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Twenty-five years later, however, the fundamentalist cause was very much alive and well. What happened between 1930 and 1950 to bring about a reversal in fundamentalism's fortunes? This is the story Joel Carpenter tells so well. Like Professor Marsden, he sees fundamentalism as a movement full of "paradoxical tensions." Not the least of these has to do with the fundamentalists' basic understanding of their place in North American culture. The Puritan notion of America as having a special divine appointment among the nations is deeply embedded in the fundamentalists' collective psyche. But the nineteenth-century Darwinian crisis and (not unrelated) the increasing influence of secularism in American public life brought about a strong sense of cultural transition that, as Marsden argued, was not unlike an immigrant experience. In this case the migration was not one of literal geography, but as evangelical Protestants moved into the twentieth century they felt like they 'Were somehow being transported into a strange new land. They were moving from the New Israel to the New Babylon.

The battles against theological modernism during the first thirty years of the twentieth century only served to reinforce this mood of cultural pessimism. Having lost the struggle for control of the old-line denominations, the fundamentalists came to see their role in the larger culture in "remnant" terms: They were the faithful cognitive minority who possessed inside "prophetic" information about the world's inevitable decline toward doom. The only hope for the future was the ushering in of a supernaturally initiated millennial kingdom. In the meantime, the faithful remnant must concentrate on the work of spiritual rescue by means of evangelizing the lost and providing spiritual nurture for the remnant. And that is precisely what the fundamentalists worked at for two decades. And in doing so—as it- turns out-they guaranteed their survival. Indeed, they did more than survive. They prepared the way for a vital evangelicalism that would come to function in recent decades as an influential movement in the Christian world in particular and in the larger American cultural scene in general.

Correcting an overreaction
What does all of this have to do with my perverse theological fantasy about a "neo-fundamentalist" movement? At the heart of this fantasy is the growing recognition that in all of my efforts to prove I have long ago abandoned fundamentalist traits and convictions, I have failed to acknowledge my indebtedness to—and my continuities with—the fundamentalism that nurtured me in my early years.

Joel Carpenter hits home with the criticisms he makes of folks like me. Take the case of Edward John Carnell. As a college student I took glee over the way Dr. Carnell attacked the fundamentalists in his 7he Case for Orthodox Theology. Characterizing fundamentalism as "orthodoxy gone cultic," he chided the movement for the pettiness of many of its attitudes and legalisms.

There is a certain measure of naivete embodied in these criticisms of fundamentalism, argues Professor Carpenter. All religious movements that are trying to accomplish something important are necessarily "cultic." A movement needs to forge an identity, which means establishing behavioral and cognitive boundaries. This is turn means devising, as Carpenter puts it, "mores and symbols" to live by, and these, by their very nature as human fabrications, reflect the circumstances of their makers." Furthermore, says Carpenter, Carnell and his colleagues failed to acknowledge that in their efforts to improve on what the fundamentalists had done, they were making use of the very subculture they were attempting to alter. While the fundamentalists could certainly be "intellectually lame, provincial, petty, mean-spirited, stultifying and manipulative" they also managed to produce a new generation-people like Carnell—who were not at all attracted to liberalism but who were restless to bring new intellectual and evangelistic energy to the larger vision they had received from their fundamentalist forebears.

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November (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44