George Marsden

Um, he's sort of a historian.

Uh, and this is, was actually began as his dissertation at Notre Dame under George Marsden.

But he talks, he describes the contemporary evangelical church today as beset with juvenilization.

And, um, this is how he defends, defines this term.

Starting in 1910, a Protestant Christian group published a series of essays called The Fundamentals that stipulated what all Christians should believe, though through a Protestant lens.

According to the historian George Marsden, Protestant fundamentalism really took off in the 1920s, though, as a reactionary backlash against modernism, a backlash against the theory of evolution, growing popularity of liberal theology, and biblical critical scholarship.

As you might have picked up in this video, the publication of new Bible translations was the animating force behind the King James Onlyist movement.

All of the criticism was leveled against scholarly critical editions, but scholars of fundamentalism in recent years have modified Marsden's anti-modernism theory.

For example, the historian Margret Bentroth notes that Christian fundamentalism is selectively anti-modernist.

Christian fundamentalists are often on the cutting edge of technology, from radio to television, and now even TikTok.

Moreover, fundamentalists are not isolationists, as Marsden suggested.

Other historians, like Matthew Avery Sutton, argue they have consistently worked to reform and transform their culture in ways that match their beliefs and ideologies, which is what we see with the modern Christian nationalist movement in American politics.

Um, and then also, I don't know, were you a part of the, um, the blogging moment where you had of...

So Alia Marsden, um, is in my cohort here.

She had been, she had been blogging as a woman, a fe-- you know, woman Christian, this whole blogging thing, and then there was that moment when somebody basically said, "Hey, wait a minute.

These women bloggers are pro-"

Mid-20 teens, especially with the election of Donald Trump, everything sort of comes apart in terms of that expectation.

And I, you know, I think Calvin, Calvin University with the...

Because it is owned by the Christian Reformed Church, um, you know, when the Christian Reformed Church took this strong turn towards a renewed confessionalism, and one might argue, say, a young, restless, and reformed confessionalism, as opposed to, let's say, the 1970s with Waltersdorf and Plantinga and Marsden and Mao, a much more open, and with Mao especially, sort of an open evangelicalism, um, you know, this-- these are the waters that are, that, that a place like CT has to navigate on, on top of the fact of what you talked about earlier, that, you know, journalistically, CT, I'm sure, was doing very well, and then now everything in terms of print journalism has to adjust with respect to the internet.

So I don't know.

Y- you're here at Duke.

You're working with George Marsden.

Some of you might not know the name George Marsden.

He was a historian who really laid the groundwork for how we understand, um, conservative Protestantism.

It used to be that we would, uh, that w- this group, this is like a very broad picture, but a group we now refer to as fundamentalists had largely retreated from popular culture.

I see.

And so, uh, I graduated from college in 1981, went to seminary in 1982.

George Marsden, who became my graduate advisor, wrote a book called Fundamentalism and American Culture in 1980.

So this...

Have you ever heard of George Marsden?

I've heard of James Marsden.

Cyclops? [laughs]

No, I don't think so.

Oh, yeah.

Uh, George Marsden was a, I think he was a Calvin College church history professor.

Um, studied at a few, I think he studied at Westminster, so he's, he's, you know, he's been out there.

... objectively bad.

Yeah, you're, um, you've highlighted on something that, uh, George Marsden describes in the early 20th century, um, that, uh...

Ca- and you mentioned evangelicalism early.

Evangelicalism is a really complicated, uh-

But-

Sure

... uh, George Marsden talks about that period in the early 20th century, the fundamentalism modernist controversies, when-

Yeah

some other ways of engaging scriptures and imagining who God is.

And it was in college that I read George Marston's book about fundamentalism that I had this kind of thunderous moment of, this is my church and what's a group of Chinese people doing here? inhabiting this very American particular moment in America.

Like it was just, I don't know.

It was a moment of disclosure for me.

And in fact, the great phrase in our culture about this is, I'm a professional, which means I'm sold into the institution.

You read George Marsden's The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, where he where he talks about the early post-war period.

Great little book based on a series of lectures that George Marsden gave.

And he talks about this anxiety in the 50s about the corporate man.

And you can imagine that because after this this enormous, traumatic, world-shaking period, which is the First and Second World War, the Great Depression and in between.