The book is organized into an demonstration and seven chapters. It seems useful to analyze these in sequence.
The Introduction is sub coroneted " delineate Fundamentalism and evangelicalism." He begins here, natur on the wholey, by offering some definitions:
[A]n American fundamentalistic is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal godliness in the churches or to changes in cultural values . . . [They] ar not just religious conservatives, they are conservatives who are unstrained to take a stand and to fight (Marsden 1).
This definition, of course, requires another. He states that "Evangelical" became the common name for the revival movements that swept through the English-speaking world and elsewhere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and whose style of talk largely shaped American Protestantism. After the evolution and schisms exposit in his maiden two chapters, Marsden offers the following definition:
[E]vangelicalism at present includes any Christians traditional enough to affirm the basic beliefs of the white-haired nineteenth-century evangelical consensus . . . [which] include (1) the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible, (2) the real historical character of God's saving
work recorded in scripture, (3) salvation to perpetual life based on the redemptive work of Christ, (4) the immenseness of evangelism and missions, and (5) the importance of a spiritually transformed life (Marsden 4-5).
The first two chapters offer an historical overview of the subject matter. Chapter 1 is titled "The Protestant Crisis and the Rise of Fundamentalism, 1870-1930." Here Marsden offers a masterful ecumenical history of American Protestantism that will enable any ratifier to grasp the relationships and difference amid the many kinds of conservative Protestant sects and movements that have arisen during the last thirteen decades, such as the Dispensationalists, Pentacostalism, and the holiness movement.
Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.
Chapter 5 covers "The Evangelical get it on Affair with Enlightenment Science." It is in good part a history of the rise of upstart science and education, and explains the contributions of the Enlightenment philosophers and scientists to modern thought. It also deals with Darwin, and the radical transformation -- symbolized by the rise of the name "science" to cover almost everything that had once been included below "philosophy" -- that produced the modern consciousness that many Evangelicals and almost all Fundamentalists resist. His central point is that Evangelicals and Fundamentalists accept science only as defined during the Enlightenment, by Locke, Newton, and other "natural philosophers," since that definition dummy up allows a reconciliation between Biblical literalism and a reasonable study of nature.
The last five chapters offer interpretations of more qualified topics. Chapter 3 is on "Evangelical Politics: An American Tradition." It offers a detailed survey, going back to the colonial era, of the complex relationships between religion and politics in the United States. It would be well to assume, as many people do, that politics is a
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