Chapter 2: The Emergence of Fundamentalism and Pentecostal Fundamentalism

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a renewal of faith and religion was sweeping through the colonies, and later, the young American countryside. While the New England colonies had been founded largely due to the puritan impulse, religion tended to be a quiet, personal matter as colonists focused on the task of survival. This would all change in the early 1700s as men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield began to appear on the scene, preaching a passionate brand of revivalism that was marked by powerful oratory and apocalyptic imagery. As Jonathan Edwards dangled men over the fires of hell in his famous sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God,” Whitefield prodded the lukewarm saints with his assertion that the measure of a man’s faith was in the power of his emotional response. In churches up and down the Eastern seaboard, saints and sinners alike flooded the altars, seeking sanctuary from sin and impending destruction. A new fervor for God and religion was born, and the “great awakening” was underway. The converts of this movement would carry the message forward over the next few years, and as circuit riding preachers bombarded the gates of hell at tent revivals and in small country churches, the “second great awakening” would extend westward during the early 1800s. Just as the Great Awakening shook 18th century New England, the Second Great Awakening would shake Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio through the purely American medium known as the “camp meeting.”

Gathering at a central location, rural populations would set up camp for days, or even weeks to hear the revivalist preach his, and in some cases her, over-the-top message of conversion, or “turning away” from sin in order to rededicate one’s life to the control of God. These meetings were spectacles of emotionalism, orchestrated by revivalists who were part showman and part spiritual guru. At these meetings participants confessed their sins, testified to Gods goodness, sang hymns with rapturous enthusiasm, shouted and moaned in spiritual ecstasy and sometimes stood or laid prostrate on the ground in a trance-like state for hours.

The most well-known revivalist of the second great awakening was Charles Grandison Finney. Finney shared the same New England Puritan roots as Jonathan Edwards, and felt, like Edwards, that man was lost and in need of salvation. Finney’s message departed from that of Edwards by a strong focus on the need for human action in securing salvation through acts of repentance and works of righteous living. Out of this call to action would come a number of powerful expressions, including the abolitionist and temperance movements.

Many scholars agree that this new, highly emotional and apocalyptic wave of religion was in part a response to the enlightenment. As the world of academe made great advances in science and the understanding of the natural world, belief in an all-powerful god who held the universe in place became irrelevant to many. Pious contemplation was exchanged for detached observation in educational institutions, and the religious vanguard feared a great “falling away.” While the great institutions of learning had always been founded and nurtured by the Church, natural science began to change the rules; and clergymen began to see the scientific community as the enemy. This tension continued to grow through the 19th century, and as more contemporary expressions of faith such as the Transcendentalist movement began to take shape, the conservative religious tradition began to separate themselves more and more from the scientists and the liberals. This tension would culminate in the early 1900s when a return to “old-time religion” became a mission, and fundamentalism was born.

Between 1910 and 1915, conservative religious scholars and writers from both Britain and America produced a 12 volume set of work known as “The Fundamentals.” This extensive work was in many ways a “line in the sand” against modernism, science, and the more recent development of Biblical criticism, an academic movement that attempted to locate the historical reality of the Jesus story. This type of scholarship was seen as a threat to the very foundation of Christian belief, as evidenced by the following passage from the Fundamentals:

"Another serious consequence of the Higher Critical movement is that it threatens the Christian system of doctrine and the whole fabric of systematic theology. For up to the present time any text from any part of the Bible was accepted as a proof-text for the establishment of any truth of Christian teaching, and a statement from the Bible was considered an end of controversy. The doctrinal systems of the Anglican, the Presbyterian, the Methodist and other Churches are all based upon the view that the Bible contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (See 39 Articles Church of England, vi, ix, xx, etc.) They accept as an axiom that the Old and New Testaments in part, and as a whole, have been given and sealed by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. All the doctrines of the Church of Christ, from the greatest to the least, are based on this. All the proofs of the doctrines are based also on this. No text was questioned; no book was doubted; all Scripture was received by the great builders of our theological systems with that unassailable belief in the inspiration of its texts, which was the position of Christ and His apostles" (1909, D.W. Hague).

The “Fundamentals” articulated a Christian worldview that was narrow in definition, reactionary, exclusionary, and based in a factual reading of the Bible as an inerrant text. This worldview would come to be known as Fundamentalism, and the dialectical tension between scripture and science inherent in such a worldview would become a defining characteristic of the movement.

Ironically, this insistence on a factual reading of the Biblical text is a peculiarity that arose out of the scientific worldview. During the Enlightenment, objective knowledge became the standard of truth. By the 1800’s, it was often assumed that the only real and useful knowledge was the factual knowledge of the material world. This assumption meant, in the minds of some theologians, that if the Bible is the ultimate source of truth, then it must also contain the factual truth of the material world. A literal reading of the Bible in this way then led to the popular practice of counting; adding years in the Biblical genealogies as a way of measuring real time. Out of this Biblical “scholarship” came a creation story that 1) held that the world was created approximately 6,000 years ago and that 2) man was created in his modern form at the beginning of time.

As the ideas of Darwin swept the educational landscape, the teaching of the evolution of man over hundreds of thousands of years was seen as a direct attack upon the faith by fundamentalists. Dialectical tension became outright war in the early years of the 20th century when rural congregations, primarily in the south, rallied to fight the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

During the 1920’s, the scientific community came to view fundamentalism as “pseudo-science and false philosophy” (Marsden, 2006, pg. 218), and the showdown finally came at the Tennessee “monkey trial.” By 1930, “not only were the nation’s universities alien territories for evangelicals, but fundamentalists, the most visible evangelicals, had made a virtue of their alienation from the world of learned culture” (Noll, pg. 211).

While the experience of early fundamentalists was one of disenfranchisement
--both from science and popular culture--- this did not affect popular appeal. In fact, the “outsider pose” became a defining characteristic of embattled fundamentalists (Carpenter, pg. 5). Heeding scriptures such as Colossians 2: 8, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit,” Alienation became separatism; and separatism became a badge of spirituality readily donned by the warriors of righteousness.

In 1909, the same year that “The fundamentals” was published, another book hit the market that would change the face of 21st century Christianity. The Scofield reference Bible, based on the teachings of an early 19th century Englishman named John Nelson Darby, laid out a sensational and apocalyptic theology that took a radical departure from the teachings of historic Christianity. The strange new ideas were based on a radical literal reading of the text, especially the book of Revelation. According to Darby and Scofield, the History of the world could be divided into 7 dispensations. The present dispensation, Darby proclaimed, was under the power of Satan himself and would end with the apocalyptic destruction of life as we know it. It was Darby who created the doctrine of the “rapture,” a secret end-time disappearance of Christians from the face of the earth. Scofield mania swept the country, and the Scofield Reference Bible became the sacred book of Fundamentalist Christianity.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the religious landscape was a boiling cauldron of emotionalism, legalism, mysticism, social activism, apocalyptic preoccupation, disenfranchisement, and an outright rejection of modernism. Out of this fomented concoction would spring a new flavor of fundamentalist Christianity that would bring all these elements together in a new and powerful way: Pentecostalism.

In the fall of 1900, a group of 40 young men and women enrolled in the newly formed Bethel Bible College in a stately old mansion in Topeka, Kansas. The founder of this school was an ex-Methodist minister, Charles Fox Parham. Parham had left the Methodist denomination a few years earlier, disillusioned by what he saw as a rejection of the truth of scripture contained in a new doctrine that would come to be known as the “latter rain” doctrine.

The Latter Rain doctrine, one of the many apocalyptic cult movements that had emerged from Scofield’s teachings, had sprung up among some radical ministers and missionaries. This camp of clergy felt that, with the end of the world fast approaching, the only way that the church would be able to win over the world in the last days would be through the manifestation of “signs and wonders” through the power of the Holy Spirit, as promised in scripture (G. McGee, 1999).

Life at the school was intense. The days were spent in Bible classes, and the evenings in prayer and discussion. Parham, deeply interested in the concept of baptism in the power of the Holy Spirit, instructed his students in the last days of 1900 that they would bring in the new year with a continuous prayer meeting in which they would ask God to visit them with the evidence of Spirit Baptism. Parham believed that the experience of glossolalia, or the spontaneous ability to speak in other languages, was the evidence they sought and had been teaching on this subject for some time. The prayer meeting began, and from it would develop a new religious discourse that would change the face of American fundamentalism forever. Parham would later report that the new year was ushered in to the sound of a cacophony of various languages being spoken by the students as they received the infilling of the Spirit. According to Parham, he had received a “gift of tongues” that allowed him to preach in German and Swedish, and that other students had received the gifts of Japanese, Hungarian, Syrian, Hindi, and Spanish (McGee, 1999).

One student in particular, Agnes Ozman, is often credited with being the first to experience this supernatural language. She claimed that she was not able to speak any language except Chinese for days after her initial Spirit-filling, and even claimed to be able to write in Chinese during that period. Her writings were later examined by a language specialist who denied that they were, in fact, written in Chinese.

McGee points out that, if these students had received these supernatural powers of language, none of them put the skills to the intended purpose. Not a single student of the Bethel Bible School went on to fulfill a missions appointment in a foreign country (McGee, 1999).
From this sensational beginning, Pentecostalism was born and began to color the religious landscape. In the years following, the movement would splinter into a number of denominations, one of the most successful being the Assemblies of God.

In the spring of 1914, Pentecostal ministers from all parts of the country converged upon Hot Springs, Arkansas to discuss the idea of organizing into a formalized fellowship. Since it’s beginnings in 1901, the Pentecostal movement had been characterized by bickering over doctrinal differences, including whether or not believers should be baptized in the name of Jesus or in the name of the trinity, whether or not speaking in tongues was the necessary and singular evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and various legalistic issues relating to Christian practice. When the meeting would adjourn days later, the fellowship of the Assemblies of God had been born. This group refused to call itself a denomination, but stressed the autonomy of local congregations. The stated purposes of formal organization included 1) safeguarding of doctrinal purity and the creation of institutions to train ministers, 2) collaboration for purpose of missionary work, 3) providing a vehicle for the credentialing of ministers in order to legitimize the work of the clergy.

Because doctrinal purity was a primary impetus for the formalizing of the fellowship, written doctrinal statements became a major focus. The fellowship’s statement of the “sixteen fundamental truths” affirm, among other things, the Bible as the inspired word of God, the virgin birth, the “sanctification of the believer” (a term that would lead to a preoccupation with legalistic expressions of faith), and the final judgment. These ideas were harmonious with and influenced by the “Fundamentals” published during the same time as the founding of the Assemblies of God; and even though we often associate fundamentalism with Baptists and “Holiness” denominations, the Assemblies of God has been fundamentalist at its core from the time of the inception of the movement.

In the early years, Pentecostalism appealed to the poor and disenfranchised. The Pentecostal church in the town was often the church “on the other side of the tracks.” These people, devoid of social power, found the message of spiritual empowerment through the baptism of the Holy Spirit especially appealing. But if Pentecostalism was seen as a poor man’s religion in the early years, this would all change in the 70’s.

By the time I got in high school in the mid 70’s, fundamental Christianity had become cool. The Baby Boomers were becoming the Jesus Generation, and the long-haired, sandal-clad “Jesus freaks” were breathing new life into fundamental religion. This new breath was called the Charismatic movement and by 1979, 19% of the American population identified themselves as either Charismatic or Pentecostal (Marsden, 1991, pg. 78). As the Charismatic movement, or neo-pentecostalism, grew in popularity, the Assemblies of God was reaping the benefits. From 1978-1988, the national membership of the Assemblies of God almost doubled, going from 1,200,000 to more than 2,200,000 (The Assemblies of God, 2004). Along with this influx of up and coming baby boomers, the Assemblies of God moved across the tracks. Not only money, but power and influence began to move into the denomination; and Pentecostalism was soon wielding social power as well as promising spiritual power.

It was in the middle of this boon that I ended up at Central Bible College, studying for the ministry. There was a lot of excitement in the air; a heady intoxication created by the afterglow of the 70’s awakening and the growing power and prestige of the fellowship. But not all was well within the halls of power. The incredible highs of the era would be punctuated by some devastating lows as one by one, high profile leaders within the movement were laid bare before the world with moral failures. Belonging to the Assemblies of God during those years was a roller coaster ride through the house of disillusion.

I still remember standing in the college library on a cold February day in 1988, when pastor and evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, one of the most powerful and widely respected names in the Assemblies of God, stood before his Louisianna congregation and wept uncontrollably as he confessed to a secret lifestyle of moral transgressions. It had been another disgruntled Assemblies of God minister, Marvin Gorman, who had hired a private investigator to expose Swaggart for his regular visits to the red light district of Baton Rouge. Believers were shocked to find out that Swaggart had been living a duplicitous life in the shadows during his meteoric rise as a prophet and man of righteousness.

Believers were heartbroken, but all too familiar with the script. Only a year earlier, evangelist Jim Baker had been driven from his post as Director of Heritage, USA, a Christian amusement park/convention center in South Carolina under allegations of rape, mail fraud, and embezzlement.

I watched in stunned silence as Swaggart cried and confessed his voyeuristic, sex-obsessed double life, not realizing that this was only the beginning of the end of innocence. At CBC, we were all required to take a Seminar in Pastoral Ministries as a capstone course, in which we sat under the tutelage of the most prominent ministers of the day, learning about the nuts and bolts practice of ministry. The seminar speaker who talked to my class about church finance was none other than Richard Dortsch; an iconic AG figure who would later be defrocked and serve actual jail time for his role in the PTL financial scandal. The commencement address at my graduation from CBC was given by another popular minister who would, only months later, be defrocked for a scandalous 6 year affair that he had been having with a parishioner. Two years later, the guest speaker at the ceremony in which I was licensed as an Assemblies of God minister would be Marvin Gorman, the charismatic southern pastor who had been involved in “bringing down” Jimmy Swaggart. He preached a passionate, moving sermon at that ceremony on the importance of purity, both physical and emotional. A year later, he too was defrocked, after it was discovered that he had been carrying on a number of affairs with ladies in his Louisiana congregation. For the Assemblies of God, the 1980s was truly the best and worst of times.
While some may argue that the series of moral failures that plagued the movement during those years was an unfortunate coincidence, I believe that the events of those years point to some critical flaws within the neo-pentecostal religious movement. While these flaws are inherent in many ways to fundamentalism, the hyper-emotionality of the Pentecostal movement created a culture in which these flaws were, and continue to be, further exaggerated.

The “Children” of God

Fundamentalism, by its very nature, is the religion of spiritual children. While definitions of what it means to be “fundamentalist” may vary somewhat, two characteristics are universally affirmed: 1) the insistence upon a literal interpretation of scripture, and 2) the inerrancy of scripture. These two features of fundamentalist religion are characteristic of the overly simplistic, concrete thinking style of pre-adolescent children.

I’m not suggesting that fundamentalists are incapable of abstract or complex thought; rather, I’m suggesting that on the scale of spiritual evolution, fundamentalism is an underdeveloped way of thinking about scripture and therefore, about faith itself.

While fundamentalist believers can be intelligent individuals who readily apply higher complex thinking styles in other areas of cognition, fundamentalism requires these same people to limit their interaction with scriptural texts to simplistic ways of thinking.

According to the theories of the great educational psychologist Piaget, until about the age of 11 children are incapable of abstract or metaphorical thought. Up until the age of 11, children are limited to “concrete” ways of thinking, where objects and ideas are seen as specific, individual things and cannot be perceived as symbols for something else or parts of a greater whole. This is the stage of literal thinking; and this type of thinking characterizes the way in which fundamentalists of all ages are required to interpret the scripture.

Interestingly enough, Jesus himself did not take a “literal” approach in his teaching. The gospels present Jesus as a high level thinker, his teaching complex and filled with metaphor and imagery. Jesus often taught in parables; extended metaphors filled with symbols and abstract concepts. Old Testament writers used symbols and abstractions, as well; and almost any conservative Bible scholar will take a metaphorical view of books like Psalms and the Song of Solomon. It seems an outright contradiction that fundamentalists apply a symbolic hermeneutic to the parables of Christ and other Biblical texts deemed as “poetic,” while insisting on literal interpretation when dealing with the work of other Biblical writers. In truth, fundamental theologians pick and choose which texts will be interpreted literally; and these decisions are often influenced by questions of politics and control as much as they are influenced by informed Biblical scholarship.

The second universal tenant of fundamentalism, biblical inerrancy, serves to squelch any human tendency toward doubt that may arise in the mind of the believer. The scriptures are held to be complete and without error. Fundamentalists teach that, in the 66 books of the Bible, all truth has been set down and all necessary questions answered. In the words of one popular fundamentalist bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” The implication of such a religious approach is that, since truth has been set down once and for all, there is no place for doubt. If one is in doubt, then it is due to an inability to rightly interpret scripture or either an attempt of the mind to rebel against the truth of God.

In fundamental circles, obedience is highly prized, and the programming of children begins early. “Raise up the child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6) is the scriptural mantra of the elders. “The will of the child must be broken early,” I once heard a prominent fundamentalist educator assert. Demand obedience. Squelch doubt. That is the implicit goal of much that passes as fundamentalist Christian Education. In a study published in 1996 (Humsberger. Alisat & Pouncer), researchers found that religious doubting was positively related to complex and integrative thinking; and not surprisingly, it was also negatively correlated with measures of religious fundamentalism. In other words, questioning the truths of one’s religion develops maturity of mind. In seeking to squelch doubt, fundamentalism squelches the development of complex thinking as well.

Still another indicator of the immature nature of fundamentalist thought is its tendency toward dualism, the lowest level of intellectual development identified by William Perry.
In 1968, Perry Published a ground-breaking work on student development, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme. Based on the results of a study conducted at Harvard University, Perry posited a model of student intellectual development that suggests that students move through a number of stages on their way to thoughtful and mature intellectual/moral commitment. The beginning stage is the position that Perry called “Basic Dualism.” In the position of Dualism, students see the world as a dichotomy; “authority – right – we, as against the alien world of illegitimate – wrong – others” (Perry, 1999, pg. 66). Perry suggests that dependence on authoritarian structures (an essential feature of fundamentalism) leads to entrenchment in a dualistic view of the world. In a dualistic religious approach, morality means unquestioning obedience.

The next major position after dualism is Multiplicity; a position where students come to realize that there are many different, and perhaps valid, perspectives that must be examined. In order to reach the position of multiplicity, the student must be able to extend “potential legitimacy to ‘otherness’” (Perry, pg. 79). This is a difficult step for students who have known only the world of fundamental dualism. For someone raised in a fundamentalist home, there is only one truth; every other view is a lie from Satan . Perry (1968) suggests that “a salient characteristic of [dualism], and the source of its innocence, is its lack of any alternative vantage point from which a person may view it” (pg. 69). This difficulty is compounded by the tendency to view anyone who would offer an alternative vantage point as blind to the truth and as a moral threat. By positioning themselves as the “us” in the battle of “us” against “them,” fundamentalists deny the validity of any opposing vantage point, and isolate themselves in their dualistic perspective. This is the deep root of the anti-intellectualism inherent in fundamentalism. Education is about opening the mind, considering alternate perspectives; but alternate perspectives are the ultimate enemy of dualistic religion.

When students leave the incubator of the fundamentalist community of origin to study at a secular university, they find themselves in direct contact with the world, no longer hedged in by well meaning but often narrow minded adults. Being exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking, they may find that the “world” is not as evil as they’ve been told; they might find that it is, in fact, quite welcoming and very interesting. Daring to dance on the abyss, students may open their minds and begin to consider the legitimacy of alternate perspectives. At this point the student begins to move out of dualism and into multiplicity. Students at this point begin to free themselves from authoritarian constraints and begin to engage in independent thinking. Fundamentalists, concerned with preserving an irreconcilable worldview, may well be justified in their fear of secular education.

Pentecostalism: Fundamental Wildfire

I have found the joy no tongue can tell,
How its waves of glory roll!
It is like a great o’erflowing well,
Springing up within my soul.
It is joy unspeakable and full of glory,
Full of glory, full of glory,
It is joy unspeakable and full of glory,
Oh, the half has never yet been told (B.E. Warren, 1900).

The Assemblies of God, like other Pentecostal movements, has always been characterized by a high level of emotionality and demonstrative expression of that emotion. The “infilling” of the Holy Spirit was the ultimate blessing in Pentecostal theology, and speaking in tongues, the sanctioned evidence that the infilling occurred, seemed to be always accompanied by extreme emotional displays. During my time in the bosom of Pentecostalism, altar services were thick with energy and excitement as believers cried, shouted, danced, and were “slain in the spirit” --- falling to the ground and remaining there, eyes closed and hands raised, in a trance-like state for hours at a time. I can remember having “Jericho marches” around the inside walls of the church. We’d sing “The move is on, I know the move is on; I can hear the rustling in the Mulberry trees and I know, I know, I know the move is on!” over and over as we marched around and around, the emotional pitch getting higher and more frenzied until the march stalled as people danced, shouted, and fell in the aisles.

In a religious climate of legalistic repression and self-denial, these times of emotional release, of total and complete abandonment to the divine impetus, were incredibly cathartic. Just like the Monks and Nuns in the medieval cloisters, these Pentecostal saints were lifted above the harsh realities of life in these intense mystical experiences. And yet, Pentecostal practitioners did not live in cloisters, and did not have the structured disciplines of the cloistered life. These were simple folk for the most part, and the emotional release often became an end in itself, and the unofficial measure of one’s spirituality. This was driven home to me during an experience I had as a teenager while traveling and performing with a Christian band. We had arrived at the home of some friends in a town where we would be performing. I had no more than stepped out of the van when the 8 year old daughter of the friends came running to meet us, shouting her proud news: “I shouted last night! I shouted last night at Church!”

While emotionality in religious expression can be cathartic, it can also be dangerous. When strong emotion becomes identified with spirituality, then experiencing these feelings can become a sanctioned addiction. These intoxicating emotional experiences become the norm, and one may seek to replicate the same level of excitement in other areas of life as well. It has often been said that there is a fine line between spiritual ecstasy and sexual excitement. This line becomes blurred, if not imperceptible, in a culture where sexuality is repressed and is often sublimated into religious feeling. Too often, untempered emotional expression in church doesn’t shut down when the final chorus has been sung. Like the many great ministers whose fall I experienced during my college years, Pentecostals too easily become victims of emotional abandonment.

In looking at the physical developmental process, one sees a similar emphasis on strong emotionalism emerging during adolescence. As hormones begin to surge through immature bodies governed by the impulses of still developing brains, teenagers are flooded with feelings. These feelings become the lens through which they see the world and interpret their experiences. It is precisely because of this that adolescence can be such a volatile time. In a dualistic religion where the intellect is locked into immature, dualistic ways of perceiving the world, extreme emotionalism can wreak the same havoc on believers that hormones create in immature physical bodies.

With the critique of Fundamentalism, and even more specifically, Pentecostal Fundamentalism, I have offered in the preceding pages, one may get the impression that I see it as an incorrect or “wrong” religious approach. More accurately, I see it as severely limited in its usefulness. Traditional Pentecostalism may be a religious expression that is stuck in spiritual adolescence, but because of that distinction, it holds a special attraction to children, teenagers, and adults who are still functioning at that level of understanding.

The Fundamentalist literal approach to the Bible stories of the Old Testament is something that children can grasp. The “rules” of Fundamentalist Christian living offers clear parameters for the pre-adolescent mind. It is no coincidence that Fundamentalist churches have the most vibrant Sunday schools and children’s ministries in the country. While Fundamentalism represents Christian understanding at a pre-operational level, Pentecostalism mirrors the experiences of the emerging adolescent. Pentecostalism is the perfect incubator for stage three faith in Fowler’s taxonomy of the stages of faith. But faith, like life and humanity, must constantly grow and evolve. Too often, thoughtful fundamentalists reach a certain point in their own intellectual and psychological development where fundamentalism does not reach. As the mind reaches for a more abstract, mythological understanding of faith which is characteristic of Fowler’s stage 5, one often finds that fundamentalism simply refuses to embrace that path, or the believer who feels impelled to go there. In terms of Fowler’s stages of spiritual development, there is a vast chasm separating stages three and five . . . a chasm that fundamentalist based approaches to faith cannot bridge.