December 8 1997

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

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 ...