tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post3284155061041817406..comments2024-03-26T11:33:59.219-06:00Comments on Religion in American History: What Came First?: Postwar Evangelicalism or the Religious Right?Paul Harveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13881964303772343114noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-58765270554293581672015-06-11T10:20:16.370-06:002015-06-11T10:20:16.370-06:00Typo: you mean Matthew Sutton, not William. Typo: you mean Matthew Sutton, not William. danielsillimanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16856570617681199873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-12163820435061541982015-06-10T09:39:00.795-06:002015-06-10T09:39:00.795-06:00Janine,
excellent review and summary remarks. I lo...Janine,<br />excellent review and summary remarks. I look forward to reading this book, and I appreciate the bibliography. I have been thinking a great deal about dispensationalism, the relationship between apocalyptic thought and forms of political activism, etc. as I have been working my way through Matthew Sutton's American Apocalypse. This has led me back to older works such as Ernest Sandeen's book and scholarship on the emergence and development of fundamentalism (and the significance of premillennialism).<br />You pose a number of very important questions and topics that demand fuller answers than we already have. <br />I thought I'd make a few general comments about the FCC and why southern evangelicals were "repelled" from it. I think it is almost impossible to distinguish nealty between theological, political, and cultural reasons for their hostility to the FCC. I have been examining how certain local church leaders were responding to a report commissioned by the FCC (around 1932) under the leadership of Broadus Mitchell, who at the time was a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins (I will give the short version since I am working on the details of this and have not published any of this material, though I have presented versions of this chapter at conferences). Mitchell later was a Socialist candidate for mayor of Baltimore. The lynching took place in Salisbury, MD. To make a detailed story really short, the objections by local pastors not only focused on Mitchell's "communistic leanings," which in part were based on awareness of his membership in the ACLU, but also the criticism was that the FCC did not know the customs of local church people. It was portrayed as an elite, New York organization that looked down upon southern religious folk. So regionalism, proximity and location were all factors in this criticism. But the local pastors also asserted that the FCC was not an exponent of true Christianity, though the aspersions in this regard were hardly detailed and seemed to be based on more generalized claims that it espoused "modernistic" theology. Some of these theological criticisms seemed inextricably linked to the place of the FCC (big bad New York City), its misguided theology (which caused it to fail to discern that a socialist could not "get" southern folk religion as a genuine expression of Christian faith), and its highly educated folk who were distanced by their learning from everyday people.<br />On the more general issue of regionalism, not all Southern religious folk, evangelical and others, were opposed to the FCC. The Southern Presbyterians were in and out of the FCC as full members, leaving when they felt the FCC took too public a stance on some social issue, which for them violated the independent stance of the church as a corporate body. At least the women's division of the Southern Methodists threw their support behind the FCC's campaign for a federal anti-lynching bill in 1934. I think that was a remarkable development, given the heated rhetoric around state's rights regarding lynching. I could go on because I am teasing out the particular denominational affiliation of members of the FCC's Department of Race Relations, but I will stop here. I have found some evidence for the active membership and work of southern white women, especially Methodists. So your question makes me think that it is all the more important to dig deeper as I think about the FCC's relationship to the South and to southern evangelicals in particular. But that only deals with one of your many queries!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18010665657724524657noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-55832151178108922972015-06-09T16:03:53.144-06:002015-06-09T16:03:53.144-06:00Ought we understand the Social Gospel movement and...<i> Ought we understand the Social Gospel movement and the theological movement toward "liberalism" as an instigator of Southern evangelicalism?<br /></i><br /><br />Could be. And of course the frustration of evangelicalism to explain itself in the secular milieu, or even to itself. Was William Jennings Bryan really arguing for literal Biblical truth to be the law of the land--as that stupid movie depicts him--or against modernity and what THAT entails?<br /><br /><i>Days after the trial ended, Bryan died in his sleep. Shortly before, he wrote:<br /><br />"Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can be perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of machinery. ... If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene."</i><br /><br />http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/people/william-jennings-bryan.htmlTom Van Dykehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07121072404143877596noreply@blogger.com