| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920–1940. By Douglas Carl Abrams. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xvi, 168 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8203-2294-6.)

A generation ago, most scholars assumed that the fundamentalist movement did not survive the public thrashing it received during the 1925 Scopes trial. Viewed as a rural, anti-intellectual reaction to the forces of modernity, fundamentalism's swift demise appeared to be all but inevitable. More recent work not only has corrected this assumption but has directed new scholarly attention to the flourishing of grass-roots fundamentalism in the decades after Scopes. Douglas Carl Abrams's study of fundamentalism and mass culture aptly follows in the path opened by George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980) and perhaps even more by Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997). 1

Abrams argues that fundamentalists did not so much reject modernity as they ambivalently embraced it, especially the emerging mass culture of the interwar decades. He finds that they wholeheartedly endorsed the American business ethic of organization and efficiency and, perhaps even more than their Protestant contemporaries, adopted the vocabulary of the marketplace and the techniques of secular advertisers to promote their cause. But, as Abrams demonstrates, the otherworldly, separatist element of their faith also required fundamentalists to denounce the material fruits of such labors—to bless the work of the entrepreneur but to preach against the dangers of earthly success. . . .

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