Straight White American Jesus - Racism at the Start: History of the Religious Right (re-issue)
Aired: 2020-09-08
Duration: 06:33


=== Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy (05:51) ===

[00:00:00]  - Axis Mundy. - Axis Mundy. - Axis Mundy. - Axis Mundy.
[00:00:15]  I am officially running for President of the United States.
[00:00:22]  The American dream is dead.
[00:00:26]  Please, please, it's too much winning.
[00:00:30]  We can't take it anymore.
[00:00:31]  We have to keep winning.
[00:00:33]  We have to win more.
[00:00:35]  We're going to win more.
[00:00:37]  Okay, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:00:40]  I am Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religion at Skidmore College.
[00:00:44]  And I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
[00:00:49]  Last episode, we called it 81% and we were looking at how and why 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
[00:00:58]  And we left the discussion with a key question.
[00:01:00]  We had put forward, or at least I had put forward, the thesis that Republican or politically conservative identity is a part of the religious identity of contemporary white evangelical Christians.
[00:01:12]  But it brought up the question of how did that happen?
[00:01:14]  There was a time in our relative lifetime when there was no religious right as we now experience it.
[00:01:22]  And so what we want to look at today is how that came to be.
[00:01:25]  How do we get from a time when to be an evangelical Christian was not necessarily to be a Republican or politically conservative and vice versa?
[00:01:34]  How did that develop?
[00:01:35]  We're going to take a look at that, and then we're going to turn to Brad's conversation with Professor Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth scholar who has spent decades studying evangelicalism in America, and is one of the world's, not just in the U.S., but in the world's authoritative voices on the subject.
[00:01:51]  And so that's going to be our focus today.
[00:01:53]  How did we get to this contemporary situation, this contemporary socio-political formation?
[00:01:59]  And so Brad, I'm going to throw it over to you.
[00:02:01]  Where does the story of what we now call the religious right begin?
[00:02:06]  Yeah, I mean, as a scholar, you know, we only have so much time.
[00:02:09]  And so, as a scholar, I feel like it's my duty to always preface any conversation with a disclaimer, right?
[00:02:15]  It's complicated.
[00:02:16]  People spend their lives studying these things.
[00:02:17]  We could fill—and people have—10 or 12 volumes on the subject.
[00:02:22]  Let me just say this.
[00:02:23]  The story—the modern story begins at the end of the 19th century, and that's a time of, you know, rapid industrialization.
[00:02:32]  The USA becomes, at that point, right, in the end of the 19th century, what we might call a modern nation.
[00:02:38]  And this sort of transition to a modern era brings with it growing pains, and it brings with it new ideas and new factors for Americans.
[00:02:48]  One of those is the arrival of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
[00:02:51]  I mean, this is something that is still raging today.
[00:02:53]  There are still debates about teaching evolution and creation all over the country.
[00:02:58]  Another is, and this is something that's really important to note, is the development of what's now called biblical studies.
[00:03:05]  And what that means, and this is really important for the ongoing discussion, is that scholars begin to study the Bible like they would have studied other texts.
[00:03:15]  Okay, so they took the blinders off and said, okay, let's study this book historically.
[00:03:20]  Let's study this text from a literary perspective.
[00:03:24]  Let's look at the archaeology of this text.
[00:03:27]  And by doing that and by deconstructing this sort of sacred text, they opened up a whole new can of worms.
[00:03:34]  Okay, so we have these things happening.
[00:03:36]  And again, if you want to read about all of those sort of movements and all of those phenomena, there's fantastic text that happens.
[00:03:43]  But by the end of the century, there's a major split between Protestants in this country.
[00:03:49]  Okay, so there's kind of two types of American Protestants that emerge into the 20th century.
[00:03:54]  One are often referred to as mainline Protestants or liberal Protestants.
[00:03:59]  And on the whole, and again, this is a characterization.
[00:04:02]  But on the whole, this group is urban, socially oriented, meaning they participate in politics and see it as part of their religion.
[00:04:09]  They see the gospel of Jesus Christ as fundamentally about improving society, helping the vulnerable, the sick, those who are most in need.
[00:04:20]  They see Christianity as accommodating modern culture, not at odds with it.
[00:04:25]  They're open to science, and they're open to biblical criticism.
[00:04:29]  On the other side, you have what emerge are those who are called fundamentalists or, later on, evangelicals.
[00:04:37]  On the whole, and again, a characterization, this is a group that is largely rural.
[00:04:41]  It's individual-oriented.
[00:04:44]  It sees the gospel as saving individual souls rather than sort of bettering society.
[00:04:50]  It shuns compromise with modern culture.
[00:04:53]  It's suspicious of things like media, newspapers, eventually the movies, etc.
[00:04:59]  They reject the authority of science, and they are suspicious of academics.
[00:05:03]  Yeah, one of the things that you're highlighting here with these terms is there are a lot of ways that scholars will map these groups, but you hit on it.
[00:05:10]  This one group is known as the Fundamentalists, and that's a term probably everybody's familiar with, but it gets its name in this period.
[00:05:15]  There was a series of pamphlets called the Fundamentals, the idea being that they're fundamentals of faith that would argue against that academic study of the Bible that you're talking about.
[00:05:24]  That would argue against evolutionary theory, that would argue in favor of a literal reading of, say, the creation account in Genesis, and those other sort of mainline Protestants who were more open to modern culture came to be known as the modernists.
[00:05:39]  So if people are looking into this, you'll often see this whole period as the so-called modernist-fundamentalist controversy, or the battles between modernism and fundamentalism within American Christianity.

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