Introduction

But the fundamentalists lost their case at Dayton, and it seemed to them that they had been treated with contempt and pushed to the margins of society.
Fifty years earlier, the New Lights had constituted a majority in America;
after the Scopes trial, they had become outsiders. But the ridicule of such secularist crusaders as Mencken was counterproductive.
Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument. After Dayton, they became more extreme. Before the trial, evolution had not been an important issue for them, and even such literalists as Charles Hodge had accepted that the age of the world was more than six thousand years, whatever it said in the Bible. Few fundamentalists had believed in the so-called “creation science,” which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail. But after Dayton, fundamentalists closed their minds even more, and Creationism and an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mindset.
They also drifted to the far right of the political spectrum. Before the war, fundamentalists like Riley and John R. Straton (1875--1929) had been willing to work for social reform and with people on the left.
Now the Social Gospel was tainted by its association with the liberals who had defeated them in the denominations. This will be a constant theme in our story. Fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism, and, under attack, invariably becomes more extreme, bitter, and excessive.
Darrow and Mencken were also wrong to assume that fundamentalists belonged entirely to the old world. In their way, fundamentalists were ardent modernists. By attempting to return to “fundamentals,” they were in line with other intellectual and scientific currents in the early twentieth century.
They were as addicted to scientific rationalism as any other modernists, even though they were Baconians rather than Kantians. As A. C. Dixon explained in 1920, he was a Christian “because I am a Thinker, a Rationalist, a Scientist.”
Faith was no leap in the dark but depended upon “exact observation and correct thinking.” Doctrines were not theological speculations, but facts. This was an entirely modern religious development, which was light years from the premodern spirituality of the conservative period.
Fundamentalists were trying to create a new way of being religious in an age that valued the logos of science above all else. Time alone would tell how successful this attempt would be religiously, but Dayton had revealed that fundamentalism was bad science, which could not measure up to the scientific standards of the twentieth century.
At the same time as the fundamentalists were evolving their modern faith, the Pentecostalists were creating a “postmodern” vision that represented a grassroots rejection of the rational modernity of the Enlightenment. Where the fundamentalists were returning to what they regarded as the doctrinal base of Christianity, Pentecostals, who had no interest in dogma, were returning to an even more fundamental level:
the nub of raw religiosity that exists beneath the credal formulations of a faith. While fundamentalists put their faith in the written Word of scripture, Pentecostalists bypassed language, which, as the mystics had always insisted, could not adequately express the Reality that lies beyond concepts and reason. Their religious discourse was not the logos of the fundamentalists, but went beyond words.
Pentecostalists spoke in “tongues,” convinced that the Holy Spirit had descended upon them in the same way as it had descended upon Jesus’ apostles on the Jewish feast of Pentecost, when the divine presence had manifested itself in tongues of fire, and given the Apostles the ability to speak in strange languages.
The first group of Pentecostalists had experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles on April 9,1906. The leader of the group was William Joseph Seymour (1870--1915), the son of slaves who had been freed after the Civil War, who had long been searching for a more immediate and uninhibited type of religion than was possible in the more formal white Protestant denominations. By 1900, he had been converted to Holiness spirituality, which believed that, as the prophet Joel had foretold, the gifts of healing, ecstasy, tongues, and prophecy enjoyed by the Primitive Church would be restored to the people of God immediately before the Last Days. When Seymour and his friends experienced the Spirit, the news spread like wildfire.
Crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into his next service in such huge numbers that they had to move to an old warehouse in Azusa Street. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States and the movement had spread to fifty countries. This first Pentecostal upsurge was yet another of the popular Awakenings that have exploded from time to time during the modern period when people have become convinced at gut level that a great change is at hand. Seymour and the first Pentecostalists were convinced that the Last Days had begun, and that soon Jesus would return and establish a more just social order. But after the First World War, when it seemed that Jesus would not return as quickly as they had expected, Pentecostalists began to interpret their gift of tongues differently. They now saw it as a new way of speaking to God.
St. Paul had explained that when Christians found it difficult to pray, “the Spirit itself intercedes for us with groans beyond all utterance.” They were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech.
In these early years, it did indeed seem that a new world order was coming into being at these Pentecostal services. At a time of economic insecurity and increased xenophobia, blacks and whites prayed together and embraced one another. Seymour became convinced that it was this racial integration rather than the gift of tongues that was the decisive sign of the Last Days.
The Pentecostal movement was not entirely idyllic. There were rivalries and factions, and some white Pentecostals set up their own separatist churches.
But the extraordinarily rapid spread of the movement among the people reflected a widespread revolt against the status quo. At a Pentecostal service, men and women spoke in tongues, fell into tranced, ecstatic states, were seen to levitate, and felt that their bodies were laughing in unspeakable joy. People saw bright luminous streaks in the air, and sprawled on the ground, felled by what seemed a weight of glory. This wild ecstasy was potentially dangerous, but in these early days, at least, people did not fall into despair and depression, as some had during the Great Awakening. African Americans were more skilled in this ecstatic spirituality, though later, as we shall see, some white Pentecostalists would fall into unhealthy and nihilistic states of mind. In its infancy, the movement emphasized the importance of love and compassion, which provided its own discipline. Seymour used to say:
“If you get angry or speak evil, or backbite, I care not how many tongues you have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.”
“God sent this latter rain to gather up all the poor and outcast, and make us love everybody,” explained D. W. Myland, an early interpreter of Pentecostalism, in 1910. “God is taking the despised things, the base things, and being glorified in them.” The stress on inclusiveness and compassionate love was in marked contrast to the divisiveness of fundamentalist Christianity. If charity is the final test of any religiosity, at this point the Pentecostalists were pulling ahead.
As the American scholar Harvey Cox has argued in an illuminating study of Pentecostalism, the movement was an attempt to recover many of the experiences that the modern West had rejected. It can be seen as a grassroots rebellion against the modern cult of reason. Pentecostalism took hold at a time when people were beginning to have doubts about science, and when religious people were becoming uncomfortably aware that a reliance upon reason alone had worrying implications for faith, which had traditionally depended on the more intuitive, imaginative, and aesthetic mental disciplines.
While fundamentalists were trying to make their Bible-based religion entirely reasonable and scientific, Pentecostalists were returning to the core of religiousness, defined by Cox as “that largely unprocessed nucleus of the psyche in which the unending struggle for a sense of purpose and significance goes on.” Where fundamentalists, by identifying faith with rationally proven dogma, were confining the religious experience to the outermost cerebral rim of the mind, Pentecostalists were delving back into the unconscious source of mythology and religiousness. While fundamentalists stressed the importance of the Word and the literal, Pentecostalists bypassed conventional speech and tried to access the primal spirituality that lies beneath the credal formulations of a tradition. Where the modern ethos insisted that men and women focus pragmatically only upon this world, Pentecostalists demonstrated the human yearning for ecstasy and transcendence.
The meteoric explosion of this form of faith showed that by no means everybody was enthralled by the scientific rationalism of modernity.
This instinctive recoil from many of the shibboleths of modernity showed that many people felt that something was missing from the brave new world of the West.
We shall often find in our story that the religious behavior of people who have not been major beneficiaries of modernity articulates a strongly felt need for the spiritual, which is so often either excluded or marginalized in a secularist society. The American critic Susan Sontag has noted a “perennial discontent with language,” which has surfaced in Eastern and Western civilizations whenever “thought reaches a certain, high excruciating order of complexity and spiritual seriousness.” At such a moment, people begin to share the mystics’ impatience with the capacity of human speech. Mystics in all the faiths have insisted that the ultimate reality is essentially ineffable and inexpressible. Some have developed modes of ecstatic utterance, not dissimilar to the Pentecostal speaking-in-tongues, to help an adept cultivate a sense that, when humans are in the presence of the sacred and the transcendent, words, and the rational concepts they express, fail us: Tibetan monks emit a double-bass drone, for example, and Hindu gurus a nasal whine. The Pentecostalists at Azusa Street had spontaneously hit upon one of the established ways in which the various traditions have sought to prevent the divine from being imprisoned within purely human systems of thought.
The fundamentalists, however, were moving in quite the opposite direction. Yet both Pentecostalists and fundamentalists were reacting, in their different ways, to the fact that by the early decades of the twentieth century, Western discourse had reached an unprecedented complexity. At the Scopes trial, Bryan had fought for the “common sense” of ordinary folk and tried to strike a blow against the tyranny of the experts and the specialists. The Pentecostalists were revolting against the hegemony of reason, but, like the fundamentalists, were insisting on the right of the least educated people to speak out and make their voices heard.
True to their exclusive and condemnatory piety, the fundamentalists hated the Pentecostalists. Warfield argued that the age of miracles had ceased; the Pentecostalists were as bad as the Roman Catholics in their belief that God overturned the laws of nature on a regular basis today. The unreason of the Pentecostalists was an affront to the scientific and verbal control that the fundamentalists were seeking to exert over faith, in their struggle to ensure its survival in a world that seemed hostile to it. Other fundamentalists accused the Pentecostalists of superstition and fanaticism; one went so far as to call the movement “the last vomit of Satan.” This vituperative and judgmental strain was one of the most unattractive traits of the new Protestant fundamentalism, and, after the Scopes Trial, this condemnatory attitude, which is so far from the spirit of the Gospels, would become even more marked. But, despite their differences, both the fundamentalists and the Pentecostalists were trying to fill the void left by the victory of reason in the modern Western world. In their emphasis upon love and their wariness of doctrine, the Pentecostalists were closer to the middle-class liberal Protestants at this early stage, though later in the century, as we shall see, some would be drawn into the more extreme, hard-line fundamentalist camp and would lose their sense of the primacy of charity.
In the jewish world, there were also signs that people were beginning to retreat from the overly rational forms of faith that had developed during the nineteenth century. In Germany, philosophers such as Herman Cohn (1842--1918) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886--1929) attempted to keep alive the values of the Enlightenment, though Rosenzweig also tried to revive the old ideas of mythology and ritual in a way that modernized people could appreciate.
He described the various commandments of the Torah, which could not always be explained rationally, as symbols, pointing beyond themselves to the divine. These rites created an interior attitude that opened Jews to the possibility of the sacred, helping them to cultivate a listening, waiting attitude. The biblical stories of creation and revelation were not facts but expressions of spiritual realities in our inner lives. Other scholars, such as Martin Buber (1878-1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897--1982), directed attention to those forms of faith which had been dismissed by the rationalist historians. Buber revealed the richness of Hasidism and Scholem explored the world of the Kabbalah. But these older spiritualities, which belonged to a different world, were increasingly opaque to Jews who were imbued with the rational spirit.
Zionists often experienced their defiantly secularist ideology in ways that would once have been called religious. People had to fill the spiritual vacuum somehow, in order to avoid nihilistic despair. If conventional religion no longer worked, they would create a secularist spirituality that filled their lives with transcendent meaning. Zionism was, like other modern movements, a return to a single, fundamental value that represented a new way of being Jewish. By going back to the Land, Jews would not only save themselves from the anti-Semitic catastrophe that some felt to be imminent, but they would also find psychic healing without God, the Torah, or the Kabbalah.
The Zionist writer Asher Ginsberg (1856--1927), who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha-Am (“One of the People”), was convinced that Jews had to develop a more rational and scientific way of looking at the world.
But, like a true modern, he wanted to return to the irreducible essence of Judaism, which could only be found when Jews returned to their roots and took up residence in Palestine. Religion, he believed, was only the outer shell of Judaism. The new national spirit that Jews would create in the Holy Land would do what God had once done for them. It would become “a guide to all the affairs of life,” would reach “to the depths of the heart” and “connect with all one’s feelings.” The return to Zion would thus become the sort of interior journey once undertaken by Kabbalists: a descent to the depths of the psyche to achieve integration.
Zionists, who often hated religion, instinctively spoke of their movement in Orthodox terminology. Aliyah, the Hebrew word they used for “immigration,” was originally a term used to describe an ascent to a higher state of being. They called immigrants olim (“those who ascend,” or “pilgrims”).
A “pioneer” who joined one of the new agricultural settlements was called a chalutz, a word with strong religious connotations of salvation, liberation, and rescue. When they arrived at the port of Jaffa, Zionists would often kiss the ground; they experienced their immigration as a new birth, and, like the biblical patriarchs, sometimes changed their names to express their sense of empowerment.
The spirituality of Labor Zionism was most eloquently and powerfully expressed by Aharon David Gordon (1856--1922), who arrived in Palestine in 1904 and worked in the new cooperative settlement in Degania in the Galilee. There he experienced what religious Jews would have called an experience of the Shekhinah. Gordon was an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist, but he was also a student of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and Tolstoy.
He had come to believe that modern industrialized society exiled men and women from themselves. They had developed a one-sided and over rational approach to life. To counteract this, they must cultivate chavayah, an immediate, mystical experience of the sacred, by immersing themselves as fully as possible in the life of the natural landscape, because that was where the Infinite revealed itself to humanity. For Jews, that landscape must be in Palestine.
“The soul of the Jew,” Gordon insisted, “is the offspring of the natural environment of the Land of Israel.” Only there could a Jew experience what Kabbalists had called “clarity, the depth of an infinitely clear sky, a clear perspective, mists of purity.” By means of labor (avodah) a pioneer would experience “the divine unknown,” and would recreate himself, as the mystics had done in the course of their spiritual exercises. By working on the land, “the unnatural, defective, splintered person” that he had become in the Diaspora would be “changed into a natural, wholesome human being who is true to himself.” For Gordon it was no accident that avodah, the word for “labor” or “service,” had once applied to the liturgy in the Temple.
For the Zionist, holiness and wholeness were no longer to be found in conventional religious practices, but in their hard labor in the hills and farms of Galilee.
One of the most innovative and daring Jewish attempts to spiritualize the secular was developed by Rabbi Abraham Yitzak Kook (1865--1935), who also migrated to Palestine in 1904 to become the rabbi of the new settler communities. It was an odd appointment. Unlike most of the Orthodox, Kook had been deeply stirred by the Zionist movement, but he had been horrified to hear that the delegates to the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898 had issued the statement: “Zionism has nothing to do with religion.” He condemned this remark in the strongest terms. It “spreads the terrible, black wings of death over our tender, lovely young national movement, by cutting it off from the source of its very life and the light of its splendor.” It was an “abomination and perverse;” a “poison” that was corrupting Zionism, causing it to “putrify and be covered in worms.” It could only turn Zionism “into an empty vessel ... filled with a spirit of destructiveness and strife.” Kook often spoke like one of the ancient prophets, but many elements in his thought were modern. He was one of the first religious people who perceived, long before the First World War, that nationalism could become lethal and that, without a sense of the sacred, politics could become demonic. He pointed to the example of the French Revolution, which had begun with such high ideals but had degenerated into an orgy of bloodshed and cruelty. A purely secularist ideology could trample on the divine image in men and women; if it made the state its supreme value, there was nothing to stop a ruler from exterminating subjects who, in his view, obstructed the good of the nation.
“When nationalism alone takes root among the people,” he warned, “it is as likely to debase and dehumanize their spirit as elevate it.”
There have, of course, been secularist ideologies that have helped people to cultivate a deep sense of the sacred inviolability of each human being without recourse to the supernatural. And religions have been just as murderous as any secular ideal. But Kook uttered a timely warning, since the twentieth century, from start to finish, has been characterized by one act of genocide after another, committed by nationalist, secularist rulers. Kook was anxious lest Zionism become equally oppressive and the Jewish state a dangerous idolatry. But he was also convinced that any attempt to separate a Jewish state from God was doomed, because Jews were existentially connected to the divine, whether they knew it or not. When he arrived in Palestine, one of Kook’s first duties was to deliver a eulogy in honor of Theodor Herzl, who had died tragically young. To the fury of the Orthodox community in Palestine, who saw Zionism as inherently evil, Kook presented Herzl as the Messiah of the House of Joseph, a doomed Redeemer in popular Jewish eschatology who was expected to arrive at the start of the messianic era to fight the enemies of the Jews and would die at the gates of Jerusalem.
His campaign would, however, have paved the way for the final Messiah of the House of David, who would bring Redemption. This was how Kook saw Herzl. Many of his achievements had been constructive, but insofar as he had tried to eliminate religion from his ideology, his work had been damaging.
It was, like the efforts of the Josephic Messiah, destined to fail. But Kook also argued that the Orthodox who opposed Zionism were equally destructive; by making themselves “an enemy of material change,” they had made the Jewish people weak. Religious and secularist Jews needed one another; neither could exist without the other.
This recast the old conservative vision. In the premodern world, religion and reason had occupied separate but complementary spheres.
Both had been necessary and each would be the poorer without the other.
Kook was a Kabbalist, inspired by the mythology and mysticism of the conservative period. But, like some of the other reformers we have considered, he was modern in his conviction that change was now the law of life and that it was essential to throw off the constraints of agrarian culture, however painful this might be. He believed that the young Zionist settlers would make Jews move forward and--ultimately--bring Redemption. Their ruthlessly pragmatic ideology was the logos that human beings needed in order to survive and function effectively in this world. But unless this was linked creatively to the mythos of Judaism, it would lose its meaning and, cut off from the source of life, would wither away.
When Kook arrived in Palestine, he met these young secularists for the first time. A few years earlier, their rejection of religion had appalled him, but when he saw them going about their work in the Holy Land he was forced to revise his ideas. He discovered that they had their own spirituality.
Yes, they were brazen and insolent, but they also had the great qualities of “kindness, honesty, fairness, and mercy,... and the spirit of knowledge and idealism is ascendent [among them].” More important, their rebelliousness, which so offended the “weak who inhabit the world of order, the moderate, and well-mannered,” would push the Jewish people forward; their dynamism was essential if Jews were to progress and fulfill their destiny. When he praised the Zionist pioneers, he picked out those qualities which would have been utterly abhorrent to a sage of the premodern period, where people had to accept the rhythms and restrictions of the existing order and where individuals who stepped out of line could gravely damage society:
These fiery spirits assert themselves, refusing to be bound by any limitation.... The strong know that this show of force comes to rectify the world, to invigorate the nation, humanity and the world. It is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos.
Had not the rabbis of the Talmudic period predicted that there would be an “age of insolence and audacity,” in which young men would rise up against their elders? This distressing rebellion was simply “the footsteps of the Messiah, gloomy steps, leading to a rarefied, joyous existence. “ Kook was one of the first deeply religious thinkers able to embrace the new secularism, though he believed that ultimately the Zionist enterprise would lead to a religious renewal in Palestine.