If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism, Would that Count as Secularization?

Abstract

Over the last decade, scholars have been reconsidering the way secularization organizes literary history. This essay suggests that recent advances have depended on a tacit distinction between the institutional and intellectual narratives once fused under the rubric of secularization. It also underlines the value of that distinction through a case study, examining the way dispensational fundamentalism has combined historicism with an anti‐secular institutional agenda. Dispensationalism is now best known because of its prominence in the United States, where it spread the doctrine of a pre‐tribulational Rapture. But the movement’s origins lie in Britain, and its leaders were distinguished by a radically historical approach to the Bible. Edward Irving, for instance, discussed historical criticism with friends S.T. Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, insisted on a contextual interpretation of Scripture, and saw the Gentile church as a provisional institution. Irving’s fundamentalist historicism is hard to distinguish from the historicism that critics have identified as a secularizing legacy of Romantic literature. But the social consequences of his views diverged markedly from the consequences associated with historicism in, say, the Broad Church – suggesting that institutional and intellectual aspects of secularization aren’t as thoroughly fused as literary historians sometimes assume.