Decades ago, evangelicals and their hard-bitten brethren, the fundamentalists, rode off the cultural cliff, and the flag that snapped in the wind all the way down bore the stripes of populism. We've discussed here and here how believers are afraid of interacting with American culture. Fundamentalists shun the larger culture because they fear the contamination of worldliness. The position of evangelicals is softer. They adopt the forms of the consumer culture, using TV and pop idioms freely, but only in a parallel media universe that mimics the secular originals.

Believers have many historical models for participating in contemporary culture while living out pure doctrine, ethics, and spirituality -- models like the Princeton theologians we sketched last week. But both evangelicals and fundamentalists have rejected these models. We no longer produce leaders with the cultural depth of a J. Gresham Machen. The exceptions, like Francis Schaeffer, are glaring.

I believe we have rejected our historical models because we now see them as elitist. To hold the attitudes that education and the life of the mind should be important values in the local church, that the arts should be a vibrant part of church life, or that genuine scholarship in the pulpit is the least a congregation should expect, is to incur many evangelicals' wrath.

Regular people don't see the point of such fancy talk. And if regular people don't see the point, then there is no point. (I'm not slamming "regular people" here. I'm articulating what I think has become an ethos. I happen to think "regular people" will provide ways forward for evangelicalism.)

This expectation that spiritual leaders will set everything according to the standards of "regular people" is new, and distinctly American. It results from the evangelical embrace of populism.

I use the term populism in a specific sense. I refer to the political and cultural aesthetic that traces at least as far back as Andrew Jackson. This aesthetic transcends parties and factions, and has expressed itself across the ideological spectrum. It has these basic characteristics:

1. Populism is agrarian, southern, and western.

Jackson was from Tennessee, and was far removed from the aristocracy of Virginia and Massachusetts. He cast the aristocratic John Quincy Adams out of the presidency, and the shindig after Jackson's first inauguration left the walls of the White House smeared with cheese. Other populist figures in American history have been William Jennings Bryan (born in Illinois, moved to Nebraska), and Huey Long (governor of, and later U.S. senator from, Louisiana.)

The fact that evangelicalism is strongest in rural, southern, and western regions is not coincidental. Evangelicals have deeply anti-urban attitudes.

2. Populism feeds on suspicion of corporate, academic, financial, and cultural "elites."

Jackson was bent on destroying the Bank of the United States. Bryan made his career opposing the gold standard. Among this year's presidential contenders, the most virulent populists were John Edwards, pitting the "two Americas" against each other, and Mike Huckabee, pitting evangelicals against Republican insiders. Populists hate power "in the hands of a few."

Evangelical fear of "cultural elites" needs no elaboration. Used as a money-raising appeal, its effect is primal.

3. Populism is animated by resentment.

One of the things that makes populists so compelling is that they feel the resentments of a particular class personally. Jackson seemed to draw life from anger. Bryan identified closely with the plight of agrarian people in an increasingly industrial society. George Wallace was not compelling because he was a racist, as people outside the south imagine, but because his hostility to northern liberals was completely sincere. (Gay Talese is enlightening on this point about Wallace in his memoir, A Writer's Life.)

I may be flirting with controversy here, but . . . evangelicals thrive on their own cultural resentments. The Hollywood elite. The scientific establishment. The Ivy League elites. Evangelicals both cherish and resent their status as outsiders.

4. Populism can evoke positive emotions only through sentimentality.

As rhetoricians, populists gain quick and questionable access to wells of loyalty through cheap symbolism. The flag. "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." Jimmy Carter (not James E.) in his cardigan sweater, carrying his own luggage. Bill Clinton's suddenly thickening accent.

Evangelical sentimentality is egregious. The juxtaposition of the stars and stripes with the cross. The happy-clappy music. The weepy testimonies. The southern pronunciation of CHEE-zus. Our dependence on these tricks is an embarrassment.

Line up Machen against these characteristics and he fails on every count. He was from the northeast. He was an Ivy League elite. The notes he hit in his rhetoric were not resentment and sentimentality. He made his case with scholarship, and based his appeals on principled reasoning.

This is probably why the Princeton leaders lost influence among fundamentalists, as the voices against modernism became less theologically informed and more populist. Like William Jennings Bryan, who turned the Scopes trial into a media frenzy and lost the cultural contest to Clarence Darrow -- lost it big time.

Over the next several weeks, I'll examine such issues as how the populist aesthetic works, how specific evangelical leaders like Mike Huckabee use it, what populism does to local churches, and why populism will always fail. I will not argue for a return to elitism. Still less will I argue that we need "another Machen," or "another Princeton."

But I will argue that evangelicals are deluded about the flag they carried off the cultural cliff. Their flag did not proclaim, "Jesus Saves!" Their flag said, "Small Towns Forever!"

The fighting fundies have made doctrinal debates feel like torch-and-pitchfork meetings. Ever since the battles over liberal modernism in the early 20th century, we've worried that controversies over the inerrancy of scripture, or creation, or the 70th week of Daniel will end fatally for somebody. When did fundamentalists take on the menace of a mob?

Consider the thinkers whom fundamentalists no longer emulate, men like the theologians at Princeton Seminary.

John Witherspoon was the school's 18th century intellectual father, fusing biblical theology with the Common Sense philosophy of his native Scotland, and delivering this minority report on the Enlightenment to the American colonies. Witherspoon became a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and was known as a warm and genuine preacher.

His combination of intellectual and exegetical discipline, personal piety, and cultural interaction with Europe remained characteristic of the Princeton theologians all the way to the twentieth century.

From 1826-1828, for example, the young Princeton graduate Charles Hodge toured theological institutions in Germany, gaining a firsthand understanding of the trends that would create liberal modernism. He became Princeton's star scholar for a generation. Hodge's student B. B. Warfield also traveled in Europe after graduating from Princeton, before returning to dominate the next generation of biblical thinkers. In 1905, Warfield's student J. Gresham Machen did postgraduate work in universities at Marburg and Gottingen, and then came home to a career as the last of the Princeton conservatives.

The Princeton theologians are remembered for their precise scholarship, sharp polemics, and deep contributions to the Reformed doctrines of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Scripture. When they attacked liberalism, they knew what they were talking about at a cultural level, not just at the level of point and counterpoint. They had learned liberalism from the best liberals on the face of the earth -- taking in their nuances of style, sensing the scope of their knowledge, and being innoculated against their hauteur. Once the Princeton theologians gained these things, they had nothing to fear -- either from liberalism or from the culture that fostered it.

So a man like Machen participated fully in his culture, retaining the privileges of his Western inheritance. He saw science and reason as part of this legacy, and he viewed himself as a steward of it. He did not live a cramped existence on the margins of Western society.

But he saw such narrowness gripping American culture (Education, Christianity, and the State, The Trinity Foundation, 1987, p 9):

The depreciation of the intellect, with the exaltation in the place of it of the feelings or of the will, is, we think, a basic fact in modern life, which is rapidly leading to a condition in which men neither know anything nor care anything about the doctrinal content of the Christian religion, and in which there is in general a lamentable intellectual decline.

I can't help but notice how well this statement from 1925 describes the atmosphere of the megachurch. Even to ask whether most believers heard anything from the pulpit that reflected scholarly discipline last Sunday is laughable. Megachurches either fondle the Precious Moments figurine they've made of Jesus, sentimentalizing the Christian experience, or they praise a rock hero Jesus, whose masculinity seems all about his three-day growth.

Evangelicals today have to live in a cultural wasteland.

As for those who became fundamentalists in Machen's day, they rejected what he was culturally in defense of what he argued doctrinally. Their rejection was conscious and explicit. The fundamentalists came to believe that if a man studied for a year in, say, Marburg and Gottingen, he would become a liberal. In their eyes, the less educated a man was, the more likely he would defend the atonement. But the more he cared about history and fine distinctions and travel to foreign parts, the more he would certainly favor the documentary hypothesis.

The fundamentalists didn't reject Machen himself, of course. They wouldn't have dreamed of it. But they've rejected men just like him ever since.

I'll be blunt.

I don't rate fundamentalists highly. If you stoke fiery convictions in a group that has no culture to tame its passions, no literacy broader than its fixations, and no experience of peaceable disagreement, what you get is a mob.

And I'm not real high on evangelicalism in general. If you take that same group in its poverty of culture, illiteracy, and narrow experience, and you douse its fiery convictions -- turn them into megachurch mush -- what you get is a mob shopping.

But I'm convinced of three things. First, the average believer is smart -- smarter than her megachurch. Second, when leaders call believers to discipline in their understanding and use of the Bible, believers respond. In this regard, sloganeering won't make the grade as leadership; but stimulating teaching will.

Third, believers will be able to assert classic orthodoxy without bigotry. The average person in a megachurch today puts up with the shallowness in order to participate in the energy. But he is more culturally sophisticated than megachurches make him appear. And if he is shown models for cultural interaction from the days before fundamentalism became a cuss word, models like the Princeton theologians among many, many others, he will know what to do with them.

The biggest problem we have is the character of evangelical leaders. We have yet to point to the true criminal in the story of fundamentalists and evangelicals -- the American populist. More about him next week.