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Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, by Joel A. Carpenter (Oxford University Press, 335 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by John Wilson.

In its issue of June 24, 1926, the Christian Century wrote an obituary for fundamentalism. According to the arbiters of American culture, fundamentalism had been defeated and would soon fade away. Thus the stage was set for a reversal of historic proportions. Over the next several decades, the mainline Protestant denominations would suffer a disastrous decline while fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals prospered. This is the story told by Joel Carpenter, provost of Calvin College, in his new book, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism.

Thanks in part to the efforts of historian George Marsden, fundamentalism is attracting a great deal of scholarly attention. It has not always been so, and even in recent years scholarship on fundamentalism has focused disproportionately on the con-temporary Religious Right, with the distorting effect that in the minds of many readers the two terms are virtually synonymous. But we are beginning to see an increasing number of studies that attempt to understand fundamentalism (sometimes fundamentalism/evangelicalism or fundamentalism/Pentecostalism; the boundaries can't be neatly drawn) in greater depth. Some of these are historical, like Margaret Lamberts Bendroth's Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press, 1993); some are memoirs, like Through Isaac's Eyes: Crossing Cultures, Coming of Age, and the Bond Between Father and Son, by Daniel Barth Peters (Zondervan, 1996; see CT, July 14, 1997, p. 54), who holds a Ph.D. in history and American Studies "with a specialty in fundamentalist and evangelical culture"; others, like R. Marie Griffith's God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (University of California Press, 1997) and Brenda Brasher's Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), are "ethnographic" studies in which the author writes as a "participant observer." (Look for a review of the books by Griffith and Brasher in a forthcoming issue of CT.)

Among these new studies, none is likely to be as widely read and cited as Revive Us Again. Carpenter's book is indispensable for three reasons.

First, he focuses on the 1930s and 1940s, a period given short shrift in earlier histories of the movement. Referring to what he calls "the myth of fundamentalism's demise," Carpenter observes that while fundamentalism did indeed suffer public humiliation in the 1920s with the Scopes trial and other embarrassments, "loss of the respect of intellectual elites does not necessarily mean loss of popular support, and it may actually enhance the group's appeal in some circles." This was the secret dynamic that allowed fundamentalism to prosper at the same time mainline Protestantism dwindled.

Even nonfundamentalist evangelicals, Carpenter argues, were significantly influenced by fundamentalism: "The role of fundamentalism and its moderating heirs during our century has been similar, then, to the influence of Methodism during the first half of the nineteenth century and the pervasive reach of the holiness movement throughout the second half of that century."

That is a large claim, but Carpenter makes a persuasive case for it. Most readers of CT will recognize strands of their own lineage in his narrative: the call to be "separated from the world"; the emphasis on the "surrendered life"; the fervent revivalism; the missionary impulse; the jazzed-up gospel rhythms of Youth for Christ; the sense of intimacy and community created by radio preachers, whose congregations of the airwaves cut across denominational lines—all these and more in the fundamentalism of the thirties and forties helped to shape evangelicalism in the post-World War II era, even to this day.

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December 8 1997, Vol. 41, No. 14