[lbo-talk] Protestant fundamentalism: pro-Israel & anti-UN before they existed

[Michael Pollak]

[Apropos the encomiums for Karen Armstrong]

A couple of months ago, someone quoted a text saying that Protestant
fundamentalism wasn't always on the right, that it had been on the left up
until the Scopes trial.  This struck me as an interesting idea and I
decided to check it out.  It turns not out in the end to be not exactly
true.  Fundamentalism wasn't really born until WWI, and it was politically
conservative from the beginning.  But I did stumble on a couple of things
I found fascinating.

There was a time when doctrinally conservative Protestants were on the
same side as doctrinally liberally Protestants, and when both participated
jointly in social programs to help the poor.  But those doctrinal
conservatives weren't yet fundamentalists.  However, when some leading
liberal Protestants took the final step, and went from having liberal
doctrines to having no doctrine -- when they professed that all you needed
to be a Christian was belief in a loving god -- conservatives reacted
vigorously against it, saying you needed some doctrines to call yourself a
Christian.  They then set about laying them out, and these doctrines
became the fundamentals.

But the three core beliefs that really made it fundamentalism took shape
during WWI.  And what's fascinating about them, and what I wanted to
share, was just how far they were ahead of their time: both the extreme
pro-zionism and the hatred of the UN that mark fundamentalism today
pre-existed both the UN and Israel by 30 years.  They have both been there
from the very beginning.

Below is a two page excerpt from Karen Armstrong's _The Battle for God: A
History of Fundamentalism_ (pp. 170-171, 172):

<begin excerpt>

[I]n the early years of the century, even such an arch-conservative as
William B. Riley, who had founded the Northwestern Bible College in 1902,
was willing to work with social reformers to clean up Minneapolis. He
could not approve of the methods of such Social Gospelers as Stelzle, who
invited Leon Trotsky and Emma Goldman to lecture in his Temple, but
conservatives had not yet moved over to the right of the political
spectruam, and led their own welfare campaigns throughout the United
States.

But in 1909, Charles Eliot, professor emeritus of Harvard University,
delivered an address entitled "The Future of Religion" which struck dismay
into the hearts of the more conservative.  This was another attempt to
return to a simple core value.  The new religion, Eliot believed, would
have only one commandment: the love of God, expressed in the practical
service of others.  There would be no churches and no scriptures; no
theology of sin, no need for worship.  God's presence would be so obvious
and overwhelming that there would be no need for liturgy.  Christians
would not have a monopoly on truth, since the ideas of scientists,
secularists, or those who belonged to a different faith would be just as
valid.  In its care for other human beings, the religion of the future
would be no different from such secularist ideals as democracy, education,
social reform, or preventative medicine.  This extreme version of the
Social Gospel was a recoil from the doctrinal disputes of recent decades.
In a society that valued only rational or scientifically demonstrable
truth, dogma had become a problem. Theology could easily become a fetish,
an idol that became a supreme value in itself instead of a symbol of an
ineffable and indescribable reality.  By seeking to bypass doctrine, Eliot
was trying to get back to what he regarded as fundamental: love of God and
neighbor.  All the world faiths have emphasized the importance of social
justice and care for the vulnerable.  A disciplined and practically
expressed compassion has been found, in all traditions, to yield a sense
of the sacred, as long as it did not become a do-gooding ego trip.  Eliot
was thus attempting to address the real dilemma of Christians in the
modern world by building a faith that relied more upon practice than upon
orthodox beliefs.

The conservatives, however, were appalled.  Faith without infallible
doctrine was no Christianity in their view, and they felt obliged to
counter this liberal danger.  In 1910, the Presbyterians of Princeton, who
had formulated the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture, issued a
list of five dogmas which they deemed essential: (1) the inerrancy of
Scripture, (2) the Virgin Birth of Christ, (3) Christ's atonement for our
sins on the cross, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the objective
reality of his miracles.  (This last doctrine would soon be replaced by
the teachings of premillennialism.)  Next, the oil millionaires Lyman and
Milton Stewart, who had founded the Bible College of Los Angeles to
counter the Higher Criticism in 1908, financed a project designed to
educate the faithful in the central tenets of the faith.  Between 1910 and
1915, they issued a series of twelve paperback pamphlets entitled _The
Fundamentals_, in which leading conservative theologians gave accessible
accounts of such doctrines as the Trinity, refuted the Higher Criticism,
and stressed the importance of spreading the truth of the Gospel.  Some
three million copies of each of the twelve volumes were dispatched, free
of charge, to every pastor, professor and theology student in America.
Later this project would acquire great symbolic significance, since
fundamentalists would see it as the germ of their movement.  However, at
the time, the pamphlets caused little critical interest, and the tone was
neither radical no particularly militant.

But during the Great War, an element of terror entered conservative
Protestantism and it became fundamentalist.  Americans had always had a
tendency to see a conflict as apocalyptic, and the Great War confirmed
many of them in their premillennial convictions.  The horrific slaughter,
they decided, was on such a scale that it would only be the beginning of
the End.  These must be the battle foretold in the book of Revelation.
Three big Prophecy Conferences were held between 1914 and 1918, where
participants combed through the _Scofield Reference Bible_ to find more
"signs of the times."  Everything indicated that these predictions were
indeed coming to pass.  The Hebrew prophets had foretold that the Jews
would return to their own land before the End, so when the British
government issued the Balfour Declaration (1917), pledging its support for
a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the premillennialists were struck with awe
and exultation.  Scofield had suggested that Russia was the "power from
the North" that would attack Israel shortly before Armageddon; the
Bolshevik Revolution (1917), which made atheistic communism the state
ideology, seemed to confirm this.  The creation of the League of Nations
obviously fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 16:14: it was the revived
Roman empire that would shortly be led by Antichrist. [...] Peace-keeping
institutions, such as the League of Nations, would henceforth always be
imbued with absolute evil in the eyes of the fundamentalists.  The League
was clearly the abode of Antichrist, who, St. Paul had said, would be a
plausible liar whose deceit would take everybody in.  The Bible said that
there would be war in the End-times, not peace, so the League was
dangerously on the wrong track.  Indeed, Antichrist himself was likely to
be a peacemaker.  The fundamentalists' revulsion from the League and other
international bodies also revealed a visceral fear of the centralization
of modernity and a terror of anything resembling world government.

<end excerpt>

What happened next was a extremely vicious war between the liberals and
conservatives with the liberals, interestingly, taking the first
initiative.  The liberals were also shaken by WWI.  It completely
contradicted their faith in progress.  They felt the only way it could
have a sense was if it had been the war to end all wars.  The League was
therefore as much an object of faith for them as it was for the
fundamentalists, only with the opposite sign.  They saw the newly born
fundamentalists as being opposed to the only thing worth believing in --
as opposing the values of civilization itself.  They accused conservatives
of being traitors and in league with the Germans (the enemies of
civilization and the heralds of war), accusations which seem absurd now,
but were poisonous then.  The attack was returned and after that point, it
became impossible for there ever to be a doctrinal reconciliation.  The
Scopes trial was simple the climax of the liberal offensive.  It was
essentially fundamentalism's annealing bath that fixed the core it has
retained to this day.

Michael