Welcome to the many new subscribers of The Cottage. I’m glad you are here!
A couple of announcements to begin:
This Sunday, we’ve got a guest post from Brian McLaren. He recently preached an inspiring sermon at First Presbyterian in New York to commemorate Shall the Fundamentalists Win? It complements my series on the topic — and I wanted to share it with you. The entire sermon is below.
Brian recently hosted me on his podcast, Learning How to See, for the Center of Action and Contemplation. I hope you’ll enjoy it. CLICK HERE to listen to the entire thing. (There’s a short preview of this podcast below.)
I’m still working to find a date with Bill McKibben for our live Cottage chat about his new book, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened. We’ll get that date to paid subscribers soon! I promise! I know many of you are looking forward to having him with us.
Finally, there will be no mid-week Cottage this week. I’m road-tripping to Georgia for Southern Lights. You can still join Southern Lights ONLINE via livestream over Memorial Day weekend. The conference is not part of the Cottage subscription and is a separate registration fee. But, if you register for the event, you can attend in real time or listen at your leisure any time within the next three months. CLICK HERE for more information (great speakers and musicians) and registration.
Meanwhile, the thread for today’s musing is “for the living of these days.” Give us strength and courage God!
Peace to you all.
Diana
Welcome our guest preacher Brian McLaren to The Cottage!
Shall the 21st Century Fundamentalists Win?
by Brian McLaren
One hundred years ago, someone was sitting where you are now sitting. They listened to their pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, as he asked Shall the Fundamentalists Win? And here you are today, as we reflect on this same question.
If we framed the last hundred years as a horse race between two versions of Christianity, Fundamentalist Christianity and Mainline Christianity, we might call the race like this.
It’s 1922, folks, and the fundamentalists are staging a comeback around the five fundamentals they published in 1910. But Harry Emerson Fosdick has activated the Protestant Mainline, and they have the swelling social gospel movement giving them momentum as they surge ahead of the pack.
Wait - it’s 1925 and the fundamentalists pull out front in the public eye by flexing their muscle in public school curriculum. They’re outlawing the teaching of Critical Race Theory - no, it was evolution in Tennessee. But wait - the Scopes Monkey Trial is backfiring. The fundamentalists seem to be falling behind into a period of embarrassment, public shame, and retreat. It’s the Mainline ahead again!
Suddenly, it’s 1929 and the stock market crashes, and as the 1930’s begin, most Mainline clergy praise FDR for organizing the nation in love for neighbor, another major gain for the Mainline. In fact … look who’s on the cover of Time Magazine: it’s Harry Emerson Fosdick! But now it’s the late 30’s, and conservative clergy are organizing against the New Deal and laying the foundation for a new alliance between conservative Christianity and America’s corporate titans.
Then it’s 1941, folks, and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US has entered World War II. That’s a plus for the Protestant Mainline, as they are seen as the party of patriotism and support of the war. Look - it’s 1944, and there’s Reinhold Niebuhr spurring the Mainline horse even farther into the lead, with his neoorthodoxy and his message of political realism. Look, it’s 1948 and Time Magazine puts Niebuhr on the cover! Another win for Mainliners!
But wait. Don’t count the fundamentalists out just yet. Now it’s 1954 and it’s - it’s — it’s Billy Graham on the cover of Time Magazine! It’s working, folks. They’re putting the fun back into fundamentalism, and rebranding it as Evangelicalism!
If we had time, we could trace the race going forward through the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, to 9/11 and beyond. We could explore how anxiety, outrage, and animus built momentum for fundamentalism’s greatest win of the century in 2016, when Fundamentalists — rebranded as Evangelicals and Charismatics — became the warhorse on which Donald Trump staged his triumphal entry into Washington … And we could interpret January 6, 2021, as an example of how far Fundamentalism will go to keep winning by any means necessary.
But we’re here this morning for more than looking back on a 100 year horserace. We want to look at fundamentalism in our current reality, and consider its role in our future. And we want to consider what call to action emerges from our considerations.
I speak as a child of fundamentalism, so I know it from the inside. Fosdick preached his sermon just 2 years before my father was born and 5 years before my mother was born. I was raised with a deep commitment to all five of the so-called fundamentals that Fosdick noted: 1. inerrancy of the Bible, 2. imminent physical second coming of Christ, 3. virgin birth, 4. physical resurrection, 5. penal substitutionary atonement. My parents saw themselves as valiant defenders of the faith against the invading hoards of devilish liberals and demonic modernists.
I might still be a fundamentalist today if it weren’t for two gifts my parents gave me.
First, they infused in their conservative theology with the “liberality of spirit” Fosdick described when he said, “We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.” My parents manifested that liberality of spirit so beautifully that I identified Christianity more with that liberal spirit and less with fundamentalist intolerance. When I was a boy in the 1960s, I watched my parents graciously but courageously scandalize people in our segregationist church when they welcomed people of all races to our dinner table and … to our church. That courageous liberality of spirit was their first gift to me.
Their second gift was that they taught me to love the Bible and Jesus more than Fundamentalism. They gave me permission to critique fundamentalism based on the Bible and the life and teaching of Jesus. When I was a teenager and experienced a deep personal spiritual awakening, I started reading the Bible on my own, from Genesis to Revelation, again and again, so I could better understand Jesus. And here’s what I discovered: the Bible was a progressive book and Jesus was a progressive leader. Fosdick captured it perfectly when he said: “[Jesus] did not think that God was dead, having finished his words and works with Malachi. Jesus had not simply a historic, but a contemporary God, speaking now, working now, leading … people now from partial into fuller truth. Jesus believed in the progressiveness of revelation.”
So I am here today as someone raised in Fundamentalism who is glad to be liberated from it, who grieves to see the ugly and dangerous thing it has become, and who fears its worst atrocities may still be in the future. I am grateful that Rev. Fosdick pulled the fire alarm a hundred years ago and named the threat of fundamentalism. But I think if Rev. Fosdick were standing here today, he wouldn’t cast the great challenges we now we face as a horserace between two brands of traditional Christianity. Instead, if he were preaching here today, I think he would ask different and more radical questions entirely. In fact, that’s what you’ll be hearing from the guest preachers who will be with you this month.
When Fosdick preached his 1922 sermon, a young 33 year old fellow had recently joined the German Workers Party, which he quickly took control of. He organized an attempted coup in Bavaria in 1923. The coup failed, but he was learning a skill that would serve him well in the coming years — the skill of highlighting racial, religious, and sexual differences to stir fear and anger and accumulate power.
A hundred years later, we see how people today are still tempted by that same toxic and intoxicating cocktail of racism, religious bigotry, and sexual stigma served at the bar of social media by today’s authoritarian conmen — whether they’re on AM radio, Cable TV, in Congress, or the White House. A fusion of white Christian fundamentalism and desperate political fascism is as much a threat as you sit here today as it was when Fosdick preached in 1922.
I was a refugee from fundamentalism. The more questions I asked, the more quickly I realized that the religious community of my upbringing and young adulthood were not a safe or honest home for me. I crossed the border and found a safe place of refugee in Mainline or liberal Protestantism. I had great hope that Mainline Protestantism could rise to the challenges of today’s world, and I’ve worked hard to help Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and their allies to seize the moment.
But a few years ago, a Lutheran minister pulled me aside. “McLaren,” he said, “you’re so naive. You’re right: fundamentalists were rigid in their doctrines, and we Mainliners are more progressive and flexible doctrinally. But we’re just as rigid in other ways. You might say you grew up with doctrinal fundamentalists, but we Mainliners are often liturgical fundamentalists, and we’re as loyal to our books of order as fundamentalists are to their doctrinal statements. You have high hopes for us, and I once did too, but when I look around today, I see most of us Mainliners keeping busy micromanaging our decline.”
His little private lecture helped me see that for the last hundred years, fundamentalists thought they were losing, so they fought hard. But Mainliners by and large thought they were winning, and so they were, all too often, comfortable and complacent. That’s why I wonder if that’s one of the questions a contemporary Harry Emerson Fosdick would raise today: Not shall the fundamentalists win, but Shall today’s Mainline or Progressive Christians self-destruct by complacently micro-managing their own decline?
To make his point, I could imagine Rev. Fosdick preaching from a text like this one, in Mark 8:
[Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
For Jesus, trying to win or save or conserve or micromanage the status quo makes no sense when your life is in danger.
That’s why I’d like to warn you about the five new fundamental realities we face. A hundred years ago, the people sitting where you now sit had no idea what would arise between their time and ours: first, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; second, climate change and a multifaceted environmental catastrophe; third, a resurgence of ugly and vicious white Christian supremacy; fourth, a form of capitalism so successful that it is not only too big to fail, but also too big to control; and fifth, the power of a small cadre of oligarchs to buy candidates and governments and media outlets and use them for their own kleptocratic purposes, including invading countries and threatening World War III.
In light of these probing questions from Jesus, and in light of the five fundamental existential threats we face, a contemporary Harry Emerson Fosdick might raise a question that challenges both fundamentalists and Mainliners, perhaps, What good is winning a religious horserace when your very life is at risk? What good is winning power, money, and numbers when the climate collapses? What good is having your leader on the cover of Time Magazine when the nuclear bombs fall? What good is getting invitations to the White House when the civil war breaks out, or the violent insurrections multiply, or the sea levels rise and the wildfires spread and the crops fail?
Fosdick was right: religious fundamentalism was a threat in 1922 and is a threat in 2022. But now religious fundamentalism has become interwoven in a larger complex of 21st century fundamentalisms: Yes, religious fundamentalism … but also political fundamentalism… economic fundamentalism … racial fundamentalism … nationalistic fundamentalism … partisan fundamentalism … educational fundamentalism … all afraid of change, all addicted to delusions of past grandeur, all too confident in their old answers to wake up to new questions.
Over this last century, calm, cool, and collected Mainliners have quietly carried on as hot, angry, and organized fundamentalists have gained ground, and things have gone, not as Rev. Fosdick hoped, but as he feared.
That’s why, if he were here today, I think he would ask if we’re willing to give and live and spend our wild and precious lives for the movement for justice, joy, and peace that Jesus called the gospel.
I think he would say to this congregation and other willing congregations, “Next Sunday and every single Sunday going forward, let’s come back and make every minute of every Sunday count for something more than saving or conserving our religious traditions and assets. Let’s move beyond liturgy as usual. Let’s bend every single prayer, every single sermon, every single song and hymn, every single meditative silence and experience of the eucharist toward the challenge of us becoming the kinds of Christ-infused people who can meet the challenge of today … not just to preach Christ or sing Christ or adhere to liberal or fundamentalist beliefs about Christ but more - to become the kinds of Christ-soaked people who live Christ in the fundamental danger and opportunity of this moment. Twentieth century liberalism and twentieth century fundamentalism are behind us. They had their day; they both won in some ways and they both lost in some ways. It’s a new century, and we face new fundamental threats and new existential challenges. So. . .
It’s time for all of us, whatever our religious identity, to look up from the religious knitting with which our hands are so piously busy … and to look up from the liturgical grindstones to which our noses are so piously glued … and to look up from the theological screens which keep us forever focused within an arm’s length. A new question interrogates us: What in God’s name are we going to risk and dare and do — together with all who are willing, whatever their religious identity — about the convergence of five fundamental catastrophes that we face right now? That question we must answer, not with words alone, but with the liturgy of our lives.”
And so, echoing Rev. Fosdick, we pray: “God of grace, God of glory … Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days.” Amen.
(reprinted with the permission of the author)
INSPIRATION
God of grace and God of glory,
on thy people pour thy power;
crown the ancient church's story;
bring its bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of thls hour,
for the facing of thls hour.
Lo! the hosts of evil round us,
scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us,
free our hearts to love and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days,
for the living of these days.
Cure thy children's warring madness,
bend our pride to thy control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss thy kingdom's goal,
lest we miss thy kingdom's goal.
Set our feet on lofty places;
gird our lives that they may be
armoured with all Christlike graces,
pledged to set all captives free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
that we fail not them nor thee,
that we fail not them nor thee!
Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the search for thy salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving thee whom we adore,
serving thee whom we adore.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick
Sunday Musings
great article, causing some very useful reflection on the differences between fundaments and conservatives. I would encourage you to finish the horse race, especially through the 70s, 80s and nineties. Thanks much
i remember at a world parliament there was a clergy from south africa who said where are your scars because the scars are where your spirituality should be... thankyou for the great critical comments to the mainliners and the fundamentalists