Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's Public Reemergence by Keith Bates

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's Public Reemergenceby Keith Bates William Vance Trollinger Jr. Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's Public Reemergence. By Keith Bates. America's Baptists. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 226. $55.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-604-9.) Over the past decade or so, a surfeit of good monographs on fundamentalism has emerged. And more keep appearing, to the point that it is hard to keep up. One excellent addition to this expanding historiography is Keith Bates's illuminating biography of John R. Rice. Bates deftly narrates the early decades of Rice's life, including his childhood in Texas, his education at Baylor University, and his mentorship under the guidance of J. Frank Norris. Norris eventually (and publicly) soured on Rice as Rice began to establish himself as a fundamentalist leader in his own right, particularly as founder and editor of The Sword of the Lord. Through this publication, as well as through other publications and sermons, Rice educated generations of fundamentalists on how to think about the Bible and theology, as well as the proper place for African Americans (he never abandoned the Lost Cause ideology of his Klansman father, as evinced in his vitriolic opposition to the civil rights movement) and women (while Rice was apparently a loving husband and father, he was deeply misogynistic, best exemplified by his infamous book, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers[Wheaton, Ill., 1941]). At the heart of Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's Public Reemergenceis Bates's compelling argument that Rice wanted fundamentalists to "avoid the extremes of yielding to the compromises of nonfundamentalists and becoming a religious enclave that loses its cultural voice" (p. 65). In this regard, Rice rejected "secondary separation"—the notion that fundamentalists must separate from both nonfundamentalists and from fundamentalists who have not separated from nonfundamentalists (p. 85). Rice spent the last years of his life in a bitter dispute with Bob Jones Jr., who vehemently attacked Rice for working with fundamentalists who had not departed from allegedly liberal denominations. Rice not only resisted these attacks but instead—as Bates nicely documents—also played an important role [End Page 580]in encouraging fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to take over the denomination (a process that was not fully completed until after Rice's 1980 death). Bates is absolutely right to emphasize Rice's importance in persuading American fundamentalists not to retreat into a religious enclave. But it is perhaps the author's zeal to highlight Rice's significance that leads him to claim that fundamentalist patriarch William Bell Riley—convinced that his fundamentalist "views had no chance of prevailing"—exited the Northern Baptist Convention (NBC) in 1923 (p. 20). Bates is mistaken. As I have documented in my work, Riley remained in the NBC until just a few months before his death in 1947. Actually, one could argue that Rice was more akin to Riley (also a southerner) than any other first-generation fundamentalist leader. Like Rice, Riley took a great deal of abuse from separatist fundamentalists for "failing to 'come out' from the denomination" (William Vance Trollinger Jr., God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism[Madison, Wis., 1990], p. 60). Like Rice regarding the SBC, Riley worked until the end of his life to embolden fundamentalists to take control of the NBC. And while Riley failed at the denominational level, he did succeed at the state level: in a striking foreshadowing of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, in 1936 "Riley's boys" (as they were known) marshaled delegates to elect a fundamentalist slate of state convention officers. For the next eleven years—until they followed Riley's deathbed example and exited the denomination—"Minnesota fundamentalists dominated leadership positions in the [state] convention" (Trollinger, God's Empire, p. 138). As Bates observes at the book's end, Rice's activist vision has won the day, as "mainstream fundamentalists show no inclination toward ghettoizing their faith" (p. 173). So we have the Christian Right, which Rice helped bring into being, with its obsession with critical race theory, absolute commitment to unconstrained capitalism, and passionate...