Did Premillennialism Drive Political Conservatism? Why it matters.

First, there is Matthew Avery Sutton, who, both in his 2012 Journal of American History article, “Was FDR the Antichrist?” (98:4) and in his recent book American Apocalypse, argues that premillenialists sometimes had critiques of capitalism and big business, but the expectation of imminent armageddeon led them to place little emphasis on reforming it. Instead, premillennialists invested their energy in what they understood as more imminent matters of evangelism and end-times prophecy. In his chapter on the early twentieth century, he draws from Fundamentalist commentators who connected labor organizing in the 1910s with communism and the coming Anti-Christ. He argues,

[Some Fundamentalists were critical of big business.] Few premillennialists, however, marched with workers. They interpreted growing economic inequality as an inevitable sign of the last days, but they did not see it as something they should work against. (182)

He connects Fundamentalists’ rejection of labor struggles with their rejection of the League of Nations, and concludes that this was a major reason for premillenialist Fundamentalists to vote with the Grand Old Party. He writes,

Over the course of the 1920s, premillenialism helped frame the way many fundamentalists understood politics. (205)

Later on, he clarifies that their political conservatism did not necessarily mean they were Republicans:

Since the 1920s, fundamentalists and then evangelicals had made their conservative, anti-statist, free market political sympathies clear. However, they had been cautious about affiliating with either political party but rather championed particular policies and particular candidates. (353)

But, he does consider Fundamentalists during this era to gravitate very strongly toward the Republican Party because of this expectation of imminent armageddeon.

Ken and Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

Second is the Fones-Wolf team, which concludes that apocalyptic premillennialism did not necessarily drive political affliliation. It sometimes correlated with conservative politics because of the the numbers of business leaders and and evangelical leadership who worked together within the National Association of Evangelicals. But, that alliance between working class evangelicals and conservative politics was not a sign of something inherent to premillenialist theology.

As they put it,

Darren Dochuk, Bethany Moreton, Darren Grem, Kevin Kruse, and the late Sarah Hammond have unearthed the evangelical underpinnings of the free-enterprise ideology that spawned not only Billy Graham and Jerry Fallwell but also Reaganism and the Walmartization of the economy. However, while these busienss-backed evangelicals seized the pulpits of key Protestant churches, their work leaves out the working people who ostensibly internalized Christian free enterprise and became the foot soldiers of the transformation of America’s political economy. We need to know a great deal more about what in their understanding of evangelical Protestantism either bolstered or rejected a conservative, antistatist political economy adn union membership. (3)

Their book explores the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ awareness of a need to dialogue with Southerners’ Christianity, including the popular apocalypticism of the era. However, the Fones-Wolfs ultimately determine that this dispensationalist apocalyptic preaching (which Sutton describes) did not automatically determine working class Southerners’ political affliations.

In contrast to Sutton’s conclusions, the Fones-Wolfs find evidence of many working class evangelical Southerners who attended Fundamentalist-leaning churches but were still supporters of FDR, especially during the New Deal. They see the postwar era as a moment of serious contest over the future of working class Southern evangelicals’ politics. After all, there was also a palpable left in the American South. As the Fones-Wolfs explain it,

The emphasis on local autonomy and independence, Biblical authority and inerrancy, premillennialism and holiness–these elements of working-class Christianity could be a powerful barrier against the CIO’s message of class unity and a modernist, New Deal-style liberalism. But social and religious upheaval also created spaces where dissident voices clamored for change. Competing against conservative evangelicalism were the prophetic gospel teachings of radicals like Claude Williams and liberal clergy in the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen who had their own working class followers. These voices had laid the groundwork for considerable optimism among veteran labor movement activists that the South was ready for change, secular and spiritual. (4)

In their incredible book, the Fones-Wolfs interpret working class theologies as fluid and changeable. They show workers who had been members of mainline Southern denominations (broadly within the postmillenialist, Social Gospel tradition) switch to join evangelical and premillenialist churches for reasons relating to culture, Southern identity, and politics, all at once. In their framing, a change in theological convictions did not necessarily drive conservative politics. Rather, some evangelical leaders’ collusion with big business leaders within the National Association of Evangelicals inspired their theological convictions. Some working class Christians followed these new ideas of Southern pastors, and others did not. The Fones-Wolfs found that the cultural incliation for Southern working class Christians to prioritize Southern identity did not necessarily mean that working class folks would heed the political or theological convictions of the business class, but it did lead them away from mainline churches after World War II. This transition toward the theologies of apocalypticism was not a theological decision or even a political decision, but primarily a cultural rejection of “Northern” religion within the National Council of Churches. Some Southerners joined cross-class evangelical churches and others were more comfortable within predominantly working class Holiness-Pentecostal churches. Yet, throughout the postwar chaos of the American South, many working class Southerners (particularly whites) retained memories of how the New Deal helped them through the Depression. While many rejected the National Council of Churches, they did not reject all support for organized labor.

They reach the conclusion that the political alliance between working class evangelicals and the Right was largely the result of the failure of the New Deal democratic coalition (particularly the CIO’s “Operation Dixie”) to mobilize the Southern “prophetic” traditions in order to gain working class adherence. In failing to recruit Southern evangelical (including premillenialist) organizers within their Southern organizing campaign, Northern labor leaders effectively lost the opportunity to be heard by Southern evangelicals. Southern evangelicals, they find, identified more strongly with their Southern religion than they did with their political party.

Tim Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism 

Finally, Tim Gloege concludes that the essential, political element within Fundamentalism was not quite apocalypticism but the Fundamentalist focus away from congregational life (13). Within mainline Protestant denominations of the nineteenth century, congregants understood their pastoral leaders as interpretive authorities on matters of theological and Biblical truth. Yet, between 1880 and 1910, the Fundamentalist movement recentered religious authority within the Fundamentals and particular, national leaders’ interpretation of Biblical teaching. Not only were Fundamentalist leaders like D.L. Moody favorable to the growth of profitable businesses. But, their experience in running businesses and working with businessmen inspired them to defend the regime of big business and use the contemporary advertising strategies of big business to promote their ministries. That is, Fundamentalists created their “brand” of evangelicalism by using direct marketing and advertising about “purity” and “authenticity” in order to construct denominational leaders as “middle men.” Fundamentalism ultimately succeeded because it functioned like a big business, using the very latest (vertical and horizontal integration) business principles of the day.

To Gloege, as to the Fones-Wolfs, premillennialism was not a driving force behind evangelical conservatism. Premillennialism was not even a driving force behind evangelical participation in Fundamentalist churches. The Fones-Wolfs see working class Southerners’ gravitation toward Fundamentalist churches as an expression of their Southernness, while Gloege sees this national and cross-class movement as the product of effective, national marketing techniques.

But, however we determine Fundamentalist churches took off, both Gloege and the Fones-Wolfs agree that widespread belief in the theology of premillenialism was not the cause but the effect of Fundamentalist leaders’ power within evangelical communities. Widespread belief in pro-business and anti-labor politics, too, was not the cause but the effect of Fundamentalist leadership. Within Fundamentalist advertising campaigns, religious and political commentary were interwoven: socialist labor organizing was condemned as antithetical to Christ. Yet, for both Gloege and the Fones-Wolfs, this was a political posture trickling down from the Fundamentalist-business-syndicate and not a political posture inherent to the theology itself.

Why is this debate important? Where will it get us?

For me, this debate matters quite a bit. It is a small example of a major question that many of us deal with right now in religious history: How should religious historians analyze the personal papers of Protestant leaders and the massive print culture of evangelicalism? When we read in a premillennial prophecy magazine that organized labor is identified with the Anti-Christ, what does that tell us and what does it not tell us? What does that magazine article conceal about the wealthy gatekeepers which produced and preserved it? What does that article tell us about the readers who may or may not agree with it? If we find evidence that a Fundamentalist minister is colluding closely with a set of business leaders, what does that relationship tell us? Can that relationship tell us anything about the congregants in small, working class churches? What sources must we use to get at the history of church members?

As the field of religious history comes closer to the field of social history and takes more seriously the fact that churchgoers have not always believed the same things as their ministers, we need to talk about how we shift our historical methodologies. That is, we need to borrow more from social history. We need to talk about how religious publications and statements by ministers do not tell the whole story because they cannot tell the whole story. Shifts in theology, as represented by ministers, have never told the whole story. As Gloege’s and the Fones-Wolfs’ books make clear, we need to analyze the conditions which produced those ministers. We need to analyze why congregants listened, or half-heartedly listened, to their religious leaders. We need to think about when religious leaders have led political leaders, and when political leaders have led religious leaders. I don’t have any real answers here. But, sometimes, historiographical debates are really worth dwelling upon.

[For a little more on this debate, see the long discussion of Matthew Sutton's new book over at Syndicate Theology.]