Читать книгу Black Fundamentalists - Daniel R. Bare - Страница 8

In the weeks leading up to the July 1925 trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, the topic of fundamentalist Christianity was much on the mind of the American public. The trial, centering on John Scopes’s teaching evolution in a public school in violation of Tennessee state law, drew national attention from across the ideological spectrum, ranging from fundamentalist giant William Bell Riley to famed cultural critic H. L. Mencken. Just as the trial ultimately functioned as a referendum on fundamentalist Protestantism itself, so the summer of 1925 represented an opportunity for religionists across the country to reflect on the merits of the fundamentalist perspective and to assess their relationship to it. Into this charged cultural context, less than a month before the proceedings began—on Saturday, June 13, 1925—the editorial page of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, a historically black newspaper based in Norfolk, Virginia, published a column lauding “fundamentalism” as a significant element of African American faith and practice. Having made clear his thesis by titling the column “Our Group Are Fundamentalists in Religion” and confident in his proclamation that “Afro-Americans are fundamentalists, for the most part,” the Norfolk editorialist concluded his piece with the assertion that “Yes, the Afro-American people are Fundamentalists, and they can give a reason for the faith that is in them by pointing to what they have become in this free Nation from what they began in the days of the Colonies.”1

More than simply a declaration regarding the perceived religious conservatism within the African American culture of the day, this editorial drew an explicit connection between the purported fundamentalist proclivities of the black populace and the issue of racial advancement in the legal, social, and political realms. Religious fundamentalism and racial identity, it implied, were intimately intertwined within the African American community in 1925; both were indivisibly linked by the longsuffering quest for freedom that united black Americans across the centuries-long sweep of American history. Yet this editorialist’s claim that African Americans were “for the most part” fundamentalists represents a perspective that has, with a handful of welcome exceptions, received far too little scholarly attention.2

Theologically speaking, American Protestant fundamentalism was marked from its very beginning by its opposition to the emerging theological modernism of the early twentieth century. Modernist theology typically aimed to bring Christianity into line with the most current patterns of rationalist thought, embracing higher-critical methods of biblical scholarship and often eschewing supernaturalist biblical interpretations that rested on the reliability or historicity of the miraculous events narrated in the text. For example, in his famous lectures from 1899 and 1900 on the nature of Christianity, renowned German liberal scholar Adolf Harnack argued that Christianity’s true “Easter faith” was not dependent on the uncertain historical claims of the apostles’ original “Easter message” of physical resurrection: “Either we must decide to rest our belief on a foundation unstable and always exposed to fresh doubts, or else we must abandon this foundation altogether, and with it the miraculous appeal to our senses.”3 Such modernist attitudes engendered fiery reactions from religious conservatives—both white and black—who undertook to defend the doctrines that they considered to be the “fundamentals” of the faith. Nevertheless, historical scholarship has often associated fundamentalism with certain cultural and social forms that tend toward excluding African Americans. George Marsden’s formulation of fundamentalism as a militant opposition to both theological modernism and “the cultural change associated with it” lends itself to emphasizing protracted cultural battles of a conservative and reactionary nature—most notably on issues such as evolutionary theory and public school curricula—waged by high-profile fundamentalist leaders and their institutional networks.4 The ubiquity of Jim Crow, as well as the overtly segregationist and racist positions of certain towering fundamentalist leaders such as J. Frank Norris, meant that many highly visible fundamentalist institutions emerged from a basically white social context empowered by American segregation.5 As a result, fundamentalism also often carries with it an association with the white racial politics of segregation, and therefore, in Marsden’s words, “‘fundamentalist’ has seldom been a self-designation” for black Americans.6

In contrast to that assessment, the Norfolk editorialist’s argument during the weeks leading up to the infamous Scopes trial that black Americans were “for the most part” fundamentalists—even if we account for the likely hyperbole in that statement—offers an interesting historical counterpoint. In fact, amid the vicissitudes of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, debates and discussions about fundamentalism were prevalent in the black press. This was true not only of explicitly religious or denominational papers, such as the Star of Zion or the National Baptist Union-Review, but even of “secular” black weeklies such as the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, and many others.7 An examination of these black weekly newspapers helps to show that the perception of fundamentalism as a significant internal expression of black religiosity was not limited merely to one editorialist in Virginia; on the contrary, many voices in the black press, on both sides of the debate, considered fundamentalism to be (for good or for ill) a widespread phenomenon within the black Protestant community. Such discourse demonstrates that there were numerous black Protestants who overtly embraced an expressly fundamentalist identity amidst the heat of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.

Since black newspapers were both shapers of public opinion and instruments for cultivating a shared culture, the discourses revealed in their pages can yield instructive insight into the perceptions of race, religion, and fundamentalism within the wider African American community. While localized papers certainly played a part in this process, so too did the growth of a national press. With the population mobility brought on by the Great Migration in the early twentieth century, the national circulation of several popular black weeklies also expanded, meaning that the conversations and ideas advanced in the pages of, for example, the Chicago Defender or the Afro-American often reached well beyond the newspapers’ local or regional settings.8 The disputes over fundamentalism in the black weeklies of this era not only demonstrate that partisans on both sides of the issue understood “fundamentalist” to be a meaningful analytical category for black religious expression, but also illuminate some of the broad elements associated with these black fundamentalists’ worldviews. Writers in the weeklies regularly associated a common array of characteristics with fundamentalist religious expression—including, as one might expect, such conservative theological bellwethers as supernaturalism, divine creation, and biblicism. Moreover, the pages of the black weeklies also tackled issues of racism, segregation, and social oppression in the context of their debates over fundamentalism, revealing racial considerations that undoubtedly influenced both pro- and antifundamentalist writers. The testimony of these black newspapers, then, demonstrates not only a robust debate about fundamentalism, but also a debate whose terms assumed that a substantial “black fundamentalist” presence within the community was a basic fact of life.