Brother Al cites in his column a 24-year-old article by Martin Marty, a leading American religious historian, "Hell Disappeared. No One Noticed. A Civic Argument" The Harvard Theological Review Jul-Oct 1985, which doesn't seem to be available on the open Web. Marty's article was adapted from his 1984 Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality of the same title at the Harvard Divinity School (which also doesn't seem to be available on the open Web). In this post, I'm commenting on Marty's article and some of the background of fundamentalist theology. In the second and final part tomorrow, I'll address Brother Al's article.
Marty's argument wasn't so much about the theology of Hell as it was about the claims by the Christian Right that teaching religion or "values" in the public schools would result in better behaved young people. He argues that for any kind of religious instruction to have the claimed salutory effect, it would have to carry the threat of punishment. Which means, as Marty puts it, it would have to include some form of teaching about "hell", i.e., eternal retribution for sins.
But Marty also explains that fear of Hell has become "culturally unavailable" for use in public schools. What he means is that so few people in America, even among active churchgoing believers, really take the threat of Hell seriously. If they believe in it at all. And for those who do believe in it, most are pretty confident that it's going to be the eternal residence of someone else other than themselves. His main point is directed at the claims advocates of "values" education make for such courses in public schools that without being able to credibly invoke some sort of eternal punishment, a concept that is "culturally unavailable" because too f ew people take it seriously, the claimed benefits of improving behavior through "values" classes are unlikely. As Marty puts it:
Rewards and punishments already exist on the sub-God, secular level. There are report cards, demerits, merit badges, trophies, rewards, awards, detentions, expulsions, suspensions, blue ribbons, congratulatory letters, parent conferences, diplomas, and the like to assure some framework, some structure for regulating and endorsing or disapproving action. If religion is to be an enhancement of the above, then there must be specifically religious sanctions or rewards. Indeed, rewards and punishments would be the very linchpin of the system, and these relate to and derive from the character of the One who does the rewarding and punishing. This is the substantive issue that would come up sooner, not later, if and when God comes with content and attributes as God must in moral education.(I love the concept of "sub-God".)
David Weeks in a review discussing opposition to Woodrow Wilson's League of Nation among many conservative American Protestants (Politics and Religion Apr 2009) gives a good description of how "liberalism" came to be the bogeyman that it still is for Christian fundamentalists:
Although the Social Gospel [a variety of Christian teaching that emphasized secular reform to address social evils] was a source of consternation among evangelicals, they were very apprehensive about a world turned upside down by the recently minted intellectual forces of historicism, positivism, Darwinism, and Marxism. Theological liberalism was just one additional expression of evangelicalism’s bête noire, modernism run amuck.Christian fundamentalism as we know it today first emerged then. It built on earlier ideas. But its suspicion of science and "modernism", and its chronic posturing as being persecuted even when they are plainly not in any meaningful sense of the word, were established in the latter part of the 19th century. The name Fundamentalism was derived from a series of essays published under the title The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth beginning in 1909.
It was during the late 19th-Century that modernity took a turn that gave pause to many Christians. Individuals such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, G. K. Chesterton, and Pope Pius X expressed deep-rooted reservations about the ideological temptations arising from the marriage of Enlightenment rationalism to German historicism, which had unleashed the notion that human reason inevitably would restructure the world, relieving all that ails humanity. Conservative evangelicals also opposed this trend in ways consonant with the theology distinctive of their denominations, thus finding themselves at odds with powerful political forces.
But the belief structure obviously preceded that, because these articles were summarizing a particular trend in Protestant theology going back to the 1870s, that had strong apocalyptic (millenarian) beliefs, held that the Scritures are verbally inspired by God and without error in their orginal forms ("autographs", which are no longer extant), and emphasized combatting scientific theories like evolution by natural selection ("Darwinism") that they found threatening.
One of the challenges of defining Christian fundamentalism historically is that the fundis had at least as much of an inclination toward schism as other Protestants, probably more. And fundamentalism was and is a cross-denominational phenemenon. Ernest Sandeen in a 1970 aricle ("Fundamentalism and American Identity" The Annals Jan 1970) noted that despite their claim to be holding to the true and original faith, fundamentalism was "a theology with no more seniority than modernism, and, in a real sense, the product of the same culltural complex".
While fundis actually created a kind of counterculture of their on over decades, they both considered themselves a minority holding out against a wicked majority culture but at the same time took pride in defending that culture against various perceived enemies: modernists, teachers, scientists, Commies, hippies, black people. But it's also important to remember that, as Sandeen put it:
Fundamentalism lives in symbiotic relationship with its adversaries. ... The very breath of life seems to be provided for the Fundamentalist by those whom he opposes, each of his positions and opinions beingh conceived through opposition to a liberal tance or utterance.Christian fundamentalism, in other words, has always strongly identified itself by its opposition to its enemies: "the liberals" being the most persistent target.
Sandeen's conclusion on the viability of Christian fundamentalism as a social/religious/political movement are worth quoting. Because liberals in 1970 tended to see fundamentalism as a throwback movement on the decline, not one on the rise. Sandeen wrote in refutation of arguments made by Richard Hofstadter and William McLoughlin had made earlier in the 1960s:
We exist in a fragmented and divided culture, not in one pervaded by consensus. We live in a society in which most of the problems are created by sub-groups whose values and ideals are threatened by changes in technological, economic, or political practices, and who doggedly refuse to drop their claims or change their attitudes as the result of a little more education or the passage of a little more time. Prayer in the public schools, Negroes living in white neighborhoods, the guaranteed annual wage, the new morality, Communist infiltration of government agencies, deficit spending -the list of issues seems almost infinitely expansible. It seems very much to the point, in the face of such a catalogue of grievances - each with its own organization dedicated to maintain ing that particular truth and defeating the agents of innovation - to challenge the pollyanna of progress, and to recognize that this century is seeing American culture in a new context.Tags: albert mohler, christian fundamentalism
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