Between 1870 and 1930, the modernist-liberal Protestant leadership was comfortably entrenched among the elite of American society, but their theological positions which they had readily conformed to the humanistic worldview of the secularizing activists were not representative of the majority of Americans who professed Christianity during that era. Some may suppose that the opponents of liberal Protestants were the original silent majority. But in reality, the conservative leaders of the once dominant populist evangelical churches were not silent but just didn’t have the cultural clout or platform from which to mount significant opposition to the liberal churches and their newly found secularist allies.
However, in 1910 twelve small volumes were published which were titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. The books outlined the five fundamental doctrines held by populist evangelical churches since their beginnings in the early 1700s:
1. The Bible is free from error in every respect.
2. The virgin birth of Christ.
3. The substitutionary work of Christ on the cross (Christ suffered and died as a substitute for man to satisfy God’s wrath against sin).
4. The physical resurrection of Christ following His crucifixion.
5. The physical second coming of Christ.[1]
Two and one-half million copies were printed and circulated. By 1916 the books had generated the beginning of a great controversy between two opposing camps in each of the large churches: the conservative fundamentalists and the liberal modernists. The Methodists, Episcopalians, and Disciples churches were stirred by the controversy. However, it was among the Baptists and Presbyterian churches that the struggle was most severe.[2]
One of the significant issues that arose from the controversy was the doctrine of Premillennialism. This doctrine states that the Jews will return to Palestine (the Jewish homeland where the nation of Israel was re-established in 1948) and Christ will come back to earth to rule in Jerusalem as king for a thousand years. In other words, this second coming of Christ will take place before (pre) the establishment upon earth of Christ’s thousand year reign (millennium). Christians who accept the doctrine place emphasis on teachings of the Bible concerning the last days. A great majority of fundamentalists accepted the doctrine of Premillennialism as do most modern evangelicals.[3]
A second issue deepened the schism between the fundamentalists and modernists. In many of the large churches in America, the less affluent members began to feel uncomfortable with the spiritual direction of their churches that were led by people of wealth, position, and prosperity and who generally welcomed the triumphant progress of modernism within the church. Those who disagreed saw the heart of their religion rapidly disappearing, especially in the formulistic worship of the fashionable churches. It was because of these concerns that the “holiness” movement arose in Methodist churches around 1880. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, taught that Christians should strive for perfection. In other words, Christians should try to live lives that were holy in accordance with biblical teachings. But most Methodists of the era were little concerned with Christian perfection, and as a result much worldliness had entered their church. The leading men in the Methodist churches and the majority of the churches’ prominent ministers did not favor the holiness movement and generally embraced the modernists’ views. Those who clung to the fundamentalist orthodoxy became uncomfortable and felt forsaken in the spiritually cold atmosphere of their churches. They began to withdraw and form new denominations and fellowships. At least twenty-five Holiness and Pentecostal sects were started between 1880 and 1926. In 1894, eight smaller Holiness groups combined to form the Church of the Nazarene. Others protesting the increasing modernism of the large churches include those that formed the Assemblies of God (1914), the Church of God, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ.[4]
Although the modernist-fundamentalist conflict was centered on biblical doctrines, the controversy soon spread to issues of control over congregations, church hierarchy, seminaries, missions boards, denominational institutions of higher educational, publishing houses, and ultimately control of entire denominations. Denominational battles were caustic, bitter, and highly publicized outside of the walls of the churches and produced long-lasting animosities and alienation between former friends and colleagues. The secularizers and their legions of political, journalistic, and academic fellow travelers strongly supported the modernist clergy and their cause in defeating the fundamentalist movement which was woefully unprepared to adequately defend the historical doctrinal positions of the church and became easy targets for modernists’ contempt and scorn.[5] Two significant battles between the modernists and fundamentalists played out in the 1920s and early 1930s and for a season caused the fundamentalist churches and clergy to abandon American culture to the humanistic worldview of the secularizers and the modernist churches’ heresies.
“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”
This was the title of a sermon preached in 1922 by modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick while pastor of New York City’s First Presbyterian Church. In his sermon he took aim at the heart of the fundamentalists’ doctrines by expressing grave doubts about the historic foundations of the Christian faith including the virgin birth, the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the atonement, miracles, and Bible as the Word of God. Fosdick was America’s most well-known liberal preacher, and his sermon represented a major escalation of the war between the conservative fundamentalists and the modernist liberals. The sermon was so far removed from accepted Presbyterian doctrines that the local presbytery was forced to investigate. But Fosdick was well entrenched in the upper echelon of the East Coast WASP establishment. Fosdick resigned to avoid censure and became the pastor of the prestigious Park Avenue Baptist Church attended by John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Foundation was presided over by Fosdick’s own brother.[6]
Rockefeller was in complete sympathy with Fosdick’s “progressive” modernists views and saw an opportunity to drive fundamentalism from New York. As a result, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the construction of a new church for Fosdick which opened in October 1930. The church has a 392-foot tower (twenty-two stories) containing the world’s largest carillon with seventy-two bells including the world’s largest bell. The church is located on the Hudson River at 120th Street and was adjacent to Union Theological Seminary and near Columbia University and Barnard, all bastions of liberal higher education and theology.[7] Publisher Henry Luce put Fosdick’s face on the cover of Time magazine. The New York Times coverage was highly enthusiastic in its admiration of Fosdick and Riverside Church. The Times writer described Fosdick as “…a new type of minister [that] is swift and strong and dynamic…” and represents a religion that “…grows with the growth of human knowledge…There is nothing that reeks of old parchments or ancient books of creed.”[8]
Just as Riverside Church was about to open, the battle between fundamentalists and liberals was in full swing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German theologian who had passed his doctoral examination in theology at the University of Berlin in late 1927. After a year in Barcelona, Spain as the vicar of a local German congregation, he returned to Germany in 1929. However, in 1930, with a Sloane Fellowship in hand, the brilliant twenty-four year old theologian traveled to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. There he was to experience firsthand and write of the massive battle raging in the 1920s and 1930s between the liberals and fundamentalists.[9] To Bonhoeffer, it was obvious that the professors and students at Union heavily favored the liberal views of Fosdick. But Bonhoeffer was appalled at their lack of serious scholarship with respect to truth and academic inquiry. He wrote,
There is no theology here… They [Union students] talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria…They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.[10] [emphasis in original]
Bonhoeffer described the theological atmosphere at the seminary as hastening the process of secularization of Christianity in America. He found the quagmire of secularization also occurring in the liberal churches of New York City.[11]
Things are not much different in the church. The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation [of the gospel]…
The fundamentalist sermon that occupies such a prominent place in the southern states has only one prominent Baptist representative in New York, one who preaches the resurrection of the flesh and the virgin birth before believers and the curious alike.
In New York they preach about virtually everything, only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.[12]
During the battle with the liberal clergy and their churches, there were several noteworthy defenders of the historic faith within the Presbyterian church. One was Dr. Walter Duncan Buchanan, pastor of the Broadway Presbyterian Church, six blocks south of Union Theological Seminary.[13] Another defender was J. Gresham Machen. In 1929, under Machen’s leadership, Westminster Seminary was established in Philadelphia to counter the growing modernism found at the Princeton Seminary. The struggle for leadership continued in the Presbyterian Church USA for several years until the fundamentalists were eventually defeated at the General Assembly of 1935. The modernists’ victory occurred because ministers, otherwise sound in doctrine, valued peace more than truth. But several who were true to the historic fundamentals of the faith left to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.[14]
Scopes “Monkey” Trial
The second battle was occurred in the public arena and became known as the Scopes “Monkey” Trial during the summer of 1925. John D. Scopes was a school teacher who had taught Darwin’s theory of evolution to his students in Dayton, Tennessee. Tennessee was one of several states that had enacted laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution in public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw this as a test case which could lead to overturning these laws and hired famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes.[15]
Darrow was a celebrated liberal-progressive and professed agnostic. The prosecution had called in a big-name of its own—William Jennings Bryan, the former Democratic Party presidential nominee who lost his bids for the White House in 1896, 1900, and 1908.[16] For the ACLU, the Scopes trial was a carefully plotted confrontational strategy designed to arouse its cultural modernist and civil libertarian sympathizers. The lead attorney for the ACLU characterized the trial as “…a battle between two types of minds—the rigid, orthodox, accepting, unyielding, narrow, conventional mind and the broad, critical, cynical, skeptical and tolerant mind.” The national media coverage of the trial heavily favored the modernists who claimed to hold the intellectual high ground. The Baltimore Sun sent the famed writer and social critic H. L. Mencken to cover the trial. Over the course of the trial Mencken’s scathing articles created a lasting caricature of Bryan and the fundamentalists in the minds of many Americans. Mencken portrayed Bryan and his followers as “rustic ignoramuses” as opposed to Scopes’ defenders who were described as enlightened guardians of American civil liberties. Mencken portrayed Bryan as “…a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity…” and who was “…deluded by an almost pathological hatred of all learning.” When Bryan died just five days after the trial, Mencken privately gloated, “We’ve killed the s*n-of-a-b*t*h.”[17]
As the trial continued, ever larger numbers of journalists arrived at Dayton. The New York Times blamed the media circus on Bryan and his supporters.
No one need be astonished to read of the influx of queer fish at Dayton, Tenn. It would seem that every freak and fanatic not already there is striving to arrive by the next train…Mr. Bryan has given the signal to thousands of unregulated or ill-balanced minds that there is a chance for them at last. No one can yet measure the impulse and encouragement to erratic thinking which the Dayton trial is giving. It is a sort of notice, posted up so the whole nation can read it, of the breakdown of the reasoning powers…But the demonstrated immense attraction at Dayton for all sorts of half-baked creatures, is an indication of the mental and moral infection which has been let loose upon the land, with Mr. Bryan as its chief agent…[18]
Most people view the Scopes trial as a huge loss for Bryan and those who upheld the biblical standard of truth. But, Scopes was convicted and fined $100. Fundamentalism survived but withdrew from cultural conflicts for several years.[19] In time they re-emerged and the evangelical cause would once again flourish by mid-century. But the falseness of Darwin’s theories on evolution continues to weaken in light of continuing new discoveries and reasoned thinking.
Nancy Pearcey described the mindset of the religious conservatives after the Scopes trial and the cultural dominance of theological modernism.
They circled the wagons, developed a fortress mentality, and championed “separatism” as a positive strategy. Then in the 1940s and 50s, a movement began that aimed at breaking out of the fortress. Calling themselves neo-evangelicals, this group argued that we are called not to escape the surrounding culture but to engage it. They sought to construct a redemptive vision that would embrace not only individuals but also social structures and institutions.[20]
Just as the modernist had lost their saltiness, the fundamentalists hid their light as they abandoned the culture and its institutions, and the forces of secularizing humanism were freed to wreak havoc in American culture.
Following the cultural turmoil that began in 1960s, many modern evangelicals began centering their redemptive efforts on the individual, not through a powerful presentation of the truth and authority of the gospel but through accommodation and catering to his felt needs. These evangelicals had either forgotten or ignored Paul’s admonition to the Romans: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” [Romans 12:2. KJV] And as did the fundamentalists of the early twentieth century, they have increasingly abandoned the culture and its institutions during the late twentieth century and twenty-first century to the present day.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 388.
[2] Ibid., pp. 388-389.
[3] Ibid. p. 389.
[4] Ibid., pp. 389-390.
[5] Christian Smith, “Introduction,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 67-68.
[6] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 101-102.
[7] Ibid., p. 102.
[8] Richard W. Flory, “Promoting a Secular Standard,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 406-407.
[9] Metaxas, pp. 94, 101.
[10] Ibid., p. 101.
[11] Ibid., p. 105.
[12] Ibid., p. 106.
[13] Metaxas, p. 101.
[14] Kuiper, p. 391.
[15] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 671.
[16] Ibid., p. 559.
[17] P. C. Kemeny, “The Destruction of Moral Reform Politics,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 230-231.
[18] Flory, pp. 405-406.
[19] Johnson, p. 671.
[20] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 18.
