Fundamentalism and American Culture, Almost a Half Century Later

George Marsden

September 2, 2025

Left: The King's Business 13, No.7 (July 1922): 642.

Right: President Trump holding a Bible outside St. John’s Church, Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-george-floyd-government-and-politics-a9931785996ddfafcc42dcdde9f50df5

Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1980), my most noticed early work, first appeared in 1980 and then in editions of 2006 and 2022. Since I added new prefaces and updates for those later editions, I have already spent a good bit of time reflecting on the ways the subject looks differently from a twenty -first century perspective as compared to how it looked in the 1970s. The book’s primary subject is the original “fundamentalism” as it first emerged as such in the 1920s. That phenomenon touched just about every American Protestant denomination in the 1920s, and helped shape the “evangelicalism” that appeared with Billy Graham during the mid-century as well as many smaller groups that remained militantly “fundamentalist.”

By far the most common question that twenty-first century observers want answered about the “fundamentalism” of the 1920 is: “to what extent was that original movement a source of for militant evangelicalism of the religious right that helped elect Donald Trump?” When I was researching and writing the book in the 1970s, the question of fundamentalist influences on national politics was only just emerging, and not in nearly so pointed a way. Evangelical Christianity first gained wide recognition as a national political force, after all, with the election of the “born again” progressive southern Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976. During the next few years, though, we saw the emergence of the religious right’s alliance with the Republican Party. So in my first edition, which appeared just after Ronald Reagan was elected, I did address in a preliminary way the question of the 1920s political antecedents to what would become the most conspicuous legacy of fundamentalism in later decades. Yet those were far from the central traits of the original movement. 

When I began studying the original fundamentalism of the 1920s, there was no consensus on how best to characterize the movement. Some early histories had emphasized its reactionary character in its prominent fights against the inroads of biblical criticism and new liberal theologies in the major American northern denominations. Others had focused on the anti-evolution campaigns, William Jennings Bryan, and the Scopes Trial of 1925. Another focal point had been bombastic revivalism and anti-intellectualism, epitomized by Billy Sunday and the like. And just when I was beginning my work in 1970 historian Earnest Sandeen, who had grown up in the movement, offered the most sophisticated history arguing that the movement was built around an alliance of two major theological emphases: (1) that the Bible was “inerrant,” and (2) Dispensational Premillennialism, a recent teaching based on biblical prophecies that declared that modern civilization was doomed by God’s judgment and that Christ would very soon return to earth to set up his millennial kingdom.

My own approach was to try to take all these dimensions into account and to avoid reducing fundamentalism to any one of its many parts. I also looked back from the 1920s (when the word “fundamentalism” was first used for a religious movement) to the late nineteenth century American evangelical revivalism that was the immediate progenitor of the post-1920 phenomena. One conspicuous difference between the more congenial, often mainstream, revivalism of the 1890s and its successors of the 1920s was the latters’ sense of cultural alarm that, as was often pointed out, was precipitated by World War I and the emerging “Jazz Age” of the 1920s. That alarm took varieties of forms. Billy Sunday, for instance, railed against (among other things) the “socialist” tendencies of modernist theologies. But he and most other dispensational premillennialism, saw the proper response as to give oneself to Jesus, live a pure life, evangelize others and wait for Jesus to return. William Jennings Bryan, by contrast, was an agrarian progressive who successfully mobilized for anti-evolution as a political reform. Some other fundamentalists organized political purity campaigns at the local level. But other premillennialists said that, in the light of Christ’s return at any minute, political reform was like rearranging the deck chairs on the doomed Titanic. Still other fundamentalists, although mostly conservative in their political views, emphasized more exclusively the doctrinal aspects of defending traditional Christianity against modernist theologies. 1920s fundamentalism, then, included some political dimensions, but were mostly haphazard.

Given these complexities, ambiguities, and paradoxes, then, what would be a good way of characterizing the movement that would make it intelligible for readers without reducing it to any one or two of its many parts? My principal way of doing that was to observe that fundamentalists were traditional evangelical or revivalist Protestants who typically were alarmed by and willing to fight against modern developments on either or both of two fronts, in their churches and in the culture generally. Often they saw these two sorts of trends as evidence of the collapse of Christian civilization (as the accompanying cartoon depicts). Militancy against various aspects of theological modernism was one essential trait. For most, however, alarm over the decline of Christian culture and its mores reinforced fundamentalist readiness to fight. 

Such militancy against varieties of modern trends in church and culture proved to be a helpful way of seeing the continuities between the original fundamentalism of the 1920s and that since the 1980s. Especially in the recent, highly politicized fundamentalistic evangelicalism there is a strong sense that righteous warfare is needed to save American Christian civilization. Yet the alliance with the Republican Party and eventually their allegiance to Donald Trump as their warrior illustrates another perennial principle. That is that once a religious movement takes on a quest for political power, it will soon be led to compromise its strict religious principles in favor of whatever it takes for worldly influence.

What are the lessons I learned from this early work? First, avoid reducing a complex phenomenon to one of its parts. And second, avoid reading the present into the past, as in insisting that the most dominant traits of a movement today were already dominant in an earlier era (sometimes they are, sometimes they are not). Third, do not expect human behavior to be consistent or rational. People of all sorts often believe many inconsistent or contradictory things. Or they act contrary to what they profess. So expect, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it so well, to find irony and paradox in history. That should also teach us to have a degree of humility, especially in how we characterize those with whom we disagree. Try to understand them in their own terms before pointing out their foibles. We, no doubt, have our own blind spots.

Finally, that last observation brings me to my own confession. I do not seem sufficiently self-reflective and humble enough to recognize some profound missteps in this early work. Rather, the book’s modest, but seemingly lasting, success has led me to look for positive lessons that can be learned from my approach of a half century ago. So, recognizing that I am not the best person to point out the flaws, I hope others may learn from what I think were the parts of my methodology that still may be useful today.