennonite distinctives and concerns. With the exception of John Horsch, the Mennonite Church (MC) writer and historian, Mennonites were not participants in the larger Fundamentalist movement. Yet they were participants in their own way in both forms of Fundamentalism -- theological and cultural. The precise mixture of the two forms varied among Mennonite groups, depending upon the history of the particular group.

Mennonite scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s suggested three conceptual frameworks for understanding Mennonite Fundamentalism. They reflect the impact of Sandeen and Marsden. The first interpretation assumes that ever since the mid-19th century for General Conference Mennonites (GCM) and since the late 19th century for Mennonite Church (MC) and Mennonite Brethren Mennonites the various groups had been in a process of developing the characteristics of American denominationalism. Denominations are defined in various ways, but common to most definitions are the creation of purposive activities and a clearly articulated theology. The purposive activities are new forms of work and activity by which the group coheres and extends itself into the larger world (evangelism, mission, schools and other institutions). The creation of an articulated theology is the necessary second stage in the creating of an identifiable denomination in the mosaic of American denominations. Theological Fundamentalism was part of the larger search for the distinctives of Mennonite theology. The American Fundamentalist movement coincided with this second stage of the denominationalizing process. Amidst the dividing of theology into two mutually exclusive and even hostile camps, Mennonites also had to define and distinguish a theology. In so doing, it was easy to borrow American formulations. The Mennonite Church (MC) adoption of the Eighteen Fundamentals at the 1921 general conference, as one example of this borrowing and systematizing, should be understood as part of the larger pattern of becoming a denomination in the American tradition.

The second framework suggests that the Mennonites who seem to be Fundamentalist were frequently denominational conservatives. Many of them distanced themselves from the highly structured and tightly guarded system of the Fundamentalist crusaders. Ambivalence about dispensational premillennialism characterized the major Mennonite groups. A softening of the constricted language of inspiration and the creedal quality of the "Fundamentalists" placed them in an older tradition of theological orthodoxy. They were the traditionalists who wished to conserve the distinctive traditions of the various Mennonite denominations. They meant to insure that the new issues of scriptural authority or millenarianism, did not overwhelm the older corpus of belief. These Mennonite conservatives frequently thought of themselves as more fundamental than the Fundamentalists in that they sought to preserve and even revitalize such historic fundamentals as nonconformity and nonresistance as well as the new issues in the "Fundamentalist party" agenda.

The third perspective suggests that Mennonite Church (MC) Fundamentalism was a response to the awakening or quickening (renaissance) which had significantly transformed Mennonites' relationship to the larger world (acculturation; language problem); that General Conference Mennonite Church Fundamentalism was an initial way of responding to the cultural transition accompanying World War I and the subsequent adaptation of a substantially Germanic population to the psychic requirements of Americanization; and that Mennonite Brethren Fundamentalism emerged also with the transition from a largely closed Germanic culture and language to more open participation in American society. The awakening for the Mennonite Church (MC) and the cultural transitions for the Mennonite Brethren and General Conference Mennonite Church brought greater interaction with the larger Protestant and national culture. Among those who wandered more freely in these circles a few brought back hints of theological modernism. More brought back a refusal to utilize the categories of the strict Fundamentalists, and in a world of simple dichotomies they seemed to be liberals. Even more brought back forms of cultural modernism: new fashions, new modes of conversation, new aspirations, new forms of church worship services, new educational degrees.

Fundamentalism came to differing parts of the North American Mennonite world at different times. But for all it was a way of responding to the groups' changed relationship to the dominant culture. Fundamentalism among Mennonites was as much an effort to redefine the relationship between culture and Christianity as a crusade to root out theological modernism. It was significantly a cultural movement because the theological modernism in the Mennonite world was only incipient and marginal. Cultural Fundamentalism was a way to codify doctrine, reassert churchly authority and redefine cultural boundaries. More rigid forms of authority and order are antidotes to rapid social change.

As the Mennonite boundaries became more permeable, as the cultural shifts were navigated, and as newer theological formulations, largely rooted in the rediscovery of the historic tradition, emerged, the need for Fundamentalism diminished. Theologically Fundamentalism in the major Mennonite denominational bodies may be thought of as a transitional theology between an inherited 19th-century theology, less doctrinal and precisely formulated, and the emergence of a theological biblicism rooted in a rediscovered Anabaptist hermeneutical tradition. After an initial stage in more formal theologizing when Fundamentalist categories seemed appropriate, they became increasingly less central to Mennonite theological reflection.

Bibliography

Additional Information

The Fundamentals: a testimony to the truth (The Fundamentals first published in 1909 in twelve volumes; here from 1917 text)

Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Ontario, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, p. 318-320. All rights reserved. For information on ordering the encyclopedia visit the Herald Press website.

©1996-2008 by the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. All rights reserved.

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