Browsing by Subject "Fundamentalism"

Fundamentalist Christians loosely affiliated with Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) teach that music influences listeners’ faith and moral characters for both good and evil, expounding their views since the evangelical Worship Wars began in the 1960s over the use of popular music styles in church services. In their dichotomous moral view, good music reveals God’s nature, allowing born-again listeners to draw closer to God and witness their salvation to unbelievers, and bad music pulls listeners away from God by promoting immorality and false worship. Fundamentalists also prioritize mental engagement with music over emotional and physical responses to it because they believe that people more directly relate to God through their conscious minds and only indirectly with their bodies, as when fundamentalist musicians make music with their bodies, an activity that they believe glorifies God. Considering their discourse and practices from ethnographic and theological perspectives, I argue that these reveal a view that all musical sound is dangerous in its insistent entrance into listeners’ bodies: music is like fire—useful under control but devastating if unrestrained.

I examine the outworkings of their beliefs in three primary areas: recorded music, congregational singing (both aloud and silent as congregants practice inner singing while listening to instrumental hymn arrangements), and solo and soloistic vocal music. Musicians’ invisibility on recordings underscores how fundamentalists’ beliefs are primarily about musical sound, not performers’ movements or appearances. Robust congregational singing reflects believers’ “joy of salvation,” but their collective emotional affects are limited, and they are physically constrained to small movements that almost never bloom into something fuller. Finally, although fundamentalist leaders consider classical music and its associated performance practice to be “excellent,” even this musical style must be restrained for classically trained vocalists to minister in their churches. These arguments are based on my fieldwork and my analyses of fundamentalists’ extensive written and recorded discourse on music.

The Senses of Fundamentalism: A Material History of Sensing Bodies in Early Twentieth-Century American Fundamentalism offers a new historical narrative about the rise of fundamentalism. I argue that sensing bodies laid the foundation of fundamentalism. New kinds of Christian sensory practices around the turn of the twentieth century established the shared frames of reference that allowed a broad fundamentalist coalition to emerge. Fundamentalists felt their faith in their guts.

Each chapter of this work explores the role of one of the senses in fundamentalist life: sight, hearing, touch, and the spiritual senses. Using visual and material evidence, I explore how fundamentalists trained their eyes to see truth from dispensationalist charts, how they taught their ears to hear the voice of God on radios and phonograph records, how they regulated and controlled contact between gendered bodies through clothing, and how they honed their bodies to sense spiritual presences.

Using the methods of visual and material culture studies of religion, I examine the how specific sensory practices structured the everyday realities of fundamentalist life. I examine the specifics of how sensation operated in fundamentalist religious practice. Current studies of fundamentalism tend to treat the movement as primarily concerned with intellectual matters. My material and visual history of fundamentalism intervenes in the historiography to show that efforts to describe fundamentalism as an intellectual movement have excluded important bodies of data. By studying ideas and doctrines, scholars have too long presumed that fundamentalists forbade material forms of religious devotion or disregarded bodies altogether. My work materializes the study of early fundamentalism, exploring how material objects and sensory practices undergird traditional concepts like “belief,” “theology,” or “literalism.” This project recovers sensing bodies as the cornerstone of fundamentalism.