Reveals the role of Black Fundamentalists during the early part of the twentieth century As the modernist-fundamentalist controversy came to a head in the early twentieth century, an image of the “fighting fundamentalist” was imprinted on the American cultural consciousness. To this day, the word “fundamentalist” often conjures the image of a fire-breathing preacher—strident, unyielding in conviction . . . and almost always white. But did this major religious perspective really stop cold in its tracks at the color line? Black Fundamentalists challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith—doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth—against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements.Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression.
Оглавление
Daniel R. Bare. Black Fundamentalists
Black Fundamentalists. Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era
Contents
Introduction
1 “Filled to Overflowing” Black Weeklies and the Fundamentalist Presence
“They Are Everywhere and in Everything”
Characteristics and Connotations
2. Formulating the Faith. The Five Fundamentals across Racial Lines
3. Polemics from the Pulpit. Antimodernist Preaching and Racial Applications
Confronting Modernism from the Pulpit
“A Happy Blessed Companionship”
4. Religious Education and Interracial Cooperation. The American Baptist Theological Seminary
“A Plan of Fraternal Cooperation”: Inception and Founding
Doctrines and Disputes
5. Contested Identities. Fundamentalism, Race, and Americanism
Fundamentalism: Religion of Racial Progress or Racial Regress?
“The Cross, Where Freedom’s Sword Was Forged”
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes. Introduction
Chapter 1. “Filled to Overflowing”
Chapter 2. Formulating the Faith
Chapter 3. Polemics from the Pulpit
Chapter 4. Religious Education and Interracial Cooperation
Chapter 5. Contested Identities
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
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Daniel R. Bare
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
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One result of this commitment is that some space is devoted to nuanced aspects of doctrinal analysis and comparisons between religionists from across the racial spectrum. While social circumstances and social application unquestionably play a large role in the analysis, similarities and differences in doctrinal positions are also treated as important building blocks for constructing a religious identity. Consequently, while other treatments might focus largely on institutional statements and actions in defining and evaluating fundamentalism, this book utilizes the ninety articles of The Fundamentals as an important reference point for theological and exegetical analysis of fundamentalist theology. These collected essays offer a starting point for evaluating the doctrinal content of fundamentalist religious convictions as “fundamentalism” emerged as an identifiable part of American religious nomenclature from the mid-1910s forward.
Another corollary of this emphasis on religious and theological thinking as intrinsically meaningful is that it helps to illuminate the power of religious ideas to shape, drive, and interpret people’s actions and experiences in this world. In this respect, my examination of black fundamentalism intersects with the topic of black intellectual history. Historians Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, in their recent volume New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, point out that intellectual history not only studies how people of the past used “ideas and symbols . . . to make sense of the world” and “what [historical subjects] thought about what they were doing,” but also allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the world with which our historical subjects were grappling. Such examination “deepens our understanding of social and cultural history, forcing us to investigate the ideas that undergird political and social life and grapple with the theories and ideologies that inform historical actors.” From this vantage, studying the theological ideas of black fundamentalists has the potential to tell us quite a lot about the world in which they lived. This is certainly true when comparing fundamentalist groups across the color line. Shared theological convictions had the power, in some cases, to bridge social gulfs and drive interracial fellowship, but divergences in social application, especially on issues of race, also showed how theological ideas and their consequences were utilized to address contextually specific social and racial concerns. Likewise, with respect to the field of black intellectual history in particular, detecting the voices of black fundamentalists reinforces Blain, Cameron, and Farmer’s argument that the history of black intellectual engagement is “by no means monolithic.” Identifying a fundamentalist facet within the black intellectual tradition, then, adds to “the range and depth of the ideological and social traditions upon which black intellectuals drew in their efforts to address key issues in black communities.”40 This tack illuminates the “sometimes overlooked fact” that, in the words of Albert Raboteau, “African-American opinion has never been unanimous.”41
