Fundamentalist Networking Across the Atlantic
Monday, August 6th, 2012
Spend a week at the regional state archives’ search rooms in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city and you have discovered a wealth of new information on the global networking of American fundamentalists and evangelicals. Spend a fortnight and, even if you do not read Swedish or German, you have discovered still more.
The Lund archives are the repository for the papers of David Hedegård (1891-1971), Swedish Bible translator, publisher and evangelical educator active in the first six decades of the twentieth century. He is well known to scholars of revivalist movements in Northern Europe, and just last year a PhD dissertation was finished at Trinity Theological Seminary in Indiana into his view of the Bible (Bruno W. Frandell, “Contending for the Faith: The Apologetic Theology of David Hedegård”). But for the most part, Hedegård remains forgotten outside the admittedly small circles of Scandinavian evangelicalism.
If historians of American church history have come across his name, this would most likely have taken place in connection with the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), the staunchly anti-ecumenical rival to the World Council of Churches that was founded by Carl McIntire in 1948. Hedegård was a founding vice president of the ICCC and remained in that post until the early 1970s. He was also, as it turns out, right at the center of the Cold War era global networking of American fundamentalists.
David Hedegård
Among the first things you notice when starting to go through the more than six archival meters of boxes that constitute the Hedegård collection is a treasure trove of late 1940s and early 1950s correspondence by Francis Schaeffer. The authors of recent biographies of this luminary of the American evangelical movement were apparently unaware of this collection. Consequently they missed on aspects of Schaeffer’s activities and aspirations in the early years of his career when he worked for the ICCC’s separatist fundamentalists.
From these materials it becomes abundantly clear that from almost the moment that he landed in Europe in 1946 Schaeffer identified with European evangelicals and acted as their interpreter to his superiors in the United States. He also schemed – a lot and right from the beginning of his European sojourn. He tried feverishly to recruit supporters for a bid to take over the ICCC through his secretive “European Friends of the ICCC” opposition group.
They were clearly a fractious lot, these ICCC fundamentalists. Although in Carl McIntire they had allied with one of the most militant of twentieth century American fundamentalists, in Europe they refused to use “fundamentalist” as their self-designation because they said it was purely an American term and did not apply on the other side of the Atlantic. They were “Bible-believers” instead, and they agreed with their American brethren and sisters on biblical inerrancy and on opposing the ecumenical movement but on little else.
Vigorous internal debate took place in the ICCC over methods and goals alike. It was no American-dominated monolith but a site for genuine inter-cultural and theological exchange across the Atlantic. The Europeans worried at first about the Americans’ trying to use the organization to push their agendas in defense of unregulated capitalism and for aggressive anticommunism, but by the early 1950s they declared victory: allegedly, everything specifically American had now been purged from ICCC positions.
With Schaeffer on their side, the European leaders of the ICCC even defeated the strong-willed McIntire when in 1950 he wanted to speak as the organization’s president on free enterprise as a biblically prescribed non-negotiable for all “Bible-believing” Christians. McIntire gave up “so as not to cause offense”.
In the Hedegård papers one finds, too, a mass of evidence about the breadth and length of interactions across the fundamentalist/evangelical divide that we have come to regard as fixed certainly by the late 1950s.
It was the Western European leaders of the ICCC who pressurized the Americans to go in for merger talks with the National Association of Evangelicals in the late 1940s. Although highly critical of the NAE later, they were also the ones who remained in touch with selected members of the rival organization after the ICCC formally and definitely turned against it. This collaboration was known to McIntire and his inner core and it was condoned.
The collaboration found institutional expressions as well. When vice president of the ICCC, David Hedegård was, at the same time, a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and an official advisor to the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He was in frequent touch with the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship headquarters in England, helped organize its Swedish chapter’s work and kept trying to persuade his American friends into more formal cooperative arrangements.
When Harold O.J. Brown resided in the Lausanne offices of the IFES in the 1960s, he and Hedegård were in close contact, sent each other materials and generally patted each other on the back. It was Hedegård as ICCC vice president who made the arrangements for Brown’s trips to Sweden in that period.
Unsurprisingly, with the help of their European friends, American fundamentalists also built extensive interdenominational networks with émigré Eastern European anticommunist clergy and even with some on the other side of the Iron Curtain. More surprisingly, some of these collaborators were Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. The ICCC was also intimately involved from early on in the smuggling of Bibles to the other side of the Iron Curtain that European evangelical groups started early on in the Cold War.
David Hedegård broke with McIntire and left the ICCC in the early 1970s when the Northern Irish Presbyterian pastor Ian Paisley brought to Northern Europe the mass demonstrations that McIntire had pioneered in the United States. These to Hedegård were a “shame and a scandal” that no “Bible-believer” could go in for. The cultural differences between the Americans and the Northern and continental Europeans in the ICCC ultimately proved unbridgeable.
Many things in the history of modern American evangelicalism and fundamentalism look different when viewed from the perspective of these Western and Northern European activists in the ICCC. We need more study on American church history in the unlikeliest of places, such as the regional state archives in Lund, Sweden.
Markku Ruotsila is Adjunct Professor of American Church History at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Adjunct Professor of American and British History at the University of Tampere, Finland.
