As the broader culture in Western Europe and the US became more modern, pressures on the Christian tradition increased, again reaching a boiling point with the popularity of Darwin's theory of natural selection (i.e., "evolutionary theory") as the 19th Century drew to a close. It was an optimistic time for the secular outlook of those impressed by science. For the first decades of the 20th Century, it seemed as though science was close to explaining, without appeal to God, just about everything of importance, and that the world's problems could best be handled by utilizing the knowledge and power science provides. World War I put a damper on things, but perhaps it could be explained as resulting from the messes created by the ignorance of the past. The future looked bright, and the social scientists unanimously predicted that religion would fade and die as people became educated.
In the US, there were also other pressures on traditional Christian thinking, described in the Chapter.
One prominent Christian response to these pressures adopted the name, 'fundamentalism'. Other responses were very different. We will use the fundamentalist response as our focus for a while, partly because it eventually became quite influential in the 60's through the 80's in the US, and possibly retains considerable influence still. Moreover, it connects with religious revival movements throughout much of the world in other religious traditions. Understanding the fundamentalist response to modern pressures on religious thinking will help you understand much of the current interaction between culture and religion. It also allows us a way of understanding other, nonfundamentalist religious responses to the modern world, by contrasting those other responses with the fundamentalist style of response.
In their Chapter 2, Marty and Appleby introduce you to 20th Century Protestant Christian fundamentalism in its various forms. Fundamentalism is not some neat, easily defined package. People, especially in their forms of religious expression, do not fall into such tidy categories. However, there definitely was something that happened in the Christian community near the end of the 19th Century and on through the 20th Century that felt distinctive, that has a definite militant or hard-line flavor, and that came to be known as Protestant Christian fundamentalism. (Just lately, it seems there might be a fundamentalist movement also developing within Roman Catholicism, with movie-maker Mel Gibson involved in it. We can perhaps talk about that later. Marty and Appleby don't really discuss it.)
Your job is to try to get an introductory grip on this phenomenon by reading these pages in Marty and Appleby. The better you understand this reading, the better you will be equipped to understand the videos about this subject that will be shown in class.
Study questions
Here are some questions about the reading. If you can answer these, you are on the way. (These are to be turned in.)