Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940.

By Douglas Carl Abrams. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xvi], 168. $35.00, ISBN 0-8203-2294-6.)

Historians and other scholars have amply documented the paradoxical propensity of religious fundamentalists to adopt and adapt the tools of modernity with little reservation, while rejecting its relativistic spirit and secularizing ethos. Thus, the thesis of Douglas Carl Abrams's book is neither original nor surprising, as Abrams readily acknowledges. It is, however, a quite readable addition to the literature on fundamentalism's efforts to wrest a blessing from its unending struggle with the demon/angel of modern culture.

In succinct, well-documented chapters, Abrams traces what Jackson Lears has called the "complex blend of accommodation and protest" that fundamentalists manifested in the interwar decades (quoted on p. 2). Largely uncritical of capitalism and the consumerist ethos (at least until the Great Depression, and then only mildly), they readily employed advertising, newspapers, journals, and radio as tools of evangelism. At the same time, they strengthened their long-standing opposition to "worldliness," tightening guidelines against alcohol, tobacco, gambling, profanity, dancing, popular music, and the like.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book chronicle the sometimes conflicting efforts of the fundamentalist warhorses of this era to decide what Christians could and could not legitimately enjoy. While none condoned alcohol, gambling, or "modern dance," other amusements drew mixed reviews. John Roach Straton, battling sin in the "white-light" district of Broadway, dismissed all theater as "the devil's church" (p. 80), but Bob Jones Sr., an earnest "proponent of 'high' culture" (p. 81), encouraged the production of Shakespeare and other dramatic classics. When Wheaton College president James O. Buswell questioned this practice, Jones countered by criticizing Wheaton's participation in intercollegiate football, which Jones considered a "spiritual handicap" (p. 87).

Abrams provides comparable treatment of fundamentalist ambivalence toward radio, movies, and popular music, often with welcome material about the Bob Joneses (Senior and Junior) and their most unusual university, where Abrams is a professor of history. He also includes a lengthy (for such a short book) treatment of conflicting and changing attitudes toward women--flappers, bobbed hair, birth control, suffrage, and women in ministry. With respect to the last, Abrams notes that William Bell Riley's Northwestern Schools, the Moody Monthly, the Winona Lake Bible Conference, and "even Bob Jones Sr." (p. 112) all promoted or at least allowed women to preach, although by 1940 most evangelicals and fundamentalists had withdrawn this privilege.

Abrams concludes that by adapting creatively to new developments in popular culture, fundamentalists and evangelicals were able to establish themselves as a vital segment of American Christianity. He does not regard this accommodation as an unmixed blessing; still, Abrams commends fundamentalists for obeying Jesus's admonition to imitate the "unjust steward" and to make "friends of the mammon of unrighteousness" (Luke 16:8-9, quoted on p. 129)--that is, to adapt to the world in order to save it.

WILLIAM C. MARTIN
Rice University