by David Stokes
“It is tempting to say that what we now call World War One was merely about military might meeting political folly. But I think the roots of the conflict lay in something more philosophical — even spiritual.”
How did a conflict triggered by a 20-year-old fanatic with a Browning semi-automatic pistol in the faraway Balkans provide the catalyst for the formation and emergence of a vibrant Independent Baptist movement in America?
One hundred years ago this summer, the world lurched and stumbled into the most destructive war it had ever seen. Eventually, 65 million men would be mobilized. Twenty million would die. Another 21 million would be wounded. In the conflict’s wake — and as world leaders planned, plotted, and partitioned — much of the planet became a hot zone as an influenza epidemic wiped out another 25 million people.
Historians and scholars are still trying to figure out what happened that fateful summer a century ago. Was the casus belli of what was then called The Great War (or informally, The War to End All Wars) the inevitable result of a tangled web of alliances and treaties ebbing and flowing between the nations of Europe? Or, was it because there had been a decades-long arms race, including the proliferation of a new class of warship, the Dreadnought? Were political leaders guilty of hubris? Did soldiers and sailors really believe the whole thing would be over in a matter of months?
One of the better books on the subject came out in 1962. Written by Barbara Tuchman and titled The Guns of August, it chronicles the miscalculations, underestimations, and shortsighted decisions made by European leaders in the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914.
President John F. Kennedy, a voracious speed-reader, devoured the book when it came out. A few months later, when faced with his own unique crisis-laden situation — Soviet missiles were being placed in Cuba — he read it again. He wanted to get a copy to the captain of every ship on the “quarantine” line he had established to intercept Russian ships bound for Havana during those tense days.
It is tempting to say that what we now call World War I was merely about military might meeting political folly. But I think the roots of the conflict lay in something more philosophical — even spiritual.
In 1983, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident, received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion at a ceremony in London. During his acceptance speech he may very well have explained not only the “revolution” that wrecked his homeland, but the underlying cause of the colossal conflict that wreaked havoc on the world beginning in 1914:
“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why this has happened.” [Emphasis added]
For decades, continental Europe had been creeping and convulsing away from its historic religious underpinnings. Across the English Channel, Great Britain was drifting, as well, but the impact of pulpit giants during the latter part of the nineteenth century mitigated the spiritual decline, at least somewhat.
This was not the case in France or Germany. The French Revolution had left in its wake the kind of tyranny that would appear again and again over the next two centuries. The revolt that began in 1789 was in many ways the sinister ancestor to Communism and Fascism. And in Germany a new “rationalism” had gained a theological foothold in seminaries and churches.
The living God was being replaced with the worship of “reason.”
Soon, other destructive philosophical systems coalesced in this environment. Karl Marx crafted a political and economic vision for a world without God. Charles Darwin published his ideas about human origins — origins that had no need of a Creator. Then Friedrich Nietzsche and others began to cherry-pick all the new ideas characterizing the zeitgeist of 19th-century Europe and take them to their logical conclusion: God was dead.
The inevitable fruit of this long slide downward was best articulated in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamozov, published a few months before his death in 1880. One of his characters contemplates the ramifications of God dying: “Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?” This is often paraphrased in a quote attributed to the novelist: “If there is no God, everything is permissible.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
By 1914, the mix of Nietszche’s deification of the “will to power,” distorted forms of Darwinism, and it’s hybrid Social Darwinism (complete with its implications of selective racial superiority), and a perpetual arms race, had created spiritual dry cultural kindling just begging for a spark.
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has written: “… the erosion of religious authority in Europe over the centuries — meaning the erosion of biblically informed concepts of the human person, human communities, human origins, and human destiny — created a European moral-cultural environment in which politics was no longer bound and constrained by a higher-authority operative in the minds and consciences of leaders and populations.”
The United States managed to keep out of things “over there” for quite a while. Even the loss of 128 Americans aboard the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-Boat in 1915, wasn’t enough to draw us in. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson won a second term in 1916 campaigning on the slogan: “He Kept Us Out of War.”
But not for long.
Wilson, on April 2, 1917, asked Congress for a declaration of war so that the world could be made “safe for democracy.” He had a vision for a new world order. And as this nation mobilized to join the physical conflict, churches and denominations across the country were facing a very real internal war of their own. It involved the same philosophical ideas that had short-circuited the spiritual vitality of the old world. However, unlike Europe, America still had a sizable remnant of doctrinal diehards who would not bow the knee to any modern Baal.
Two theological ideas emerged in this country against the backdrop of the European war and our ultimate involvement: Fundamentalism and Premillennialism. The former was a reaction to attempts to undermine the authority of the historic Christian faith. The latter was a response to the false optimism of the social Darwinism behind various progressive movements, both secular and ecclesiastic. The war was proving every day that the world was not getting better and better. The social gospel, in concert with philosophies of human potential and the worship of reason, was proving to be powerless against human nature unredeemed and unrestrained by the salt-like impact of authentic Christianity, the kind rooted in a belief in the authority of Scripture.
Actually, the advancement of both Fundamentalism and Premillennialism began in 1909, a year that turned out to be pivotal for American evangelicalism. It was the year Cyrus Ingerson (“C. I.”) Scofield published his famous reference Bible. The Scofield Bible became the ultimate text for dispensational premillennial thought for the next 50 years.
Also, in 1909, Lyman Stewart, a wealthy Presbyterian oilman, attended a service at Baptist Temple in Los Angeles, where A.C. Dixon, pastor at Moody Church in Chicago, was the guest preacher. Stewart had been interested in Christian publishing and had the idea to bankroll some books to defend historic Christian doctrine. The preacher and the tycoon talked after the service and soon formed an alliance. Dixon established the Testimony Publishing Company and Lyman recruited his brother Milton to help.
They became the Koch brothers of conservative Christianity for the next few years, anonymously funding the printing and distribution of twelve books called The Fundamentals. These volumes, mailed free of charge to hundreds of thousands of people across America, were published between 1910 and 1915, and each contained articles written by the leading conservative Christian teachers of the day — B.B. Warfield, R.A. Torrey (who edited the final three volumes), G. Campbell Morgan, A.T. Pierson, W.H. Griffith-Thomas, Thomas Spurgeon, and C.T. Studd. Eventually, more than three million copies were distributed.
The Fundamentals informed and fueled a movement. By 1920, the name “Fundamentalist” was being worn as a badge of honor by Americans who cherished sound Biblical doctrine. These same people were resolved that the ideas that led to spiritual bankruptcy in Europe would never gain a stranglehold over America.
There is one particularly interesting sidelight from the days of The Great War and the convergence of Fundamentalism and Premillennialism, and this had to do with views on the subject of patriotism.
At first, many Christian conservatives of the day — people who would soon be identified as Fundamentalists — were wary of involvement in the war. William Jennings Bryan is an example. The man today remembered most for his tepid final act at the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, was actually a multi-faceted character. The three-time Democratic nominee for President (1896, 1900, and 1908) helped get Wilson elected in 1912. He was rewarded for his efforts with an appointment as U.S. Secretary of State. But war talk led him to resign in the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. He opposed America’s entry into the war, not as a pacifist, but as a “peace-advocate.”
Then there was Billy Sunday. The famous evangelist was at the peak of his popularity as American boys began to cross the ocean to fight. And he turned his meetings into patriotic affairs. He said: “Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms and hell and traitors are synonymous.” He called the Germans “a great pack of wolfish Huns whose fangs drip with blood and gore.” Billy’s words were seldom minced.
One of the watershed moments in the embryonic days of American Fundamentalism, coming just five days after Congress declared war on Germany and the Central Powers, Billy Sunday opened a ten-week meeting in New York City. A temporary “tabernacle” with a seating capacity of nearly 20,000 was erected at 168th Street and Broadway. It filled every time the evangelist preached. Four train-car loads of sawdust covered the floor. Total attendance reached more than 1.5 million, and there were more than 98,000 conversions.
The New York Times, which just days before Sunday’s arrival in the city had been carrying banner headlines about the country’s wartime mobilization, began to make a place on the masthead for a box score about Billy’s campaign. Directly across from the paper’s iconic motto, “All the News that’s Fit to Print,” readers saw a daily running total of converts from the upper Manhattan meetings.
Billy Sunday held a premillennial view of Biblical prophecy, though this subject had been studiously avoided in The Fundamentals. Instead, Mr. Scofield’s Bible and study notes became the primary delivery mechanism for the increasingly popular eschatological view.
The strongest opposition to those who were moving toward a premillennial viewpoint, in light of world events, was not from Biblicists who held different views on the end times (read: Postmillennialists or Amillennialists). Instead, the fire came from theological liberals, chief among them Shailer Matthews.
The dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, Matthews, was an outspoken advocate for theological liberalism — particularly what was known as the social gospel. He published articles and pamphlets ridiculing the idea of a literal Second Coming of Christ. One of his colleagues even went so far as to speak out against premillennialism as a dangerous ideology that was contrary to “the very heart of American ideals.”
These liberal theologians saw premillennialism as “a sinister conspiracy.” They even tried to imply that holding the doctrine could be treasonous. Shirley Jackson Case (a male, despite the name), also on the Divinity School faculty in Chicago, told newspaper reporters from the Chicago Daily News: “Two-thousand dollars a week is being spent to spread the doctrine. Where the money comes from is unknown, but there is strong suspicion that it emanates from German sources. In my belief the fund would be a profitable field for governmental investigation.”
The argument seemed to be that describing the world as beyond repair was akin to anarchist ideas about blowing things up in order to build something better. Case, in an article titled “The Premillennial Menace,” suggested that while our soldiers were fighting in France “it would be almost traitorous negligence to ignore the detrimental character of premillennial propaganda.”
One Fundamentalist replied smartly: “While the charge that the money for premillennial propaganda ‘emanates from German sources’ is ridiculous, the charge that the destructive criticism that rules in Chicago University ‘emanates from German sources’ is undeniable.”
And popular Bible teacher Arno C. Gaebelein spoke out on the destructive influence of apostate theology on European culture. He suggested that if churches in Germany and other European countries had “entered the conflict against German rationalism fifty years ago, as loyalty to Christ demanded, this most destructive and hideous of wars could never have occurred.”
Fundamentalists and Premillennialists were joining hands as never before. And this union brought about a change. Premillennialists had long been critical of reform and progressivism, seeing not only no hope, but no point in dealing with cultural issues. But when America went to war, more and more of those who had disengaged from trying to influence culture found ways to reconcile an ultimate hope with temporary issues.
J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth was one of the earliest to combine ardent premillennialism with an activist approach to community standards and issues. Billy Sunday clearly modeled this as well. For others, the journey was more conflicted, though they eventually arrived. William Bell Riley, pastor of First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, was becoming one of the nation’s leading Fundamentalist-Premillennialists.
As the war in Europe was nearing its end in 1918, he said he had no quarrel with the cry: “Make the world safe for democracy.” He did, however, add: “But who will rise, and when will he come to make democracy safe for the world?” He then emphasized that nothing was more compelling than personal conversion and the “divinely appointed plan of divine redemption.”
Riley, Norris, and many others would ride the Fundamentalist-Premillennialist wave for the next few years and see their movement become, for a brief time, one of the most potent in the nation during the 1920s. The Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken would eventually write, “Heave an egg from a Pullman car anywhere in the country and you’re likely to hit a Fundamentalist smack in the face.”
Of course, not all Fundamentalists were, or became Premillennialists, or vice versa. The primary place the two viewpoints meshed and survived, and in many cases flourished, was among Baptist separatists.
Now, a century after the beginning of the war that was supposed to end all wars, this unwavering belief in the Fundamentals of the historic Christian faith and an unshaken hope in Biblical promises yet unfulfilled, still helps to define Independent Baptists.
David R. Stokes is a best-selling author, columnist, broadcaster, and has served as senior pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, VA, since 1998.