Tim LaHaye died in 2016 at the age of 90, which means he spent seven decades being wrong about the imminent Rapture. He preached thousands of sermons in his 90 years of ministry in which he insisted that he and all of his listeners would be whisked away long before any of them saw the age of 90. All of his predictions and “Bible prophecies” were completely and utterly wrong.
Did LaHaye ever realize that? Nah. He was TimLaHaye. He spent 90 years being utterly wrong about everything and making a huge fortune doing it.
The re-run post below from a week after his death is not grave-dancing — although that wouldn’t be inappropriate following the death of a man who also spent 90 years promoting John Birch Society-style fascism. It is, rather, about the weird indignation some of his admirers expressed about obituaries describing him as a “fundamentalist.”
LaHaye was born in 1926, a year after the Scopes trial. He was born into and raised in white fundamentalism, born into and raised in a faith that was not modernist and was therefore fundamentalist. By the time Billy Graham and Carl Henry introduced the “Neo-evangelical” rebranding, LaHaye was already a graduate of Bob Jones University who was deeply suspicious of such squishy liberal compromisers.
He was, and always insisted he was, a fundamentalist. And like all fundamentalists of his generation, he would’ve found it strange and insulting that anyone would try to say he wasn’t.
This 6-year-old post is timely again due to a recent spasm of discussion about “fundamentalism” as a category. Most of that discussion is confused, I think, because it recognizes that something is different about the generation of fundies that came after LaHaye’s, but it doesn’t quite grasp what that is.
What I think has changed is this: In the 21st century, white fundamentalists want to be regarded as mainstream evangelicals. Throughout most of the 20th century, fundies rejected the Neo-evangelical project, even long after it dropped the “Neo-” and just became the plain vanilla evangelicalism of Christianity Today and the NAE, InterVarsity, Eerdmans, etc. They rejected this compromising, worldly watering-down of fundamentalism the same way they rejected everything they regarded as too worldly — “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.”
The fundamentalism of those generations is summed up in an old joke I’ve seen attributed to both Bob Jones and Billy James Hargis: “An evangelical is someone who says to a liberal, ‘I’ll agree to call you a Christian if you’ll agree to call me a scholar.'” That sentiment is the theme of every third column or radio commentary from Al Mohler, whose entire career is based on sneering at squishy evangelicals whom he accuses of chasing after such worldly praise. But Mohler — whose religion is more like that of Jones and Hargis than like that of Graham and Henry — embraces the term “evangelical,” and has in turn been embraced by evangelicalism as One of Us.
Mohler is a product of the Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and ’90s, which is more widely described as the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC. Instead of separating themselves from what they saw as an increasingly apostate convention, the fundies decided to infiltrate it and reshape it in their own image. This proved to be far more effective — in pursuit of audience, influence, money, and power — than “Come ye out and be separate” had ever been.
This became the template for 21st-century fundamentalism. It’s why the most prominent fundamentalists today no longer embrace that label as a badge of honor — why folks like Mohler and pre-implosion Falwell and John MacArthur, Ken Ham, and The Liar David Barton all seek to identify merely as “evangelicals.” It’s why every contemporary clone of Billy James Hargis is desperately trying to pretend they’re Carl Henry or Ned Flanders. It’s why the ultra-right-wing pastors of the “Conservative Baptist Network” remain a faction within the SBC attempting to wrest control of its boards and offices rather than just doing what every prior generation of fundamentalists had done and splintering off into a new, separate convention.
And it’s why all of these 21st-century white fundamentalists are busily working the refs, getting folks to write articles like the one I critiqued six years ago, in which the term “fundamentalist” is rejected as a nefarious slur and a wholly imaginary category that no longer exists.
It still exists. And it’s winning. Thanks to the white fundamentalist takeover of the Republican Party that has succeeded as thoroughly as the trial-run in the SBC, the fundies are moving closer to their long-term, generational goals of barring teachers from mentioning evolution and slavery, and of overturning Loving v. Virginia (which is what, for them, “Come ye out and be ye separate” has always meant).
Now, it is certainly true that LaHaye went to Bob Jones University, a campus that has long embraced the “fundamentalist” label, but he also led a Southern Baptist church and most members of America’s largest non-Catholic Christian denomination [sic]* would never call themselves fundamentalists. Also, his audience as a writer and speaker was much larger than the “fundamentalist” niche.
Follow the logic there: X was Y. Most Y are not Z. Therefore X cannot be Z.
It is true that “most members” of Southern Baptist congregations would “never call themselves fundamentalists.” But some would and some do — proudly and insistently. Some others certainly qualify as such, by any objective criteria, but have, in recent decades, shied away from preferring the term due to the many negative connotations it has accumulated over the years.
But in any case, “fundamentalist” is a word that means something. It is a useful and necessary descriptive word that conveys meaning and distinction. It is a useful and necessary word that has a definition, and Tim LaHaye fits that definition. Tim LaHaye fits that definition definitively.
In Fundamentalism and American Culture, religious historian George M. Marsden jokingly describes a “fundamentalist” by quoting Tim LaHaye’s close friend and co-worker — and fellow fundamentalist — Jerry Falwell: “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.” Falwell’s quip echoes the sense of aggrieved misunderstanding that GetReligion complains about — in their post on LaHaye as well as in almost everything they publish. It also reveals what motivates both Falwell and GetReligion to recoil from this “f-word” — their desire to be embraced and included as indistinct members of mainstream evangelicalism. Or, at least, to receive the same general respect they imagine that more mainstream evangelicals must be enjoying.**
Marsden also offered a larger, more serious and more precise definition of fundamentalism — meaning, here, American [white] Christian fundamentalism. He needed to as a historian because fundamentalism is a thing that exists, that has parameters, and that has had and continues to have an effect on the world.
Historian George M. Marsden also apparently “didn’t get the memo” from GetReligion that the “f-word” should never be used when discussing fundamentalists.
Lincoln Mullen provides a nice summary [now-dead link] of Marsden’s attempt to define the outlines of this fundamentalism. Here’s Mullen on Marsden:
In the standard narrative, fundamentalism was a reaction by late 19th- and early 20th-century evangelical Christians against modernizations in American society, such as industrialization, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and changes in popular mores. Fundamentalists resented modernization because it clashed with their out-of-date worldview and literal faith in the Bible and Christian doctrine. …
When fundamentalism reappeared in the 1970s, the flaws in that interpretation were revealed. In its place, a new body of historical work, including Marsden’s book, redefined fundamentalism not as evangelicalism reacting against modernism, but as evangelicalism adopting modernism. The first historian to make this argument was Ernest R. Sandeen in The Roots of Fundamentalism. Sandeen saw fundamentalism as a movement descended from American and British evangelicalism with the additions of dispensationalist eschatology and an explicit definition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. George Marsden expanded on Sandeen’s definition by unpacking the significance of those additions. Dispensationalism divided history and biblical prophecy into a series of eras, or dispensations — a type of scientific classification. By defining biblical inspiration as extending to the very words of Scripture, fundamentalists created a new hermeneutic which treated the Bible as a source of data to be mined and scientifically analyzed.
Let’s see if the shoe Marsden describes fits Tim LaHaye. “Dispensationalist eschatology”? Check. “An explicit definition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible” (“inerrantist,” “literalist,” etc.)? Check. “Adopting modernism” through a quasi-“scientific analysis” of biblical “data”? Check. (See, for example, LaHaye’s lifelong interest in young-Earth creationism, including his helping to found the Institute for Creation Research.)
LaHaye was also a separatist who played a big role in calling for, creating, and showing how to create, alternative educational systems for Christians apart from the “secular humanism” of the public school system. Those efforts were just as vocally anti-evolution as anything from 1925. (They were also, by the way, post-Brown v. Board of Education — but that, of course, is merely a coincidence and had absolutely nothing to do with the desire of good [white] Christian parents to establish good [white] Christian schools for their good [white] Christian children.)
So, yeah, Tim LaHaye was a premillennial dispensationalist, young-Earth creationist, separatist, inerrantist, biblical literalist. Describing him as a “fundamentalist” is not a pejorative slur or an unfair bit of name-calling. It’s simply accurate.
The Times isn’t slurring Tim LaHaye by categorizing him in the appropriate category. If there’s any slurring going on, it’s being done by GetReligion, with its insistence that no one should be allowed to ever make any distinction between fundamentalists like LaHaye and the vast majority of evangelicals and Southern Baptists. That’s what GetReligion winds up suggesting — not that Tim LaHaye is just like all evangelicals, but that all evangelicals are just like Tim LaHaye. And that’s simply not true and not accurate and not fair.
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* The Southern Baptist Convention, being still — at least nominally — Baptist, is not a denomination, but rather a voluntary association of congregations. Hence “Convention,” right there in the name. The term “denomination” still strikes many Southern Baptists as fightin’ words — an accusation to be angrily denounced.
Kind of a rookie mistake for GetReligion — a site that proclaims itself to be the religionsplainer for the ignorant masses.
** As the leader of Liberty Baptist College, Jerry Falwell seemed driven by a kind of Wheaton-envy — longing to enjoy the same measure of respectability as that evangelical school. He attempted to achieve that, in part, by developing a bigger and better football team. These days his son, Jerry Jr., pursues this goal by emphatically insisting that Liberty be described as an “evangelical” school — never, ever using the “f-word.” That’s pretty much the same empty assertion of spin you’ll find from GetReligion in the post linked above.
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