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During the past decade or so I have occasionally played around with a rather perverse theological fantasy. I have thought of announcing the formation of yet another "neo" movement within evangelicalism—this one I would label "neo-fundamentalism." I hasten to repeat: It is a mere fantasy, and admittedly a perverse one. But there is nonetheless a germ of seriousness for me in the idea.

The thoughts that sparked the fantasy came shortly after current Notre Dame professor George Marsden published his much-acclaimed history of Fuller Seminary titled Reforming Fundamentalism. A person who was quite fond of Fuller told me he liked the Marsden book very much but found the title "embarrassing." This wasn't a word I would have thought to use, so I pressed him for clarification. He explained that he had rejected his fundamentalist upbringing and now looked to Fuller for "a more sophisticated evangelicalism." But to make a big thing about Fuller's connection to a fundamentalist past, he said—well, it was for him "embarrassing." Much better, as he viewed things, to reject fundamentalism altogether than to be associated with any effort to "reform" it.

Prior to this conversation, I hadn't thought much about the Marsden title. But now I began to muse about what it means to "reform" something. It would be very strange, for example, to give the title "Reforming Roman Catholicism" to a book about the Protestant Reformation. When the sixteenth-century Reformers set out to change things, they broke completely with the Roman church. They were re-forming (re-making, re-establishing) the church as such-a church that, as they saw things, had gotten completely messed up in Catholic hands. When a group within a particular political party, on the other hand, announces that it is working for the reform of their party, they are not trying to create a brand-new entity but rather to renew the existing party from within. They are working on something they see as seriously damaged—but they are also convinced it is worth fixing.

The person who expressed annoyance with Professor Marsden's book title would have been happy, I'm sure, with "Reforming Evangelicalism" as an alternative. This person saw fundamentalism as a distorted version of the evangelical movement. To attempt a repair job on fundamentalism was, for him, a waste of time. He saw Fuller Seminary as embodying a new kind of evangelicalism—one purged of fundamentalist distortions.

My own criticisms of fundamentalism are probably quite similar to his. But I do have a difficult time seeing the fundamentalists as nothing more than the villains in the story of evangelical reform.

Survival and beyond
I must confess that in my own support for the "neo-evangelical" cause I have often engaged in a bit of fundamentalist-bashing. This is why it was good for my soul to read Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of AmericanFundamentalism, a compelling account and an honest assessment of what happened to American fundamentalism from 1930 to 1950. Professor Carpenter's book picks up the story where George Marsden left off in his much-discussed 1980 book titled Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. Together these two books provide an excellent and authoritative history of the fundamentalist movement.

As the conventional wisdom had it at the time, Protestant fundamentalism was all but dead by the end of the 1920s. The fundamentalists had struggled for several decades against "modernizing" tendencies in old-line Protestantism, and now they had, to all appearances, lost the battle. Their efforts to gain control of denominational seminaries and missionary agencies had failed, and one of their most visible champions, William Jennings Bryan, had suffered a humiliating defeat in the infamous J. T. Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925.

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November (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44