By the end of the 1920s, fundamentalism in America was intellectually bankrupt and publicly disgraced. Bitterly humiliated by the famous Scopes "monkey trial," this once respected movement retreated from the public forum and seemed doomed to extinction. Yet fundamentalism not only survived, but in the 1940s it reemerged as a thriving and influential public movement. And today it is impossible to read a newspaper or watch cable TV without seeing the presence of fundamentalism in American society. In Revive Us Again, Joel A. Carpenter illuminates this remarkable transformation, exploring the history of American fundamentalism from 1925 to 1950, the years when, to non-fundamentalists, the movement seemed invisible. Skillfully blending painstaking research, telling anecdotes, and astute analysis, Carpenter--a scholar who has spent twenty years studying American evangelicalism--brings this era into focus for the first time. He reveals that, contrary to the popular opinion of the day, fundamentalism was alive and well in America in the late 1920s, and used its isolation over the next two decades to build new strength from within. The book describes how fundamentalists developed a pervasive network of organizations outside of the church setting and quietly strengthened the movement by creating their own schools and organizations, many of which are prominent today, including Fuller Theological Seminary and the publishing and radio enterprises of the Moody Bible Institute. Fundamentalists also used youth movements and missionary work and, perhaps most significantly, exploited the burgeoning mass media industry to spread their message, especially through the powerful new medium of radio. Indeed, starting locally and growing to national broadcasts, evangelical preachers reached millions of listeners over the airwaves, in much the same way evangelists preach through television today. All this activity received no publicity outside of fundamentalist channels until Billy Graham burst on the scene in 1949. Carpenter vividly recounts how the charismatic preacher began packing stadiums with tens of thousands of listeners daily, drawing fundamentalism firmly back into the American consciousness after twenty years of public indifference. Alongside this vibrant history, Carpenter also offers many insights into fundamentalism during this period, and he describes many of the heated internal debates over issues of scholarship, separatism, and the role of women in leadership. Perhaps most important, he shows that the movement has never been stagnant or purely reactionary. It is based on an evolving ideology subject to debate, and dissension: a theology that adapts to changing times. Revive Us Again is more than an enlightening history of fundamentalism. Through his reasoned, objective approach to a topic that is all too often reduced to caricature, Carpenter brings fresh insight into the continuing influence of the fundamentalist movement in modern America,and its role in shaping the popular evangelical movements of today.

Reviews

In this riveting historical and cultural study, Carpenter, provost of Calvin College, examines the American Fundamentalism between 1920 and 1950. While several books (Sandeen's The Roots of Fundamentalism, for example) trace the origin and development of American fundamentalism, there are none that explore the relative silence of fundamentalism after 1925. While many observers, including the Christian Century magazine, saw it as the defeat of parochial and narrow fundamentalist theology, Carpenter demonstrates that the 1925 Scopes Trial was not a loss but a new beginning for American fundamentalism. Even though fundamentalism retreated from the social horizon after Scopes, in the 1930s and '40s it became introspective, attempting to reformulate its own mission and its relation to society. These two decades saw a new emphasis on the training of leadership in seminaries and the emergence of movements like Youth for Christ and various missionary movements that would bring revival to the world. According to Carpenter, fundamentalism's exile ended in the late 1940s, when various preachers, such as Bob Jones, began to use radio as an effective tool for spreading their message and when Billy Graham's revivals began to fill stadiums with capacity crowds. Carpenter's portrait of the lost years of American fundamentalist is compelling religious and cultural history. (Sept.)

"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

Carpenter (provost, Calvin Coll., Mich.) acknowledges that he was propelled by a "corrective motive" in writing about the complexity and contributions of fundamentalism as a faith system whose purposes and beliefs have all too frequently been reduced to caricature. To a large extent, he achieves his aim. He closely analyzes American fundamentalism from its humiliating encounter with modernism at the Scopes trial in the 1920s to its reemergence in the popular revivals of the 1940s and 1950s led by evangelists such as Billy Graham. Carpenter is careful to note nuances of theological difference within fundamentalism. His work is thoroughly documented, well written, and built solidly on the work of other historians of U.S. popular religion such as Ernest Sandeen (The Roots of Fundamentalism, 1970) and George Marsden (Fundamentalism and American Culture, 1971). Appropriate for academic collections in religion and in American history.‘Linda V. Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville