If you benefit from theologically sound preaching, have a degree from an evangelical college or seminary, enjoyed the “Left Behind” series, or visited the Creation Museum, you are indebted, in part, to the founding generation of fundamentalists.
Beginning after World War I, those militant Protestants protested liberal theology and evolution. To grasp that “mood” one must return to the 1920s and 1930s.
Historical Context
Higher criticism of Scripture and denials of Christ’s deity had spread from Germany to American seminaries and pulpits. In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick, foremost liberal Protestant of the era, confronted adversaries in his widely publicized sermon at New York’s First Presbyterian Church, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Conservative Protestants responded by defending the faith and building institutions to maintain it.
By the 1920s, the other threat, evolution, had filtered down to public schools, and a few states responded with anti-evolution laws. The 1925 Scopes Trial tested Tennessee’s anti-evolution law and turned into a media event. Celebrity defense attorney Clarence Darrow won the public relations battle with William Jennings Bryan’s ineffective defense of Genesis.
But Bryan, a Presbyterian and part of the prosecution, won the case, and fundamentalist churches and institutions would thrive for years despite the negative image from the event. The idea that the trial relegated the movement to the shadows was a myth.
A better window into the movement’s militance around the same period would be J. Oliver Buswell, Jr. – Presbyterian, and future Wheaton College president – challenging his modernist professor Shirley Jackson Case for Case’s bias against supernatural Christianity in the classroom at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Buswell’s assertiveness illustrates the movement’s confidence, but he paid a price. After he completed his master’s degree at Chicago Divinity School, the school denied him doctoral candidacy. Buswell accused them of prejudice. When he later earned his doctorate from New York University, his dissertation focused on modernist titan John Dewey.
Fundamentalism Across Denominations
A major reason for fundamentalists’ success during the 1920s and 1930s was the commitment to transdenominationalism, individuals crossing denominational lines. Defending core ideas of supernatural Christianity overrode doctrinal differences.
Imagine a conservative Protestant world in which a Methodist evangelist would invite a Presbyterian theologian to join his “lecture faculty” for a planned seminary, two years after founding a college.
On October 12, 1929, Bob Jones, Sr. wrote J. Gresham Machen, whom he called an “outstanding orthodox” leader, with such a proposal. Machen replied on October 30 that he was “gratified” by the offer, but declined because of the pressure of his work, which included the founding of Westminster Seminary that year.
Cooperation across denominations contradicts the fundamentalists’ testy image. In 1919, William Bell Riley, a Minneapolis Baptist pastor, founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. He borrowed the label from pamphlets titled, “The Fundamentals,” published from 1910 to 1915, which expounded key Protestant ideas that liberals had challenged.
Riley organized the WCFA as a rival to the mainline Federal Council of Churches, begun in 1908. He had worked earlier in Chicago with a nondenominational Dwight L. Moody. The WCFA also included Reuben A. Torrey, dean of BIOLA, James M. Gray, dean of Moody Bible Institute, and William M. Pettingill, dean of the Philadelphia School of the Bible.
The WCFA included a cross section of conservative Protestants who could fellowship more easily with defenders of the faith from different denominations than they could with conservatives in their own churches who chose silence. Over 6,500 delegates from 42 states, most Canadian provinces, and seven foreign countries attended the first WCFA conference in Philadelphia in 1919.
In the WCFA and beyond, the first generation was diverse. Northern Baptists and Northern Presbyterians dominated, but Methodists, Reformed Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and independent groups joined the ranks. Leaders were pastors, evangelists, educators, and journalists. Core leadership was Republican, but Southern fundamentalists were Democrats. These conservative Protestants could be urban or rural and live anywhere in America. Prominent churches were in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Fort Worth, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
In 1920 Curtis Laws, a Northern Baptist leader, coined the label “fundamentalist” for this movement, and it stuck. In a 1922 address at Moody Bible Institute, for example, he cited the important ideas to defend: the inspiration of the Bible, the deity and virgin birth of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, and Christ’s second coming. He also argued that evangelization should accompany the defense of the faith. Fundamentalist organizations, including colleges, devised similar creeds, which were streamlined versions of historic ones.
That stress on creeds was enough to lure Machen to cooperate with other groups, A “new warmth of fellowship,” he believed, existed among Calvinists and other evangelicals. Machen now saw the battle lines drawn not between Calvinists and other evangelicals, nor Protestants against Catholics, but clearly between Christians and modernists. He shared the fundamentalist use of Common Sense Realism, a philosophy stressing facts, popular during the Enlightenment.
Privately, however, he argued that cooperation among denominations weakened the church, believed dispensationalism was harmful, shunned the anti-evolution campaign, and was relatively quiet about the inerrancy of Scripture.
Moreover, Machen disliked the word “fundamentalist” because it sounded like a new sect. One basic argument in his 1923 apologetic “Christianity and Liberalism” was that modernists should not call themselves Christians. That term should apply only to orthodox Protestants. Nonetheless, he readily identified with fundamentalism in public addresses and in the media.
The Bible Conference movement was another feature of transdenominationalism. The conference in Winona Lake, Indiana, was a conservative Protestant hub, led by Presbyterian fundamentalist William Biederwolf from 1922 to 1939. Speakers represented a broad spectrum of denominations, including Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Reformed Episcopalians. Moderates from mainline denominations occasionally spoke there as well.
By 1941, there were over 50 Bible conferences across the U.S. Those gatherings also brought together revivalist elements and conservative academic theologians.
Fundamentalists working together also advanced premillennialism at Bible conferences, colleges, and churches. Popularly known as the “Second Coming” or “Blessed Hope,” it was an important part of the fundamentalist coalition.
The foremost premillennial dispensationalist advocate, however, shunned the fundamentalist label. Lewis Sperry Chafer, who in 1924 founded Dallas Theological Seminary, preferred a positive, not militant, stance. Like his mentor C.I. Scofield, he eventually became a Presbyterian.
The Reformed wing, except for a few like Buswell, opposed the premillennial view of end times. Baptists J. Frank Norris and a young John R. Rice, along with Brethren pastor Louis S. Bauman, carried the premillennial torch in the 1930s. Ironically, their flexibility about “time,” especially the “gap” theory, echoed new scientific theories, such as “relativity.”
Cooperation among denominations was the lifeblood of the movement. Core doctrines could transcend sacramental, theological, denominational, and lifestyle issues. As one historian noted, in the 1930s in Chicago, a fundamentalist layperson could be a member of a mainline church, yet attend conferences at Moody Church, donate to China Inland Mission, enjoy WMBI radio, read Charles Trumbull’s “Sunday School Times,” volunteer at Pacific Garden Mission, frequent nearby Winona Lake Bible Conferences, and send a child to Wheaton College.
Not all theological conservatives, however, endorsed working with other denominations. Missouri Synod Lutherans, Pentecostals, and Southern Baptists defended the faith within their own denominations, but did not formally align with fundamentalists. Some African Americans interacted with fundamentalists, but did not participate formally in the movement.
Some conservatives, after losing battles for denominational control, left their denominations for form new ones. Some fundamentalists in the Northern Baptist Convention stressed the autonomy of local Baptist churches and seceded in 1932, forming the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. In the late ‘30s the Orthodox Presbyterian and Bible Presbyterian Churches left the Northern Presbyterian Church. Most conservatives stayed in their mainline denominations.
Fundamentalism and Creationism
While unified against modernism, fundamentalists disagreed about creation. Most of the leaders in the 1920s and 1930s advocated the day-age theory, but fundamentalists also developed creationism, which advocated a literal view of creation and geological views shaped by the Genesis flood.
The most important spokesman for creationism was Harry Rimmer, who in 1921 founded the Research Science Bureau. George McCready Price, with his book “The New Geology,” served as an authority for the anti-evolution cause, although he was not a fundamentalist but a Seventh-day Adventist educator.
In August 1929, Riley and Rimmer debated creation in Minneapolis. Both believed Genesis was inspired, but Riley insisted on the day-age theory, while Rimmer believed in literal days, including the dispensationalist “gap” theory, which proposed an indeterminate amount of time between the first two verses in Genesis 1.
Not all who endorsed the Genesis account accepted Rimmer’s view. Some believed it conceded too much time, leaving open the option of evolution. Still, fundamentalists could tolerate differing views on the issue.
In 1930, a Presbyterian chapel speaker at Bob Jones College argued for the long-day theory, a view Buswell also endorsed. At the Scopes Trial, Bryan supported the long-day view. Machen, who declined Bryan’s offer to help with the Scopes Trial, was quiet about creation and evolution. Torrey was also ambiguous about evolution.
Fundamentalism and Women
In this era, fundamentalists had a surprising view about women. While the general culture, and even mainline churches, stressed traditional roles for women in the 1920s — perhaps a backlash against women earning the right to vote in the ‘20s and serving as evangelists in the 1800s — fundamentalists often platformed female leaders.
For example, John Roach Straton, pastor at New York’s Calvary Baptist, encouraged women in leadership. Billy Sunday had female Bible teachers on his staff. “Moody Monthly” endorsed the idea of women in ministry. Some fundamentalists supported the popular, though controversial, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
Fundamentalist colleges provided more opportunities for women too. Riley trained female pastors and evangelists in his Northwestern Schools. In 1929, two female Bible teachers spoke at a Bob Jones College Bible Conference, and in 1949 the university awarded Henietta Mears, of Hollywood Presbyterian Church, an honorary doctorate for her work in Christian education, a traditional vocation for women. Wheaton and Bob Jones had female Bible faculty, a practice that ended after World War II.
Fundamentalism After The 1930’s
That initial fundamentalist group left a vital legacy. They built the foundation for evangelical presence in our contemporary culture. At a time of religious decline, their churches and institutions thrived. They built colleges and seminaries based on national standards of higher education, published books and magazines, and utilized radio and film.
They participated in politics: supporting prohibition, most condemning the Klan, and endorsing Hoover in 1928. By the late 1930s they joined Catholics in the battle against communism, and most defended Jews.
What happened after the founding generation? Times and fundamentalists changed. With the threats of World War II and the Cold War, American culture focused more on unity than militance. In 1942, more inclusive fundamentalists formed the National Association of Evangelicals, and in the 1950s cooperated with mainline denominations, including liberals, in evangelism. Some fundamentalists remained militant and separatist, but their coalition was smaller, and they developed more conservative lifestyles.
Fundamentalism’s last phase was joining with others in forming the Christian Right. This political action was a response to Supreme Court decisions against prayer and Bible reading in 1963, and in favor of abortion in 1973. Fundamentalists also rejected the ‘60s counterculture, anti-war protests, and feminism.
Francis Schaeffer illustrates the transition to the Christian Right. In the 1930s, a young Schaeffer worked with fundamentalist Presbyterian Carl McIntire. After World War II, as a missionary in Switzerland, he embraced a broader evangelicalism and engaged secular culture with lectures, books, and films. In the 1970s, however, he returned to fundamentalism, a pioneer in opposition to abortion. He, along with D. James Kennedy, supported Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979.
As a movement, fundamentalism ended in the late 20th century. In 1989, Falwell’s Moral Majority and “The Fundamentalist Journal” ended. The Christian Right continued, but the media and academics increasingly used the term “fundamentalist” to describe Muslim extremists.
Fundamentalism appeared and disappeared within a span of a century. Yet, its effects continue to be felt today. Evangelicals continue to have publications, conferences, colleges, and coalitions to protect and promote the vitals of the Christian faith. Though few would refer to themselves as fundamentalists today, they share many of the movement’s core beliefs.
Carl Abrams serves as a ruling elder at Emmanuel Upstate Presbyterian Church. He served as professor of history at Bob Jones University for 46 years. In retirement, he teaches at the University Center in Greenville, South Carolina. He is the author of “Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940” and “Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture.”