Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, by Adam Laats. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. x + 348 pp. $29.95.
The subject of twentieth-century evangelicalism fascinates the academic world. A host of recent publications on the variegated history of this large and complex movement has expanded and opened windows and insights into a universe that many outsiders only look on with bewilderment. Movement insiders, of course, are well aware of the family problems—dominant figures, petty feuds, suspicious accusations, conflicted choices, and the like. But outsiders are intrigued by what appears to be archaic or draconian beliefs held by strange and sheltered people who seemingly cannot cope with the wider, modern world.
One such outsider approach is this book now under review. Adam Laats, a stranger to evangelical/fundamentalism, has written a generally well-researched narrative on the rise and expansion of fundamentalist education from the 1920s through the 1980s. As exemplars of these institutions, Laats chooses inter-denominational (or in some cases, non-denominational) schools whose storylines run through his chosen timeframe. Fundamentalism has never been monolithic. As the plot unfolds, Laats rightly observes the diverse and conflicting ideas that Bob Jones College (1927), Wheaton College (1860), Moody Bible Institute (1886), Gordon College (1889, 1921), BIOLA (Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1908) and other schools expressed as they lay claim to the rising fundamentalism of the 1920s. But just what was their unique understanding of fundamentalism and how did it shape their individual educational agenda and ethos?
These are the questions that Laats addresses in his most interesting narrative. For these schools to survive, “they had to protect their reputations as safe places for fundamentalist or evangelical youth” and they needed “to offer the best possible modern educations” (3). Fundamentalism and later evangelicalism, including the new evangelicalism, had conflicting ideas of what was at the core of fundamentalist beliefs. This lack of consensus caused an interesting array of application to issues for these growing schools. Should the schools have a drama program? Bob Jones College said yes while Wheaton said no, with both claiming the fundamentalist high-ground. What about science? Just what could a fundamentalist/evangelical school allow to be taught? Young-earth creationism or progressive creationism? Again, Bob Jones College (later University) and Wheaton were on opposite sides of the question, with both claiming to be within the pale of acceptable fundamentalism/ evangelicalism.
Insiders in these movements should not get overly concerned with Laats’s interchange of the terms fundamentalism and evangelicalism. The author rightly sees these strands as cousins, at least, if not brothers and sisters. Thus, he uses fundamentalist and evangelical in ways that insiders will think imprecise but, for the sake of the story, work quite well. As fundamentalism and evangelicalism are continuous strands of an overlapping history, their stories are intricately bound together and can be discussed in a useful way in this study on education.
Professor Laats, a specialist in the history of education, is interested in the ways this group of schools developed their educational identities while trying to maintain their sense of Christian orientation, especially for the parents who would send their children and the alumni who would send support to their alma maters. At times the narrative is painful as Laats recounts the foibles and even sins of some of the institutional leaders. The debacle at Des Moines University was led by a strident Thomas Todhunter Shields, a staunch Canadian fundamentalist, for its brief but turbulent history. Charges of “moral turpitude” were leveled at Shields and his lieutenant, Edith Rebman, near the end of the collapse, less than three years after the takeover by the Baptist Bible Union. Other leaders of other schools were more circumspect but still resisted modernity with iron fists and institutional fiats. Still other school leaders capitulated to student and secular demands for a broadening of institutional identities and practices.
By far, Bob Jones University and Wheaton College catch the lion’s share of Laats’s attention and really represent the diversity within the tradition he is studying. The Bob Joneses, Sr., Jr., and III, tried to maintain a tight control over their institution while the various Wheaton presidents allowed for limited moderation. Issues discussed by Laats include desegregation and BJU’s infamous attempt to die on the hill of interracial dating. The question of scientific evolution is also considered, with comments about Bryan College’s attempt at a course correction, which saw a major exodus of faculty and students. The need for accreditation is an important part of the story with a discussion of BJU’s Supreme Court loss and their eventual seeking of accreditation, the final major fundamentalist school to do so.
The book is filled with interesting stories collected from the archives of the several schools under consideration, which brings the reviewer to the first unfortunate issue with the book. Laats treats the brief history of Des Moines University, a failed effort by Baptist fundamentalists to wrest a school from the hands of liberals and establish their own fundamentalist school. To do this, President Shields fired the entire faculty and required them to reapply for their jobs so he could weed out the liberals. Archival materials on the story are scarce, but whether Laats knows this or not is unclear. Laats depends for his information on the rise and fall of Des Moines on a 1956 journal article drawn from an even earlier Ph.D. dissertation on the Des Moines story. Included in the narrative is an account of an accusation of indiscretion against Shields and his secretary Edith Rebman. According to a period newspaper, The Des Moines Register, Shields was charged with “moral turpitude” at a chaotic board meeting near the end of the school’s history. The article’s author quoted a Des Moines Register story, carried in newspapers across the country and in Canada, that Shields and Rebman on separate business trips happened to be in the same Waterloo, Iowa, hotel and had rooms next to each other. From this, Shields’s enemies at the University (and Shields had many, as Laats recounts) charged him before the board with “moral turpitude.” But the board fully exonerated Shields and Rebman. Shields and Rebman’s history far transcended Des Moines University. Rebman was a member of Shields’s Canadian church and she ran the Baptist Bible Union office in Chicago, while Shields served as president. There is no evidence of any untoward relationship between the two. For Laats to refer to Rebman as Shields’s “purported paramour” (27) is regrettable. Twice more in chapter two, Laats calls attention to their alleged “sexual relationship” (50) and draws the unfortunate conclusion that this caused fundamentalism “to be equated” with “amoral” behavior (55).
A second odd infelicity in the book regards Bob Jones College. At one point, Laats acknowledges that BJC prohibited dancing (53). Later in the book as he discusses the school’s regulations regarding social interaction, he states that “every student was required to attend school dances and every student was required to secure a date.” Later in the same paragraph, Laats states that Bob Jones Sr.’s wife, Mary Gaston Stollenwreck Jones, took country students “to dances at ‘a hotel with elevators and all,’…to show (the students) and the wider American populace that fundamentalism was a high-class affair” (109–10). Anyone remotely familiar with BJU would find such a statement remarkable. Efforts to verify any dancing at the school in its long history with people connected with the school all resulted in the same conclusion. BJU never sanctioned dancing. Likely, Laats picked up on a Bob Jones Sr.’s oft-repeated comment that BJ was like a shoe factory. They “fixed the souls (soles), shipped the heels, and sent them out in pairs.” Indeed, students were encouraged to find dates for such administration-sanctioned activities as “Artist Series” where plays were performed and for banquets, but never for dances at the school or elsewhere. This infelicity suggests a basic misunderstanding of the ethos of Bob Jones on the part of Laats.
These problems notwithstanding, Fundamentalist U is an engaging study of an important era in education history. The work is helpful for anyone trying to understand the complexities of the movements under study and help to explain current diversities that exist between them. While these schools are cousins, so to speak, they each have their unique approaches to the issues that separate them from other similar schools. Fundamentalists and evangelicals tried hard to maintain their unique commitments to their core Christian values, while at the same time trying to provide a quality education in keeping with the best education standards of the day. Evidence of this comes from the fact that all of the represented schools, BJU included, eventually sought peer-reviewed accreditation to demonstrate that the education they offered was consistent with their publicly advertised promises and the best practices of similar secular schools. It is a fantasticating story that continues to unfold and is worthy of a careful read, from inside or outside the movements.
