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On Tuesday, June 13, 2017, a wave of chaos and indignation broke over the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC’s) annual meeting. The fumes of the nation’s acrimonious 2016 presidential contest still lingered in the air. The recently concluded election season had, among other things, generated a spike in the visibility and influence of the “alt-right” movement, a small but vocal white identitarian group championed by the likes of noted white nationalist Richard Spencer. Hence, as the 2017 SBC meeting approached, a black Southern Baptist pastor determined to take this opportunity to express his concern about the recent increase in the alt-right’s visibility. To this end, he introduced what he expected to be an uncontroversial resolution for the convention to firmly denounce the racism and white nationalism of the alt-right. The pastor, Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, was taken aback when the resolutions committee declined to forward his proposal to the convention floor. The committee explained this initial decision by noting that they were “very aware that . . . feelings rightly run high regarding alt-right ideology,” but “we just weren’t certain we could craft a resolution that would enable us to measure our strong convictions with the grace of love, which we’re also commanded by Jesus to incorporate.” This stance released a tidal wave of protest both on social media and from messengers at the convention. For his part, McKissic called it “a mystery how you can so easily affirm standard beliefs about other things, but we get to white supremacy . . . and all of a sudden, we’ve got a problem.”1

In the face of this backlash, the committee scrambled to correct its misstep, and so on June 14, the last day of the annual meeting, the convention adopted a resolution that denounced “every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy, as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”2 Yet from a public relations perspective, the SBC was still left with the lingering optics of having ignored an antiracism resolution offered by one of its black members. Many people, including McKissic, maintained reservations in the face of the hastily passed resolution, arguing that the entire episode “showed a fault line. It showed that maybe, just maybe, you aren’t where you’re supposed to be on this.”3 Other Southern Baptists bristled at the resolution itself, holding that it was unnecessary and smacked of political virtue signaling: “If there are those in the SBC who have embraced [white supremacy] . . . issuing a resolution isn’t going to produce repentance. Scripture already condemns it. If Scripture won’t convince them, what chance does a resolution have?”4 Ultimately both the original hesitation to broach the resolution and the divided reaction to its eventual adoption left some black Americans wondering, along with McKissic, how the black and white members of one of the most visible conservative evangelical denominations in the United States could find agreement on many other issues, including doctrinal confessions, and yet still argue about how to address the topic of racism.

This particular issue is by no means a new development, and its recent manifestation in such obvious fashion in the midst of the relatively theologically conservative ranks of the Southern Baptist Convention serves simply to point to its persistence in American religious life—particularly in conservative Protestant circles.5 Indeed, a full century prior to the SBC’s alt-right resolution, this trend was apparent in the emergence of one of the most famous conservative religious movements in modern American history—Protestant fundamentalism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the fundamentalist movement arose as a reaction against the “modernist” or “liberal” theology gaining popularity in many churches and intellectual centers. Modernist theology sought to adapt Christianity to fit with the growing rationalistic and naturalistic sensibilities of the modern age—thus jettisoning or redefining doctrines such as the virgin birth of Christ or the divine inspiration of the Bible, which were seen as incompatible with a modern, scientific understanding of the world. In response, fundamentalists rose up to affirm the centrality of these “fundamental” theological positions to historic Christianity and to denounce modernists as insidious threats to the Christian religion itself.6 Eventually, major white fundamentalist leaders built up institutional networks of schools, conferences, newspapers, and the like—networks that, in accord with the prevailing mores of a society structured by Jim Crow, were forged and populated almost exclusively by a white membership. But while these particular institutional networks may typically have been circumscribed by the color line, the theological ideas, ecclesiastical concerns, intellectual arguments, and rhetorical labels were not.

In the years between the world wars, when the fundamentalist-modernist controversy burned the brightest and fundamentalism was making a name for itself as a major force in the American religious landscape, the theological convictions underlying fundamentalism straddled the color line to the extent that some African Americans began to publicly self-identify as fundamentalists and to discuss the importance of “the fundamentals” to the black community. Yet despite this reality, these black actors are for the most part noticeably absent from the historical accountings of fundamentalism, and in turn fundamentalism rarely engenders much discussion in the realm of African American religious history. The story of fundamentalism has thus often become the story of white institutional leaders who take on Brobdingnagian proportions—men such as Minnesota Baptist pastor William Bell Riley, founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, or sensationalist Texas Baptist firebrand J. Frank Norris, whose dominance in the narrative implicitly paints fundamentalism as a pugilistic white enterprise confined to white social circles. For instance, historian David Harrington Watt’s evaluation of the demography of interwar-era fundamentalism concludes that it was essentially restricted to “native-born white Americans,” while noted sociologist Nancy Ammerman suggests that the term “fundamentalism” itself is broadly inapplicable to the black community both historically and in the present, because “although they share many beliefs with other evangelicals, those beliefs function quite differently in their very different social world” in which black religion offers “a racially based separation in which church and community are bound tightly together.”7 Here again arises the persistent question of racial differentiation in the midst of substantial doctrinal alignment.

Yet, what of those black conservative Protestants who did explicitly name themselves fundamentalists, or who undertook a traditionalist defense of the fundamentals? This is the driving question that this book aims to explore. It argues that there were indeed fundamentalists among African American Protestants who not only claimed the title for themselves but also aligned with the theological heartbeat of fundamentalism. In making this case, I especially emphasize the series of ninety articles, compiled and widely distributed between 1910 and 1915, which comprised the theological work from which the movement eventually gained its name—The Fundamentals. Sometimes referred to as the sourcebook of fundamentalist theology, The Fundamentals represents an early, forthright, and centralized source for fundamentalist doctrinal expression. Comparing the writings and sermons of certain black authors and ministers with the language and arguments of these articles offers one fruitful avenue for exploring and demonstrating fundamentalist convictions and identity across racial lines. The completion of The Fundamentals also provides a starting date for this study at 1915, the year in which the final articles of the series were published. Hence, the periodization from 1915 to 1940 discussed in this book stretches from the publication of The Fundamentals through the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the 1920s and 1930s, leading up to the emergence of the neo-evangelical movement in the 1940s.8

But beyond simply chronicling the existence of black fundamentalists, this book further argues that black fundamentalists displayed a type of social engagement markedly different from that typically associated with fundamentalism. Rather than spending the majority of their time and energy on fighting against the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools and similar issues, black fundamentalists advocated social action and religious application that emphasized racial equality, justice for all people regardless of skin color, and the social advancement of the African American community from marginalized minority to full participants in American citizenship. Black fundamentalism was thus not a mere carbon copy of white fundamentalism superimposed onto black churches. Even considering the substantial congruence of theological conviction and exegetical argumentation across the color line that we will examine in this book, black fundamentalism nonetheless represented an internal formulation and expression of religious thought and experience from within black church traditions. Especially as they addressed the topic of race, black fundamentalists applied their conservative religious beliefs in more progressive ways than did their white counterparts.9 This study of fundamentalism across the color line shows how religious expression is influenced by racial context, as well as how racial prejudice in society can obscure those very same dynamics.

As much as this book challenges the traditional conceptualization of American Protestant fundamentalism, it also shows that theologically conservative religion offered an avenue for African Americans to address racism in ways that are often popularly associated with more theologically liberal (or even secular) traditions in the black community.10 Black fundamentalists managed to combine a traditional brand of theological fundamentalism with a race-conscious, progressive attitude toward social engagement—two perspectives that are usually considered to be profoundly disparate, if not mutually exclusive.11 This is not to say that the ideas or approaches of black fundamentalists were identical to those of their more theologically liberal or secular brothers and sisters in the African American community; like any social or political movement, the quest for black freedom evinced plenty of internal diversity. However, it is to say that they were engaged with the struggle for freedom, justice, and citizenship and that their racial context significantly influenced how they applied their religious convictions. These black fundamentalists of the early twentieth century would undoubtedly have empathized with Dwight McKissic’s frustration during the 2017 SBC annual meeting at the mystery of “how you can so easily affirm standard beliefs about other things, but we get to white supremacy . . . and all of a sudden, we’ve got a problem.”

Despite the fact that numerous African Americans affirmed fundamentalism or identified explicitly as fundamentalists during the interwar period, the historiographies of fundamentalism and African American religion have, for the most part, failed to intersect. One recent book, Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s Doctrine and Race, marks a noteworthy exception to this trend, offering a much-needed consideration of the relationship between fundamentalism and the black community.12 She rightly notes that “historians of [fundamentalism] have not engaged fully with how fundamentalists understood race and race relations in general” and further points out that “the extent to which African Americans interacted with white fundamentalists . . . and with fundamentalist theories in general has also received scant attention.”13 Mathews argues that both whites and blacks racialized fundamentalism and modernism in ways that excluded the black community from direct involvement in the controversy—with white fundamentalists painting fundamentalism as an exclusively white movement and conservative black Protestants casting modernism as an essentially white problem.14 While she does devote substantial space to discussing some of the expressly theological aspects of fundamentalism, Mathews nevertheless excludes blacks from among the ranks of the fundamentalists, maintaining that (among other reasons) their willingness to entertain and employ certain racially progressive social ideologies and strategies, including a general emphasis on racial justice, precluded such an association or identification.15 African Americans, she contends, were positioned “outside the debate being held by white Protestants—both the fundamentalist/modernist debate and the debates among the fundamentalists themselves,” making black Protestants “free to interpret the Bible and current events without the restrictions of the debates that raged around them.”16 Hence, Mathews draws a consistent terminological distinction between “fundamentalists,” who were necessarily white, and “black Protestants” (or various parallel descriptors), who “declined to self-identify as fundamentalists.” In this vein, she argues that “African American Baptists and Methodists did not explicitly embrace or reject fundamentalism,” and that black Baptists and Methodists “would not side with modernism, but they could not live with fundamentalism either.”17

Unfortunately, this perspective fails to fully account for not only the black Protestants who were overtly embracing the fundamentalist label in the 1920s and 1930s, but also the assertion coming from both proponents and opponents that fundamentalism was, for good or for ill, a widespread phenomenon in the black Protestant community. I argue, in accordance with Mathews, that black Protestants did often embrace various sorts of racially progressive applications and strategies that distinguished them from white fundamentalists, but in many cases they actually grounded these social positions in their fundamentalist theology and identity. Hence, the discrepancy in social application across the color line should not prompt us to dismiss black fundamentalists as inauthentic or even nonexistent. Rather, it should cause us to recognize that fundamentalist American Protestantism, considered from a historical-theological perspective, may have had a wider range of social commitments and cultural applications than has usually been assumed, if we take into consideration the disparate racial, social, and cultural contexts in which fundamentalism was manifested.

While Mathews’s book represents an undeniably important step forward in considering the confluence of fundamentalism and racial identity, its novelty also reveals and reinforces the historiography’s generally exclusionary trend when it comes to African Americans and fundamentalism.18 Although she does not go so far as to affirm that “black fundamentalists” was a meaningful category, Mathews does convincingly demonstrate that blacks were self-consciously engaged with certain ideas surrounding the fundamentalist-modernist controversy—at least among the four major denominational newspapers that structure her study. Yet in the majority of historical scholarship, black Americans have typically been excluded from considerations of American Protestant fundamentalism, based either on explicit denials that African Americans could even be fundamentalists or on implicit neglect in historical analysis. Moreover, when African Americans do expressly appear in the scope of historical narratives relating to fundamentalism, they often represent either a small sympathetic group to be quickly mentioned and passed over or a bogeyman that white fundamentalists could leverage in consolidating their coalitions. Unfortunately, these sorts of exclusionary perspectives fail to account for those African Americans who consciously self-identified as fundamentalists in the very midst of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, as well as those whose theological and polemical arguments reflected a doctrinal commitment to fundamentalist principles—not to mention those in the black press who presented claims about the widespread presence of fundamentalist convictions and identity among the black Protestant populace. One of the main goals of this book is to incorporate these marginalized black fundamentalist voices into the historiography.

This marginalization of African Americans in relation to fundamentalism in the scholarly literature reflects at least two notable historiographical trends. First, fundamentalism is often understandably construed as an essentially institutionalized political or social movement rather than as a primarily theological undertaking. This position marginalizes those who might have been theologically (and possibly even ideologically) aligned with the movement but whose cultural context and social circumstances precluded overt participation in the movement’s institutional structures. Indeed, many of the most visible and influential fundamentalist institutions and networks, established amid Jim Crow and run by powerful white leaders, often reflected (or even reified) the segregationist and racist sensibilities of the predominant white culture. Thus, analyses that treat these institutional structures as definitional to fundamentalism per se tend to obscure the possibility of black participation. Black fundamentalism, in contrast, was not institutionally defined, but rather existed within extant denominational boundaries and other religious structures. In this sense, it was more a perspective than an institutionalized movement. As a result, the fundamentalist outlook among black Protestants was by necessity significantly less separatist in nature than was the institutionalized fundamentalism of whites, and it often existed side-by-side (albeit sometimes uncomfortably so) with more liberal perspectives within organizations such as the National Baptist Convention (NBC) or the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Such dynamics were for instance evident, as we will see, in the NBC’s seminary in Nashville.

The second relevant historiographical trend is that most academic treatments of fundamentalism consider a militant posture toward certain social and cultural changes that were often associated with the modernist worldview, such as an increasing acceptance of evolutionary biology, to be definitional.19 Yet this perspective naturally excludes African Americans who may have expressly identified themselves as fundamentalists, but whose social focus was often, and necessarily, directed in various ways toward racial issues. In short, if fundamentalism is conceptualized as a movement closely tied to a narrow spectrum of culturally conservative political and social objectives important to conservative white Protestants, and if it is likewise defined by virtue of formal institutional structures, then it follows that African Americans can be safely ignored because they were typically far from the cultural centers of power and the social center of the institutionalized movement, even if they were doctrinally aligned with the fundamentalist perspective.

An example of the first trend—treating fundamentalism as an institutional movement over against the theological specifics of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy—comes in Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism, one of the earliest modern scholarly treatments of the subject. Sandeen carefully distinguishes between the “fundamentalist movement” and the more limited “fundamentalist controversy” of the 1920s, noting that “the movement existed independently of the controversy.” He describes the movement as “a self-conscious, structured, long-lived, dynamic entity with recognized leadership, periodicals, and meetings,” possessed of a “self-conscious identity and structure similar to the Republican party, the Knights of Columbus, or (probably the closest parallel) the Puritans.” For Sandeen, the central concern that gave “life and shape to the Fundamentalist movement,” including its institutions, was millenarianism and its attendant focus on the imminent return of Christ.20 Sandeen’s emphasis on the self-conscious identity and institutionalized structure of this millenarian Fundamentalist movement—on a level with a major political party, no less—clearly sets the focus on those citizens with relatively unfettered access to the social and cultural mainstream. Consequently, it is not entirely surprising that African Americans, a group that was constantly pushed to the margins of society in the Jim Crow era, are absent from Sandeen’s narrative. The comparison of the fundamentalist movement with a political party is a striking one when considered from this angle; African Americans were routinely marginalized in the political sphere at this time through disfranchisement efforts, and so perhaps it should not be a surprise to see them excluded from Sandeen’s evaluation of a movement he considers to be similar to a political party in its institutional makeup. For similar reasons, other studies containing a strong institutional focus—such as Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again, which admittedly “devotes most of its attention to the internal affairs of the fundamentalist movement”—largely omit African Americans because of their marginality relative to the institutional forms, though perhaps not to the doctrinal commitments, of the movement itself.21

This perspective is likewise often inculcated in biographical portraits of individual fundamentalist leaders, such as Barry Hankins’s biography of J. Frank Norris, God’s Rascal, or William Trollinger’s study of William Bell Riley, God’s Empire.22 It is pertinent, though rather obvious, to point out that such prominent fundamentalist institutional leaders were white. Figures such as Riley and Norris rightly receive a significant amount of historical attention because they were men of enormous influence—superstar preachers, Bible college founders, radio personalities, conference organizers, and on and on. They were in many ways larger-than-life characters heading sprawling networks of fundamentalist churches and organizations, and as such their biographies naturally tend to paint fundamentalism as a social movement intrinsically tied to these institutional structures. When, as Ernest Sandeen suggested in 1970, the “fundamentalist movement” is seen as possessing “self-conscious identity and structure similar to the Republican party,” the historian’s focus will naturally gravitate toward the most influential and “self-conscious” leaders of the movement, just as political pundits tend to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on highly influential party leaders. Furthermore, an emphasis on the formal institutional structure of the movement naturally draws attention to the individuals who created and oversaw the schools, colleges, radio stations, churches, conferences, newspapers, and associations that comprised the fundamentalist institutional networks; and of course any such “top-down” institutional approach is going to tend to exclude socially marginalized groups such as African Americans.

Trollinger admits in his biography of William Bell Riley that top-down thinking has too often characterized the study of fundamentalism: “William Ellis’ observation, made in 1981, still rings true: while the revisionists ‘have provided a valuable service to historiography by describing the intellectual base of fundamentalism,’ they have failed to give ‘the grass roots of fundamentalism . . . the full attention it deserves.’”23 While his statement was not intended as commentary on the paucity of racial analysis within the literature, there is certainly a sense in which it can be applied to the much-neglected subject of black fundamentalists. An emphasis on fundamentalism as an institutionally defined social movement tends to ensure that the most attention is inevitably drawn to the elite white leaders of the movement. And although such attention does at times touch on issues of race and ethnicity—Trollinger discusses Riley’s anti-Semitic urge to make Jews the ubiquitous “social scapegoat,” and Norris’s well-known fondness for segregation and white supremacy prompted Hankins to devote a chapter to Norris’s utilization of “the race card” in defending both fundamentalism and the South’s social status quo—this nevertheless does little to illuminate the question of fundamentalist expressions within black religious communities.24

Much as Hankins examines J. Frank Norris’s rhetorical connection of the fundamentalists’ institutional fight against modernism with the fight to preserve the segregationist status quo, so historian William R. Glass’s Strangers in Zion likewise ties institutional fundamentalism in the South to segregationist ideals. Glass explains that it is helpful to view fundamentalism as an institutionalized “movement with a specific agenda,” rather than as “a set of [theological] beliefs.”25 For Glass, whose study centers on the development of fundamentalism in the American South, southern fundamentalism was essentially concerned with preserving the doctrinal fidelity of churches and denominations because the movement leaders saw their churches as the moral guardians of their culture and the organizing institutions of their communities; thus, the movement was in large part concerned not merely with doctrinal issues but with preserving the South’s social order. A significant part of that social order, of course, centered on race relations, and the prominence of Jim Crow loomed large as the fundamentalist movement was establishing its roots in the South. Consequently, aside from a passing reference or two to a minimal black presence at a few southern Bible conferences, Glass’s study includes African Americans only insofar as they appeared in white fundamentalist rhetoric. For example, Glass recounts how the fundamentalist opponents of the reunion of southern and northern denominations played on racial fears and prejudices to consolidate support for their cause, demanding that no consideration of reunion would be feasible unless the northerners provided “an explicit statement that the reunited denomination would maintain a policy of racial separation.”26 Thus it seems that Glass’s understanding of southern fundamentalism as “a movement with a specific agenda” rather than “a set of beliefs” limits the degree to which (and the roles in which) African Americans appear in the history of fundamentalism. Given that the movement is presented as one that sought in many respects to preserve the prevailing social and racial hierarchies of the South, African Americans are naturally excluded. There is no room for any conception of black fundamentalists within this particular vision of the “movement.”

Political scientist Michael Lienesch, setting his sights specifically on the anti-evolutionist portion of the fundamentalist phenomenon, argues that anti-evolutionists made similar use of racial prejudice by intimating that “acceptance of evolution would encourage racial equality and the eventual mixing of the races.”27 Lienesch goes further than Glass, however, in at least acknowledging some noticeable degree of black support for fundamentalist positions. He notes that black churches of the 1920s “tended to be theologically orthodox, and many of their ministers were biblical literalists who held strong dispensationalist sympathies,” and further points out that at the Scopes trial “large numbers of black believers rallied behind William Jennings Bryan.”28 Drawing chiefly on the work of historian Jeffrey Moran to argue that shared anti-evolution sentiments caused some black church leaders to ally with white fundamentalists, Lienesch concludes that “while African Americans remained on the outside of fundamentalism’s strictly segregated organizations, many . . . may have considered themselves to be fundamentalists.”29 In this brief statement, Lienesch appears to concur that a strictly institutional focus might obscure connections between fundamentalism and African American religion. Yet although it is commendable that he at least offers some degree of explicit consideration of black support for fundamentalist causes, it is also notable that Lienesch devotes less than one full page to the subject.

In addition to the conceptualization of fundamentalism as an institutionalized movement rather than as a set of particular doctrinal positions, the definitions used to identify the most central aspects of the fundamentalist perspective can likewise tend toward racial exclusion. Most notably, an emphasis on certain types of conservative cultural militancy permeates the historiography of the last several decades, thanks in large part to evangelical historian George Marsden’s seminal work Fundamentalism and American Culture. Marsden defines fundamentalism as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism” and posits that militant opposition to modernism, in both its theological and cultural expressions, was the single mark that “most clearly set off fundamentalism from a number of closely related traditions.”30 Marsden recognizes fundamentalism as a movement that, though largely driven by theological convictions, was most clearly defined by its fiercely oppositional attitudes toward not only modernist theology but also the social and cultural changes that fundamentalists associated with a modernist worldview. Fundamentalists, then, were not engaged merely in ecclesiastical battles for control over their denominations or spiritual battles for the salvation of souls; they necessarily also took part in protracted social and cultural confrontations designed to preserve the society’s status quo—perhaps most famously in the anti-evolution movement and the Scopes trial.31 Indeed, this brand of conservative cultural militancy is so prevalent in the literature as to be nearly axiomatic. And in fact there is little doubt that such cultural militancy was a key element of the formally institutionalized, white-dominated fundamentalist networks. Moreover, for the most visible and influential movement leaders militant cultural antimodernism was clearly a nonnegotiable priority, as when Baptist journalist Curtis Lee Laws, who coined the term “fundamentalist” in 1920, famously proposed “to do battle royal” against modernist foes.32

Apt as this emphasis may be in the context of fundamentalism’s institutional history or the study of major (white) movement leaders, a single-minded focus on this brand of cultural militancy can unfortunately also serve to obscure the presence of those African Americans who self-identified as fundamentalists or championed the theological convictions of fundamentalism, but whose political and social attention may have been occupied with social concerns that hit closer to home—issues such as segregation, racial violence, and unequal access to education and voting rights for black citizens. Consequently, such people receive little consideration in the prevailing historiography.33 For instance, in arguing that fundamentalism was in essence a “lily-white” undertaking, historian David Harrington Watt points to the fact that “few African Americans threw themselves fully into the fundamentalists’ campaign to keep evolution from being taught in the nation’s public schools.”34 For his part, George Marsden contends that “‘fundamentalist’ has seldom been a self-designation” for African Americans due to the movement’s segregationist heritage.35 Yet although it is unquestionably true, as William Glass demonstrates in Strangers in Zion, that many fundamentalist institutions (particularly in the South) have at times been intimately intertwined with segregation and racial prejudice, there nevertheless remain unexplored in the historical record any number of black figures who did in fact call themselves “fundamentalists” or who took up the pen or ascended to the pulpit to stridently defend “the fundamentals” and to decry the insidious threat of modernism. The ubiquitous emphasis in the historiography on anti-evolution activism and other similar forms of socially conservative cultural militancy serves to obscure the presence of self-identified black fundamentalists and to marginalize claims such as that of one Norfolk Journal and Guide editorialist who declared, within mere weeks of the famous Scopes trial, that “Afro-Americans are fundamentalists, for the most part.”36

This is not to say that the approaches outlined above—specifically the emphases on institutional networks or campaigns of conservative cultural militancy—are invalid or useless. On the contrary, these scholarly endeavors have shed enormous light on numerous elements and expressions of twentieth-century fundamentalism. It is merely to say that they are incomplete, because no single approach can adequately capture every facet of the topic—and the particular facet of black participation has remained heretofore largely unexplored. Thus, the approach that I offer here is not intended as a wholesale replacement or repudiation of the perspectives that have come before. However, this book does insist that there is a history of black fundamentalism, and that lifting new voices from the documentary record helps clarify a heretofore opaque chapter in the story of American fundamentalism.

In contrast to the earlier institutional or political approaches to the topic noted above, my analysis in this book aims to seriously incorporate the fundamentalist elements within the black church by taking a historical-theological approach that treats the specifics of doctrinal commitments and doctrinal attitudes—understood and rightfully situated within their historical contexts—as central in identifying and defining fundamentalism. This approach assumes theology qua theology to be a meaningful analytical category and understands the content of religious belief to be important in and of itself, rather than being simply a reflection or manifestation of other underlying driving forces. Indeed, much of American history is so tightly bound to religious paradigms and ideas that some scholars argue that it is incomprehensible without considering religious context and praxis, as well as the theological and narrative content of American religious traditions.37

It is important to note from the outset that this approach does not entail that the theological content of religious belief is the only meaningful analytical category, or that religious beliefs are entirely unrelated to other commitments. On the contrary, it is an undeniable fact that social circumstances and religious beliefs often inform and influence one another, especially in the essential sermonic (and also more generally religious) task of practically applying theological convictions to everyday life. In this vein we might profitably reflect on what evangelical scholar Mark Noll calls the “social history of theology.” Noll’s approach admits that theological developments and historical developments, far from being partitioned and compartmentalized, must be understood as mutually influential. Theological changes must be considered within their “ecclesiastical, social, political, intellectual, and commercial” contexts. Noll asserts that incorporating this contextual perspective on theological history is “especially useful for explaining why Christian belief evolved along different lines” in disparate social contexts (for Noll, the contexts were the Protestant United States and Protestant Europe).38 My analysis in this book reflects, in part, this “social history of theology” perspective. Recognizing that theological developments take place within the always complex, often knotty, and sometimes discomfiting realities of day-to-day life—rather than in some ethereal vacuum—is the very reason that the topic of “black fundamentalists” is meaningful at all. When we examine the fundamentalist ideas and impulses that manifested themselves in the African American community, social and political and intellectual context matters a great deal, especially in conjunction with the pervasive reality of racial context in American life. So, in line with Noll’s own evaluation of his method, my application of this approach helps to explain the similarities and differences in the evolution of a very particular type of Christian belief in disparate social contexts—in this case, specifically American racial contexts. In the chapters that follow, I argue that the different social and cultural circumstances facing the black and white communities often led to substantially different social actions and applications, even among those who would commonly agree on the most important fundamentalist doctrines.

At the same time, we must also be careful to ensure that the pendulum does not swing too far in the other direction. The theological convictions underlying “fundamentalist” thought (on either side of the racial divide) ought not be boiled down to mere expressions of underlying social, cultural, political, or economic ideological positions. Rather, these bedrock doctrinal convictions should be treated as significant and meaningful in themselves, as markers of legitimately deep-seated belief about the nature of reality and, in many cases, also markers of personal or corporate identity. The historical-theological approach in this book seeks to heed noted historian Albert Raboteau’s warning of the dangers that exist when historians fail to take seriously the theological content of religious belief. Reducing religion to “an epiphenomenon of economic or political ideology,” he cautions, demonstrates both “an inadequate grasp of religion and a simplistic understanding of history.”39 Moreover, the fact remains that many of the historical figures who appear in the following pages considered theology in general, and their own theological positions in particular, to be intrinsically meaningful in defining their identity, and therefore the historical-theological approach seeks to take these religious devotees seriously on their own terms.

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

The historical-theological approach also allows for a sense of the religious variety, diversity, and dynamism among African American congregations and individual religionists. Recognizing that real, substantive theological divisions and conflicts existed within African American communities helps to avoid the temptation to treat “the black church” as a singular, monolithic, undifferentiated whole. Even as many African Americans on opposing sides of the fundamentalist-modernist conflict shared a broad concern for the advancement of the race—and while they may have been inclined to embrace different strategies, some of them were also willing to work side by side in seeking to achieve those goals—they still expressly drew lines of distinction and differentiation on essentially theological grounds. Their commonality in the one arena did not necessarily dictate a congruence in the other; a level of complexity and diversity within “the black church” in general, and often even within a single denominational structure, is apparent. That black fundamentalists sought to balance their recognition of the common oppression facing all black people in a Jim Crow world with their conviction about the spiritual centrality of the traditional “fundamental” doctrines of Christianity also helps to illuminate how and why black fundamentalists tended to be less separatist than their white counterparts. In this respect they represent at once both a theologically distinct facet of a diverse black church tradition and a specifically black manifestation of fundamentalist sentiments.

This situation further reinforces the value of treating theological conviction as a meaningful identity-shaping factor in and of itself, rather than simply, as Raboteau noted, “an epiphenomenon of economic or political ideology.” After all, if that were the case, then there would seem to be little reason for black religionists who faced the common sociopolitical foe of Jim Crow oppression to draw any sharp theological dividing lines over such doctrinal issues as biblical inspiration or the divinity of Jesus. Indeed, if theology were merely a utilitarian expression of underlying political and social motivations, then such doctrinal divisions would be utterly confounding, since they would functionally hinder the utility of religion in accomplishing its principal and elemental sociopolitical goals. In and of itself, the persistence of these theological distinctions demonstrates their deep significance to the practitioners themselves, while the fact that these very same practitioners at times showed a spirit of ecumenical cooperation for common racial goals (an ecumenical approach that white fundamentalists would generally have rejected out of hand) speaks to the power and ubiquity of racial identity as a motivating factor for many African Americans—even fundamentalists and modernists—in the context of Jim Crow America.

With the historical-theological approach in mind, then, the difficult task of defining “fundamentalism” remains. Approaching this endeavor from the vantage of theology and identity, I propose four conditions: (1) the embrace of an overarching supernaturalist and biblicist worldview, including an attitude of continuity with historic Christian traditions, (2) a personal commitment to the central doctrinal essentials of the movement, consonant with the theological convictions reflected in The Fundamentals, (3) a readiness to explicitly criticize and overtly condemn modernist theology, and (4) the willingness to utilize expressly fundamentalist language and terminology in defining one’s theological positions and religious identity. The first three conditions, which are primarily theological, build upon one another to form the doctrinal and attitudinal content of fundamentalism, such that the removal or denial of any one of them would clearly set someone outside of the fundamentalist realm. The fourth condition, which has to do with self-identification, is more subjective and therefore, by necessity, more elusive.42 The three theological tenets together are the essence of what I would define as “doctrinal fundamentalism”—that is, regardless of whether or not a historical actor explicitly claimed the fundamentalist moniker, these tenets reflect a fundamentalist posture from a historical-theological perspective, though of course not necessarily from an institutional one.43 The first three chapters of the book identify and examine these three elements in the black community.

The fourth element, self-identification as a fundamentalist, is rather more difficult because of the inherent subjectivity involved, but it remains important in demonstrating that some major black ecclesiastical leaders sought to overtly position themselves within the cultural maelstrom that was the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. When such self-identification appears in conjunction with the three aspects of “doctrinal fundamentalism,” as laid out above, it becomes difficult to deny that a significant historical-theological congruence between white and black Protestants has seemingly slipped through the cracks of the historiographies of fundamentalism and of African American religious history. Of course, self-identification as a definitional criterion has its own inherent limitations—most notably, that divorced from explicit theological affirmations, the term “fundamentalist” might well carry different connotations to each person who uses it. Two caveats, then, are in order. First, many of the figures in the following pages who sought to elucidate and defend “the fundamentals” or to identify as “fundamentalists” did so in light of their clear doctrinal affirmations, thus adding their self-identification to the already established contours of their “doctrinal fundamentalism” (as defined above). Second, those who designated themselves “fundamentalist” in the absence of a robust, detailed theological or doctrinal context may present more tenuous connections to the historical-theological formulation of fundamentalism, and thus the conclusions we can draw from their examples are somewhat more limited. Nevertheless, the existence of the raging religious controversy between fundamentalists and modernists during the interwar period meant that blacks’ very usage of the terminology implied a willingness to be identified in some respects with the common public perception of fundamentalism. So, while self-designation is obviously a limited criterion, it is nevertheless an important element of dealing with historical figures on their own terms, and it will recur throughout the following chapters as both an important marker in the process of identity construction and, in many cases, as a parallel affirmation of the other three theological elements of “doctrinal fundamentalism” as laid out above.

While consideration of this self-referential aspect of fundamentalism recurs throughout this book, the first three theological elements receive specific consideration in the first three chapters, since they progressively build upon one another. Chapter 1 explores the claims by commentators in the black press (on both sides of the theological divide) that fundamentalism was a widespread force within the black community. Using these weekly newspaper accounts to examine the contours of the basic fundamentalist worldview that was understood to exist among African Americans, this chapter both identifies a professed fundamentalist presence among black Christians and analyzes the theological and racial connotations of these black weeklies’ considerations of fundamentalism. In terms of broad theological characteristics, this fundamentalist worldview was characterized by a supernaturalist presupposition connected to the traditional beliefs of “the old-time religion,” a commitment to biblicism that was often termed “biblical literalism,” and a doctrine of creation that denied the rising tide of evolutionary thought. To deny a supernaturalist and biblicist worldview would, automatically and obviously, preclude a fundamentalist identity. Yet while many African Americans recognized a major fundamentalist contingent among themselves, the broad theological commonalities between black and white fundamentalists did not necessarily manifest in a similar overlap in social worldview, especially regarding issues of race. The fact that the black community was subject to ubiquitous structures of racial oppression meant that the press’s discussions of fundamentalism were also often tinged with questions and implications about the relationship of fundamentalist religion to racial identity and upright social action. In this case, a historical-theological perspective illuminates a self-identified fundamentalist contingent within the African American community, while an institutional perspective might obscure such a connection.

While a supernaturalist and biblicist worldview obviously constitutes the sine qua non of fundamentalist thought, it just as obviously needed to be joined with specific Protestant doctrinal propositions that formed the “fundamentals” of the faith that fundamentalists undertook to defend. To deny any of the basic doctrinal essentials that comprised the majority of the argumentation in The Fundamentals—such as, for example, the full divinity of Christ—would virtually axiomatically set someone apart from the “fundamentalism” of the early twentieth century.44 Chapter 2, therefore, focuses on the so-called five fundamentals, which consist of biblical inspiration, Christ’s divinity, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, and Christ’s literal resurrection and second coming, and examines these doctrines as they were commonly taught by conservative black clergy and religious leaders. In terms of the positive affirmations attending the basic “fundamental” theological propositions, conservative African Americans very much resembled white fundamentalists. For both, the Bible represented the inerrant words of God Almighty, and Christ was as fully divine as he was fully human—he was literally born of a virgin, his bloodshed was necessary to effect the forgiveness of humanity’s sins, and he physically arose from the grave in anticipation of a literal future second advent. The doctrinal formulations, the accompanying argumentation, and the common appeal to solidarity with both biblical and church-historical sources demonstrated substantial similarity between members of different races who sought to champion the fundamentals.

But even possessing a supernaturalist/biblicist worldview and also embracing the core “fundamental” doctrines fail to fully encapsulate the fundamentalist perspective. These commitments might be sufficient to make one a theological conservative, but perhaps not a fundamentalist. Characterized not only by what it affirmed but also what it opposed, historic Protestant fundamentalism entailed an overt resistance and explicit opposition to the rising modernist theology in early twentieth-century churches and denominations. The most famed modernist preacher of the era, Harry Emerson Fosdick, drew this distinction: “We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.”45 The fundamentalist posture of overt polemical opposition to modernism, which Fosdick characterized as “essentially illiberal and intolerant,” constitutes the focus of chapter 3. Even more pointedly, the chapter deals with African American clergymen’s polemical repudiations of modernism from the pulpit—a location that (along with its associated ecclesiastical office) holds a place of special authority and influence in both the Protestant tradition in general and the African American Protestant tradition in particular. While chapter 2 notes the many similarities between blacks and whites in formulating and arguing for the fundamental doctrines, chapter 3 goes even further, examining not only the congruence in antimodernist polemics across racial lines but also the significantly different applications that African American preachers drew from these same pro-fundamentalist and antimodernist positions. In some cases, black fundamentalist preachers launched immediately from their fundamentalist doctrines or polemics into social considerations—the need to subvert Jim Crow, the promise of black racial advancement through religion, the promotion of interracial marriage—which would likely have been inconceivable to many of their white counterparts. Thus chapter 3 continues the argument from previous chapters that certain African Americans could rightly be considered fundamentalists on the basis of both their positive doctrinal affirmations and negative polemical repudiations, but it also shows that the expression and application of that fundamentalist faith could differ enormously from one side of the color line to the other.

While racial context unquestionably affected the way fundamentalists understood their faith’s relationship to the culture, there were nevertheless instances of confluence and cooperation across racial lines that are worth noting. Chapter 4 examines in detail one such interracial endeavor, the establishment of the American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS) in Nashville, Tennessee. As a school affiliated with the nation’s leading black Baptist denomination (the National Baptist Convention, USA), ABTS represented National Baptists’ desire to bolster the availability of conservative Baptist theological training for black ministers across the nation. Partnering with the National Baptists in this project was the white Southern Baptist Convention, which helped fund the school and shared in the control of the institution’s governing bodies. The seminary’s early leadership, doctrinal statements, founding documents, and early controversies testify to a pro-fundamentalist and antimodernist outlook within this institution and allowed (in some cases) for a remarkable degree of interracial cooperation on the basis of shared religious identity. ABTS is a particularly noteworthy case due to the fact that it was much more than the paternalistic exercise that one might expect in the context of the early twentieth-century South. In fact, although white Baptists obviously exercised much influence, the seminary project was designed for African Americans to maintain primary control over the institution by holding majorities among the governing bodies, the faculty, and the administration. The first few decades of ABTS’s existence testify to both the unifying power of a common religious confession as well as the tragic dividing walls erected by a culture of Jim Crow, which even a shared commitment to “the faith once delivered” could not breach.

Chapter 5, in turn, examines another aspect of fundamentalist identity as it came to be expressed and experienced in the African American context—the contested relationship between fundamentalism and Americanism. The chapter serves to highlight some of the divisions within the black community over this brand of religion, as pro- and antifundamentalist forces maneuvered on the rhetorical battlefield of American identity to cast fundamentalism as either supportive of or injurious to various American ideals (and hence blacks’ full participation in the American experiment). In this context, fundamentalism was treated not only as a religious issue, but also as a racial and political issue. Both sides admittedly sought to attain for African Americans the full extent of American citizenship and the rights and privileges thereof, but they vociferously disagreed as to whether fundamentalist religion and identity constituted a help or a hindrance in such a quest. But even as opponents attempted to portray fundamentalism as an albatross around the neck of the race, fundamentalists within the black community sought to weave together these various elements of their identity—as black, as fundamentalists, and as true Americans—in ways that were unique and particular to their cultural experiences in their time and place, as African Americans living under the threateningly watchful eye of Jim Crow.

Thus the progression of the chapters points to the dual reality facing black fundamentalists in the interwar years. On the one hand, they embraced and propounded fundamentalist doctrines, arguments, and polemics, even to the point that some African Americans explicitly donned the controversial mantle of fundamentalism for themselves. Yet on the other hand, their place in American culture as a whole was subject to the overarching white supremacy of Jim Crow, and as a result the actions, attitudes, and activism that stemmed from their religious convictions took on a very different cast from that of their white counterparts. The task of applying their theological convictions to the most pressing issues facing their community entailed that issues of racial justice and equality took a level of precedence unfamiliar to white fundamentalists, and the institutionalized racial prejudice of the Jim Crow era led black fundamentalists to eschew strict ecclesiastical separatism. And even when the lines of strict racial distinction were momentarily blurred by a common religious confession, as in the ABTS project, the strictures of American society drastically circumscribed the boundaries of interracial cooperation, because the single most defining characteristic of any black person in the eyes of the dominant white society remained his or her race. Due to the tensions that arose from these two intersecting realities—the theological reality of their fundamentalist religion and the social reality of the second-class citizenship imposed upon them by Jim Crow—black fundamentalists remained largely ignored by their white counterparts and, until recently, also by historians. The pages that follow seek both to examine this tension and to understand these people on their own terms, thereby offering another level of complexity and variety to the experiences of African American religionists in the twentieth century and suggesting an American Protestant fundamentalism united in essential doctrinal attitudes but variegated in its hues of social action, cultural application, and activist fervor.