Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective Read Online Free PDF Page B

contenders on the world scene late in the twentieth century, in a time when progressives thought they would all have been fossilized or would simply have disappeared. They merit study both comparatively, for what they hold in common, and in their singularity.

 

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American Fundamentalism to the 1950s: A Guide, for New Yorkers
Leo P. Ribuffo
Unlike other great cities, New York is not usually associated with fundamentalism. Walking through downtown Chicago, we can easily encounter the Moody Bible Institute, whose founder, Dwight L. Moody, emerged as the nation's foremost evangelist in the 1870s and built a religious infrastructure later used by fundamentalists. Chicago is also home to the Pacific Garden Mission, where Billy Sunday, Moody's successor as the premier American evangelist, returned to Christ in 1886. And Los Angeles houses the Angelus Temple, where the great, gorgeous Pentecostal preacher, Aimee Semple McPherson, held forth from the 1920s until her death in 1944.
The absence of comparable landmarks in New York City reflects the relative weakness of the fundamentalist movement there. Yet, paradoxically, New York has played a decisive role in the interpretation of fundamentalism. Indeed, three CCNY alumniDaniel Bell, '38, Seymour Martin Lipset, '43, and Nathan Glazer, '44offered an explanation of fundamentalism that survived virtually unchallenged among social scientists from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s. According to Bell, Lipset, and Glazer, fundamentalism was best understood as a social movement led by provincials whose penchant for far-fetched conspiracy theories rose as their status declined. Although this pluralist theory contains several grains of truth, those

 

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granules are now usually diluted in popularizations by journalists or polemical mailings from People for the American Way. Moreover, even sophisticated versionspresented, for example, in Bell's famous anthology, The New American Right (first published in 1955, then revised and reissued as The Radical Right in 1963)are problematical products of a venerable cultural conflict between cosmopolitan intellectuals and theologically conservative Protestants. In the 1990s, still, neither side understands the other very well.
In this chapter, an attempt to maximize understanding, I will consider aspects of theologically conservative Protestantism from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s, when this broad religious movement underwent an important transition. We will see that New York City, though lacking in fundamentalist landmarks, did house some fundamentalist activists, many targets of fundamentalist ire, and even a few empathic cosmopolitans who tried to make sense of that anger.
Most thoughtful Americans probably know that a hundred years ago our country was overwhelmingly Protestant. What needs emphasis, however, is the degree to which an evangelical Protestant ethos pervaded the cultural elite and, to a lesser but large extent, affected everyday life. Of course all American Protestants were not alike. Their faith had been marked by schism and internecine persecution from the outset; Mormons could attest that neither had ceased by the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, especially after the Civil War settled the central issue of slavery, there was sufficient agreement among major denominations to make possible an evangelical coalition promoting piety, diligence, temperance, and patriotism, traits often presented as characteristically if not exclusively Protestant. Catholics and Jews represented significant minorities, enjoyed equality before the law, and sometimes rose to positions of power, nonetheless, their faiths definitely were affected by the prevailing ethos. As Professor Glazer has suggested, a merger between Reform Judaism and modernist Protestantism would not have been inconceivable a hundred years ago. And the American Catholic hierarchy, skeptical of papal infallibility and ostentatiously devoted to the