Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism / Edition 1

by Joel A. Carpenter, Julie Metz Design, Cornell Capa, Magnum Photos, Inc.

Overview

Publicly humiliated by the Scopes "monkey trial", fundamentalism in America seemed extinct by the end of the 1920s, and appeared invisible to the mainstream until the popular revivals of the 1940s and 1950s led by evangelists such as Billy Graham. In this groundbreaking book, Joel A. Carpenter illuminates these hidden years of the fundamentalist movement's career, and in the process provides answers to the riddle of its survival.

Skillfully blending painstaking research, telling anecdotes, and astute analysis, Carpenter brings this era into focus for the first time. He reveals that contrary to the popular opinion of the day, fundamentalism was alive and welt in America in the late 1920s, and used its isolation over the next two decades to build new strength from within. Through a reasoned, objective approach to a topic that is all too often reduced to caricature; Carpenter offers a fresh perspective on the continuing influence of the fundamentalist movement in modern America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195129076
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	03/28/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1540L (what's this?)

About the Author

About the Author:
Joel A. Carpenter is Provost of Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has also been the Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College as well as Director of the Religion Program of The Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments		ix	(2)
Preface		xi
Introduction		3	(10)
1 A Thriving Popular Movement		13	(20)
2 The Separatist Impulse		33	(24)
3 Separated from the World		57	(19)
4 Separated unto the Gospel		76	(13)
5 A Window on the World		89	(21)
6 Will Revival Come?		110	(14)
7 Tuning in the Gospel		124	(17)
8 An Evangelical United Front		141	(20)
9 Youth for Christ		161	(16)
10 World Vision		177	(10)
11 Can Fundamentalism Win America?		187	(24)
12 Revival in Our Time		211	(22)
Conclusion		233	(14)
Appendix: Fundamentalists' Views of Prophecy and the End of Time		247	(4)
Notes		251	(68)
Index		319

Editorial Reviews

"Carpenter's book is one of the best we have on fundamentalism."—Books & Culture

"Indispensable.... Carpenter is comprehensive without ever becoming pedantic."—Christianity Today

"A lucid, in-depth account. "—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

In 1925, H.L. Mencken scoffed that if he heaved an egg out of a Pullman window anywhere in the country, he would hit a fundamentalist. But by 1930, defeated by their public humiliation in the Scopes "monkey trial," those same fundamentalists seemed to have disappeared. Or had they?

In this groundbreaking new book, historian Carpenter, provost of Calvin College, argues that fundamentalists did not vanish in the 1930s and '40s—they went underground and built a unique and powerful subculture, with Bible schools, foreign mission societies, seminaries, camp meetings, and mom-and-pop publishing houses. Carpenter traces the vitality of the fundamentalist movement from 1925 to 1950, arguing that fundamentalism actually expanded during the '30s, when mainline Protestants were experiencing a precipitous decline. What's more, these militantly antimodern crusaders eagerly embraced the most cutting-edge of mediums, radio, to proclaim their old-time gospel message. Radio evangelists like Paul Rader and Charles Fuller gave fundamentalists a respectability they had coveted since Mencken's hurtful depictions of them as ignorant backwater bumpkins. Radio was fundamentalism's entry into many American homes. In the 1940s, the highly successful Youth for Christ movement built on this media-savvy precedent, gaining mass appeal with slick publicity campaigns and evangelists be-bopping from the pulpit to contemporary big-band tunes. So when the nation as a whole began turning to religion in the anxious days of WW II and its aftermath, fundamentalists were at the ready with their well-established infrastructure. The "prophet" who arose from this fundamentalist subculture and was a product of its Bible schools, radio ministries, and revival circuits was the legendary Billy Graham, who helped bring fundamentalism further into the American mainstream.

A valuable contribution to a critical but neglected era in fundamentalist studies.

Kirkus Reviews