Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture focuses on the founding generation of American fundamentalism in the 1920s and 1930s and their interactions with modernity. While there were culture wars, there was also an embrace. Through a book culture, fostered by liberal Protestants, and thriving periodicals, they strengthened their place in American culture and their adaptation helps explain their resilience in the decades to come. The most significant adaptation to modernist culture was the embrace of the modern, secular university as a model for evangelical higher education. After political battles along sectarian lines in the twenties, fundamentalists learned to compete in a pluralist society. By the thirties they were among the strongest supporters of Jews and began working with Catholics to fight communism. In politics and higher education they encountered issues of race, gender, and class. While opposing higher critics of the Bible, their approaches to texts were in some cases similar: a focus on the original languages, commitment to scholarship, ambiguities about both the role of reason and the interpretation of key doctrines. Several had graduate training, some even in European universities. With their views of end times, they continued innovative approaches to prophetic texts from nineteenth-century dispensationalists. In response to evolution and prophetic texts, in a time-conscious age, they also had innovative ideas about biblical time. Fundamentalists engaged in debate with Freud and, while rejecting his ideas, absorbed elements of psychology. Some understood William James’ effort to accommodate religion and modern ideas. Although rejecting John Dewey’s pragmatism, fundamentalists found value in studying modern philosophy. They tapped a secular, Enlightenment philosophy to defend their supernatural Christianity. Between the wars they even participated in the interest in Nietzsche. Usually dismissed as fractious, they rose above core differences and cooperated among themselves across denominational lines in building organizations. In doing so, they reflected both the ecumenism of the liberal Protestants and the organizational impulse in modern urban, industrial society. This study, the first to focus on the founding generation, also covers a broad spectrum of fundamentalists, from the Northeast, Midwest, the South, and the West Coast, including some often overlooked by other historians

The relationship between Protestant fundamentalists and mass culture is often considered complex and ambiguous. Selling the Old-Time Religion examines this relationship and shows how the first generation of fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing, advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel. Selectively, and with more sophistication than has been accorded to them, fundamentalists adapted to the consumer society and popular culture with the accompanying values of materialism and immediate gratification, despite the seeming conflict between these values and certain tenets of their religious beliefs. Selling the Old-Time Religion is written by a fundamentalist who is based at the country's foremost fundamentalist institute of higher education. It is a candid and remarkable piece of scholarship that reveals from the inside the movement's first encounters with some of the media methods it now wields with well-documented virtuosity. Carl Abrams draws extensively on sermons, popular journals, and educational archives to reveal the attitudes and actions of the fundamental leadership and the laity. Abrams discusses how fundamentalists' outlook toward contemporary trends and events shifted from aloofness to engagement as they moved inward from the margins of American culture and began to weigh in on the day's issues--from jazz to "flappers"--in large numbers. Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 1930s "were willing to compromise certain traditions that defined the movement, such as premillennialism, holiness, and defense of the faith," Abrams concludes, "but their flexibility with forms of consumption and pleasure strengthened their evangelistic emphasis, perhaps the movement's core." Contrary to the myth of fundamentalism's demise after the Scopes Trial, the movement's uses of mass culture help explain their success in the decades following it. In the end fundamentalists imitated mass culture not to be like the world but to evangelize it.

7 Books That Rocked the Church, by Daniel Crane, explores controversial books throughout history that the Christian church has famously disavowed—and asks the question, Why? Engagingly written and thoughtfully researched, this book explores what the “fuss” was all about with books ranging in date from the second century after Christ to more contemporary authors. Books by Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, and many others profoundly upset the church by calling into question foundational Christian doctrines or beliefs. Most of the books discussed here were banned at some time by Christian authorities. The author’s aim is to challenge Christians to respond critically but open-mindedly to books that oppose a Christian worldview. Readers of 7 Books That Rocked the Church will come away better equipped to answer the charge that the church is intolerant of competing ideas. They will also develop the ability to interact with new and possibly dangerous ideas that comport with Jesus’ admonition to be wise as serpents but gentle as doves. This book also includes discussion questions for further study. Valentinus the Gnostic: Who Doesn’t Love a Conspiracy Theory? (Think The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown) Galileo Galilei: A Scandal of Religion, Science, and Politics Voltaire’s Candide, Enlightenment Rationalism, and the Church’s Thin Skin Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Many Faces of Evolutionary Theory Marx’s Communist Manifesto: The Red Bull of the Masses Sigmund Freud’s Ego Joseph Campbell: Christianity as an (Almost) Enlightened Myth (A book that strongly influenced George Lucas’s Star Wars films)

This book draws upon the Mahayana philosophy developed within Buddhism, employing it as a means to empty our usual alternatives for viewing the world's many religions--whether exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. The aim is to free people from clinging to intellectual positions, enabling them gently but committedly to affirm their vernacular tradition as it is practiced on the ground. It critiques the above three options, and introduces the Mahayana philosophy of emptiness and dependent arising, along with its distinction between ultimate truth and conventional truth. It then applies this philosophy to an urgent question that bedevils modern people: how to practice one's chosen faith in the awareness of many other honored and attractive paths, both elegant and efficacious.

Reveals the history of Black Fundamentalists during the early part of the twentieth century As the modernist-fundamentalist controversy came to a head in the early twentieth century, an image of the “fighting fundamentalist” was imprinted on the American cultural consciousness. To this day, the word “fundamentalist” often conjures the image of a fire-breathing preacher—strident, unyielding in conviction . . . and almost always white. But did this major religious perspective really stop cold in its tracks at the color line? Black Fundamentalists challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith—doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth—against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements. Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression.

The Hollywood Brand traces the development of the moving picture from its humble roots as an object of mass amusement to its transformation into an art form worthy of exhibition in museums and academic study in leading universities. This book provides historical context to the ideas that coalesce to create the iconic Hollywood brand that comes to define American identity.

Today pentecostalism claims nearly 500 million followers worldwide. An early stronghold was the American South, where believers spoke in unknown tongues, worshipped in free-form churches, and broke down social barriers that had long divided traditional Protestants. Thriving denominations made their headquarters in the region and gathered white and black converts from the Texas plains to the Carolina low country. Pentecostalism was, in fact, a religious import. It came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. Adherents formed new churches in the Jim Crow South and held unconventional beliefs about authority, power, race, and gender. Such views set them at odds with other Christians in the region. By 1900 nearly all southern holiness folk abandoned mainline churches and adopted a pessimistic, apocalyptic theology. Signs of the last days, they thought, were all around them. The faith first took root among anonymous religious zealots. It later claimed southern celebrities and innovators like televangelists Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, T. D. Jakes, and John Hagee; rock-and-roll icons Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard; and, more recently, conservative political leaders such as John Ashcroft. With the growth of southern pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement moved cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different. Many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end. Yet a growing number did so as active political conservatives.