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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Bible in America: The Power of Books

A few years back I stumbled across a remarkable Bible campaign.  Beginning in 1921 and continuing throughout the twentieth century, Bible evangelists based at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute delivered Bibles, New Testaments, and tracts to underserved regions.  This campaign, which began as part of the Bible Institute Colportage Association and eventually became part of the Moody Literature Mission, delivered millions of Bibles and religious literature to the Southern Appalachian region, as well as the Ozarks, western logging camps, Louisianan Catholic schools, prisons, hospitals, and other venues in which missionaries thought people were hungry for the Word. 

            At the time, I focused my study on the missionaries’ use of Appalachian public schools as a distribution network for this religious literature.  I published some of my findings in an academic journal [“The Quiet Crusade: The Moody Bible Institute’s Outreach to Public Schools and the Mainstreaming of Appalachia, 1921-1966,” Church History 75:3 (September 2006): 565-593.] 

            Looking over my notes as I thought about the meanings of the Bible in Fundamentalist America, I came across my collection from this research.  As usual, there was a lot more material than what I could use in the article. 

            For the next few posts, I’ll pull up various pamphlets, brochures, and other materials from this archival collection.  Most of the material is available at the Moody Bible Institute in downtown Chicago.  The people there were very accommodating and friendly on my visits, and the archive is certainly worth a visit if you’re in the area. 

            I won’t argue that these materials somehow capture any single essence of fundamentalist attitudes about the power of the Bible.  That would be far too simplistic.  But I do believe that the attitudes toward the Bible expressed in these materials give a window into a commonly held fundamentalist vision of the nature of Holy Scripture.  As we’ll see, the Bible missionaries from Chicago believed the Word had a unique power.  The Gospels, to them—and, I argue, to many fundamentalists in the 1920s and since—meant more than just a collection of edifying religious messages.  As we’ll see, many of these Bible missionaries held a fundamentalist belief in the saving power of this powerful text. 

The most powerful book, fundamentalists agree, is the Bible.  Among conservative Protestants, the Bible is often considered to have supernatural power on its own.  The Chicago book missionaries of the Bible Institute Colportage Association and Moody Literature Mission were no exceptions.  They believed the Bible could transform lives.  But the Chicago book missionaries also believed in the power of non-Biblical literature.  Especially as a counterweight to an expanding pulp press, Bible-friendly fiction could be an important way to save souls.  In this post, I’ll describe an example of each type of book that the Chicago book missionaries distributed.

First, the Bible.  The most commonly distributed Bible book wasn’t the entire Bible, but rather a special edition of the Gospel of John.  This edition was edited by TC Horton in 1922.  At the time, Horton was at the peak of his career.  He was a minister and organizer in the Los Angeles area.  He was best known in 1922 as the editor of the Kings Business, the magazine of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University).

Horton’s attitude toward this little volume was clear from the verse on the front cover.  Sorry, it’s hard to read in this photo, but the verse says,

  Here is a little book for you!

                        Just take it, now, and read it through.

                        Page sixty-six, verse thirty-one,

                        Believe it, and the work is done!

If any curious reader followed this clue, he or she would find the following verse: “But THESE ARE WRITTEN, THAT YE MIGHT BELIEVE THAT JESUS IS THE CHRIST, THE SON OF GOD; AND THAT BELIEVING YE MIGHT HAVE LIFE THROUGH HIS NAME.”

In case readers didn’t follow the cover clue, Horton repeated the message on the inside cover.  Horton insisted that the Gospel of John was “the incomparable piece of English Literature.”  But it was not only good literature.  It was inspired by God in order specifically to convert people to Biblical Christianity.  If only people would read these words, Horton believed, their lives would be transformed.  As Horton insisted, this supernatural power was the reason why this Gospel “should be placed, as far as possible, in the hands of every man, woman, and child in the world.”

As we’ve seen, fundamentalists in America have embraced this mission.  In a campaign that sometimes seems bewildering to non-fundamentalists, Bible missionaries have worked to get people to see these Gospel words.

The files of the book missionaries shed some light on this attitude toward the saving power of Gospel words.  The first director of the Bible Institute Colportage Association, William Norton, told stories of the instant power of the words of the Gospel.  In 1921, Norton told a story of a man given a Gospel tract.  At first, the man ignored it.  “Coming to a hedge,” Norton related, “he stuck the tract into the hedge.”  However, thanks to the awesome power of the words of the Gospel, “it was too late; his eyes had caught a few words of the tract which led to his conversion.”  In another story from 1921, a vicious murderer found a copy of a Gospel tract.  “Through reading the Gospel of John this man saw the error of his way, changed his manner of living, and moved to the Bear Creek community in Scott County, Tenn.”

For Bible missionaries like the ones from Chicago, this power of conversion came from the power of the Gospels.  The words were inspired by God to lead to this kind of conversion.  It only made sense, then, to distribute those words as widely as possible.  This attitude toward the words of the Gospel has informed the outreach of Fundamentalist America in ways that remain bewildering to folks who don’t understand the impulse.  But if we can understand this book, these words, as inspired by God to lead people to salvation, we can understand something about the Fundamentalist desire to get these words in front of as many people as possible.  For the Chicago book missionaries, this meant delivering hundreds of thousands of copies of these tracts and Gospels to children across the nation.

Among fundamentalists, only the Bible had the kind of supernatural power that could lead people to instant conversion, merely by seeing the words.  But other kinds of books, too, could help.  The Chicago book missionaries also distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of short novels.  These books weren’t as powerful as the Bible, but they could still work to combat the trend toward sin in popular literature.  As one missionary warned in 1937, they needed uplifting books “during these difficult days when much pernicious literature is being widely distributed by religious cults, atheistic organizations and anti-Christian societies, whereby many are being deceived and destroyed.”

Back in 1921, William Norton had called these books “true-to-the-Bible literature.”  One of the most popular was Rosa’s Quest, originally published in 1905.

In this story, a poor girl is lost in a big city.  Her Christian mother had died, and just before she died she told Rosa to find her in the “beautiful land.”  Unfortunately, the girl lacked any Christian education.  She wandered around the city, rebuffed by nominal Christians who did not reach out to her.  Finally, a missionary on a city bus explains the Word of God to Rosa.  Rosa is converted, then adopted by a wealthy secular family.  In the end, Rosa converts all of her new family using the Gospel.

In the eyes of Bible missionaries, books like this did not have the same supernatural power as the Gospel itself.  They could not change lives simply by being read or heard one time.  But missionaries still reported that the books could help save souls.  One missionary in 1921 reported that the children she worked with were “very enthusiastic” about Rosa’s Quest.   One child from Madison County, Kentucky, wrote to the BICA to thank them for the free books, and noted that he felt “like little Rosa in Rosa’s Quest.  I have found the way to heaven.”  Another recipient wrote in 1937,

“FROM KENTUCKY: ‘In the year 1929, one of my friends loaned me some of your books entitled “Little King Davie,” “The Way Home,” “The Robber’s Grave,” “A Peep behind the Scenes,” and others.  I was thirteen years of age.  God definitely spoke to me through the books and gave me a peep behind the curtains which hid my heart.  In the same year I received a heart-felt experience from God, and also a call into His service.  I am now a missionary in the mountains of Kentucky.”

For the conservative Protestant missionaries of the Moody Bible Institute, books had power.  Some of them, if they contained the actual words of the Gospels, could have supernatural power.  Those words, distributed in books, tracts, and leaflets, emblazoned on billboards, eventually printed on Tim Tebow’s face, could change a life in an instant.  Other books, like Rosa’s Quest, merely provided information about how such change could happen.  They did not save lives the same way the Gospel could, but they kept young people from reading literature that could confuse them or lead them into sin.

 

 

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on April 9, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, From the Archives
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Posted by Adam Laats on April 9, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/04/09/from-the-archives-bible-in-america-the-power-of-books/

In the News: Tebow in Fundamentalist New York

I know I’m not alone in hoping for some kind of Tim Tebow media blackout.  I was hoping the end of the football season, especially with the Broncos’ defeat, would bring some quiet to the Tebow-as-Christian-in-a-strange-land stories.  But Tebow’s move to the New York Jets brought a new round of media focus on Tebow’s style of loud public Christian-ness.

IMHO, the most interesting comment on the Tebow move came from Paul Moses at dotCommonweal.  Moses noted that the New York press tended to gasp at the incongruity of an extravagantly Christian celebrity in the extravagantly pagan Big Apple.

Moses pointed out,

The Times put it this way: “Tebow is also a somewhat incongruous fit: an outspoken Christian playing  in a city known for its extensive night life and a member of a  franchise made famous by the bachelor stylings of Joe Namath and  currently known for the profane speeches of its coach, Rex Ryan.”

And this, from the National Enquirer: “It is unclear how the pie-eyed pundit of the pigskin will respond to the multitude of temptations New York has to offer.”

Moses took such papers to task for assuming too much about life in New York City.  New Yorkers are a decidedly religious group.  Moses cited a Gallup poll from 1991 in which a majority of respondents–53%–said they prayed at least once a day.  The problem, Moses claimed, is that too many people equate Manhattan with the entirety of New York City.  In Manhattan, 17% of poll respondents claimed to be atheists.  In the Bronx, that number dwindled to 1%.

As we’ve pointed out here before, people who do not know much about Fundamentalist America often assume that religiosity goes up only with distance from big cities, education, and indoor plumbing.  It is just not true.  The myth might come from the association in the United States of conservative evangelical Protestantism with conservative religion as a whole.  But if we look at other conservative religious folks, New York City has as much of a claim to fundamentalism as anywhere else.  In the Catholic Church, for example, New York City is now home to genial Archbishop Timothy Dolan.  Dolan’s blog and very public presence inject a strain of conservative religiosity into life in the Big Apple.  And, of course, outside of Christianity, New York City is host to innumerable conservative religious groups.  The old joke about the hayseed who comes to New York and is surprised by the number of “New York Amish” demonstrates that New York has its own profound tradition of deeply conservative culture and theology.

Even within the bounds of conservative Protestantism, large urban areas have always served as strongholds.  True, someone wanting a Protestant fundamentalist education could go to Bob Jones University in lovely Greenville, South Carolina.  Or she could go to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.  But she could also head to Los Angeles to Biola University, or to Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute or Wheaton College.

The roots of this commonly held misperception, I think, come from the utter dominance of conservative evangelical Protestantism in some rural areas.  When folks from the big city drive around in fly-over country, they are shocked by the public dominance of this type of fundamentalism.  But such folks ought to look closer at their own cities.  Look for storefront Pentecostal churches.  Look for big cathedrals.  Look beyond the stereotypes of cities as home only to nightlife and paganism, and you’ll notice a deeply religious urban America.

There might be a few translation difficulties as Tebow  moves from the Bible Belt to the Big Apple, but there will not be any lack of fundamentalists ready to greet Tebow as he (if he?) makes his New York Jets debut.

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on April 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on April 5, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/04/05/in-the-news-tebow-in-fundamentalist-new-york/

IN THE NEWS: Ignorance or Disdain? Fundamentalists, Science, and Alternative Intellectual Institutions

The folks at Scienceblog recently reviewed the findings of Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at University of North Carolina.  In his study, Gauchat found that Americans who self-identify as conservatives trust “science” less in 2010 than conservatives did in 1974.  In contrast, self-identified liberals and moderates kept a stable attitude toward “science” during that period.

So what do these findings tell us?  On first glance, it might seem as if conservatives simply don’t like science.  After all, we’ve seen a rush to denigrate climate-change science and evolution among 2012’s Republican Presidential candidates.  This confirms some culture-war stereotypes, which paint Fundamentalist America as the hillbilly redoubt of Nascar, meth labs, married cousins, and a hatred for all forms of higher learning.

But the study needs a second look.  The level of respondents’ education had an inverse relationship to their reported trust of “science.”  That is, conservatives who had more education tended to trust science less.  This is not about anti-intellectualism or anti-science, at least not as such.

Let me suggest an historical analogy.  I’m not sure if it’s got legs, but I think it’s worth thinking about if we want to understand the phenomenon of educated conservatives maligning “science.”

In the Glory Days of American liberalism, a deep distrust of the cultural and political establishment took hold among the well-educated Left.  With the founding of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, some of the best-educated young people in the country announced their disdain for the establishment world of universities, governments, and research centers.  These earnest, intelligent young leftists would have responded to a survey that they did not trust mainstream intellectuals.  As they agreed in their 1962 Port Huron Statement, SDS disdained academic culture. They attacked their “professors and administrators,” as tools of The Man who

“sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic.”

Did this disdain for the culture of higher education mean that the intellectuals of SDS were anti-intellectual?  No, what it signaled was an active disdain for the dominant culture of American higher education.

In less than a decade, this anti-establishment impulse among well-educated young leftists had careened down a startling path and mutated into a very different animal.  By 1970, the scattered remnants of SDS had resorted to bombing the Pentagon, army bases, and—accidentally—themselves.  Leftist disdain for the establishment had morphed from the smiling, fist-shaking intellectualism of the 1963 SDS meeting pictured above into the gleeful nihilism of Abbie Hoffman pictured below.

So what might this analogy tell us about the feelings of today’s conservatives and fundamentalists about mainstream science?  For one thing, it suggests that the proper term here is not “ignorance,” but “disdain.”  Well-educated American fundamentalists are not ignorant about mainstream science, but they feel a deep disdain for it.  That disdain has increased in the last generation as alternative intellectual institutions have propagated an anti-establishment culture.

Other studies have supported this intuition.  As we reviewed here recently, Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind included a survey of 2000 respondents.  In this study, self-identified conservatives and moderates were very good at predicting the moral responses of liberals.  Self-identified liberals, on the other hand, could not guess what conservatives might say.  This suggests that Fundamentalist America is well aware of what liberals think, but liberals have allowed themselves to become ignorant of other intellectual options.

Let’s return to our analogy to see if it helps explain this phenomenon.  If fundamentalists in 2010 share the disdain for mainstream intellectual culture that was espoused by well-educated young leftists in the early 1960s, what might be the results?

In the case of the Left, this divorce from academic culture was merely a trial separation.  Most of the student radicals of the 1960s and 1970s ended up the boring center-leftists of the 1990s.  The academically inclined among them founded or joined friendly academic centers hoping to eliminate racism or poverty or war.  The more talented and lucky managed to open new fields of study and press for new visions of education, promoting successful “ethnic studies” programs and multicultural education initiatives.  For a small minority of 1960s/70s leftists, those who followed the logic of anti-establishment culture to its bitter 1970s conclusion, this meant increasingly bizarre forms of dress and behavior, meant to signal distance from the establishment.  For a tiny fraction, this meant political and cultural violence, such as bombs at the Pentagon and Days of Rage.

What will it mean for fundamentalists?  If the historical analogy holds any weight, this distancing between mainstream science and fundamentalists will lead a small fringe on the Right to continue its violent campaign against America.  Like the violent Weather Underground, some fundamentalists will likely follow the logic of separation from mainstream culture to a violent conclusion.  But for the overwhelming majority of conservatives and fundamentalists, if the historical analogy holds any weight, it will mean the continuation of a trend toward alternative intellectual institutions.  Many conservative and fundamentalist intellectual types will find congenial homes in the widening world of the academy and private foundations/think-tanks.  Since the 1970s, indeed, we have seen a proliferation of conservative think tanks and foundations, such as the Heritage Foundation.  In recent years, these conservative alternative intellectual centers have offered well-educated fundamentalists a happy home in which to continue their intellectual work while continuing to feel a deep disdain for mainstream intellectual culture.  In some cases, this has included a disdain for mainstream science.  For example, a new intellectual center at Biola University, the Center for Christian Thought has promised to offer

“scholars from a variety of Christian perspectives a unique opportunity to work collaboratively on a selected theme. Together, they develop their ideas, refine their thinking, and examine important cultural issues in a way that is informed by Scripture. Ultimately, the collaborative work will result in scholarly and popular-level materials, providing the broader culture with thoughtful and carefully articulated Christian perspectives on current events, ethical concerns, and social trends.”

Just as the 1970s witnessed a huge increase in Left-friendly academic centers and fields of study, so this widening cultural distance between educated fundamentalists and mainstream science and academic life should lead to an increase in fundamentalist-friendly academic centers like this one.  It will lead to a deepening division between types of well-educated people; it will force Americans to confront their notions that there is one “correct” version of science and intellectualism.

***Thanks for the reference to Tim Lacy at USIH  ***

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on April 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on April 4, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/04/04/in-the-news-ignorance-or-disdain-fundamentalists-science-and-alternative-intellectual-institutions/

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