The first thing that stood out was Jones’s apologia for the racial order of the Old South. Jones questioned whether slaveowners were prone to violence toward their slaves. His own great-grandmother, Rachel Napier, owned several plantations and over 300 slaves and is protrayed as a gentle, caring paternalist who only sold slaves in family groups, taught them Scripture, and restrained her overseers. Jones then repeated a line often used in defense of slavery: “One thing is certainly true. The average black slave was in every respect a thousand times better off than he had been in Africa.” (23) And, of course, Jones asserted that the Civil War “had not been fought primarily over the issue of slavery but, rather, over states’ rights.” (24) He finished the section with a fond recollection of eating his lunch as a schoolchild while sitting on the spot where Jeff Davis took the oath of office as President of the Confederacy.

Keep in mind that Bob Jones Jr. published these thoughts in 1985, just two years after Bob Jones University v. United States and only fourteen since the school dropped its whites-only admission policy. The school had begun to change to face the realities of the times, but Jones himself remained unreconstructed. Jones’s defense of the old southern racial order is a sharp contrast to the current administration’s apology for the school’s history of racial discrimination.

I was struck by Jones’s distrust of Zionism. He staked out a moderate position by condemning acts of terrorism by both Israelis and Arabs. He praised the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, as effusively as he complimented King Hussein’s hospitality (and Jones included signed pictures from both). Jones was greatly annoyed by a group of fundamentalists who had declared their support for Menachem Begin, then the Prime Minister of Israel; instead, Jones condemned Begin’s persecuation of Christian Arabs and the massacre of Arab civilians he ordered at Deir Yassin. “I have a great love for both Jews and Arabs, but I hate tyranny, terrorism, and violence just as much on the part of a Jewish government as I do on the part of an Arab government.” (141) Jones’s moderate views towards Israel and the Arab nations were a marked contrast to the growing support for Zionism among American evangelicals at the time.

Cornbread and Caviar also evinced, what I’ll call for lack of a better term, fundamentalist enlargement. When A. C. Dixon published The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth in the 1910s, fundamentalism was a minimalist movement. The fundamentals were meant to be the basic doctrines of Christianity. They were a call to orthodox ecumenicism, cooperation across denominational boundaries and despite secondary doctrinal differences. A postmillenial, reformed Presbyterian like J. Gresham Machen and a premillenial, dispensationalist Baptist like William Bell Riley could both be considered fundamentalists. Separation was theoretically reserved for those who transgressed a discrete set of fundamental doctrines.

Since the 1910s, the fundamentals have been enlarged. The fundamentals evolved from a set of essential doctrines — e.g., the deity of Christ and the inspiration of Scripture — into a far more detailed list of secondary doctrines and proscribed behaviors. That transformation surfaces briefly in Jones’s discussion of eschatology. “I have never had any agreement with the postmillenial position…it goes contrary to the whole teaching of Scripture and, like Christian Science, is an affront to intellectuality and hard common sense as well. … Postmillenialism is a menace to the spiritual life of fundamental, Bible-believing churches today.” (110) Premillenialism had become a de facto fundamental. Interestingly, Jones did not add cessationism to the list of fundamentals, although most fundamentalists today do. Jones greatly admired O. Talmadge Spence, a Pentecostal preacher and a board member at Bob Jones. He acknowledged their disagreement over the cessation of the apostolic gifts, but he called Spence “as much of a Fundamentalist as I am.” (181)

There are a whole host of adjectives used to describe fundamentalist religion: backwards, anti-modern, reactionary, unscientific, ante-Diluvian.* The idea behind all of those descriptions is that fundamentalist religions have fallen off the train of progress. It’s a whiggish notion that religion, like society and politics, is advancing to greater freedom, rationality, and liberality thanks to science; consequently, fundamentalist religions that don’t share those goals are backwards, and will fade away in time.

It’s also a notion that is wrong.

As George Marsden points out in his influential book Fundamentalism and American Culture (reviewed here), the prediction that fundamentalist Christianity will die out in America is as old as fundamentalism itself, which has managed to outlive its predicted demise. So far from being anti-modern, fundamentalism is a modern form of religion.

Marsden argues for fundamentalism’s debt to modern, scientific ways of thinking in several ways, but the argument most relevant to recent events concerns hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the set of principles by which one interprets Scripture. In the recent furor over Harold Camping and his predictions of a date for the rapture, the question that has not been much asked is how he went about pulling a precise date out of obscure scriptures.

My point, borrowing from Marsden, is that the hermeneutics of Camping and his ilk are compatible with, even indebted to, modern ways of thinking. To be sure, calculating a date for the end of the world is a practice old enough to be condemned in the Talmud. But the methods of Camping et al. are a peculiarly modern take on an ancient tradition.

Witness the Rapture Index, a website that tracks the signs of the times indicating the end of the world. The website lists a series of categories, such as inflation and ecumenism, then tracks whether they are getting better or worse. The aggregate of those numbers serves as index, like the Dow Jones or S&P500, indicating whether the end is drawing nigh. You’ll notice that the Rapture Index, unlike the stock market, is just off the all-time high.

The categories for the Rapture Index have been derived from the inductive, scientific study of the Bible (cf Marsden, p. 60). The index’s creator has read the Bible as a set of proof texts that speak about the end of the world. Then, its creator has examined and quantified the natural world, like a scientist or technocrat. The findings are being distributed on the Internet. And the findings bear the form and authority of a stock market index, a quasi-scientific way of conceiving of the economy. In an age of stock market collapses and government bailouts, what could be more modern?

* Well, maybe not “ante-Diluvian” and certainly not “anti-Diluvian.”