Fundamentalism and American Culture

by Marsden, George M. ;

  Almost simultaneously the leading voice of liberal Protestanism, the Christian Century, conceded that the issue was not a peripheral one raised by extremists, but involved the essential character of the Christian religion. “Two worlds have crashed,” said Century editor Charles Clayton Morrison, “the world of tradition and the world of modernism. One is scholastic, static, authoritarian, individualistic; the other is vital, dynamic, free and social.” Arguments such as Machen’s, he admitted, were on this point correct. In fact there were “two religions” and the clash between them was “as profound and as grim as that between Christianity and Confucianism.”18

  XX. The Offensive Stalled and Breaking Apart: 1924–1925

  Although the liberals now conceded that the issue of fundamentalism versus modernism was a most serious one, they were a long way from conceding defeat. During 1924 both press and public were eager for any contribution to the ongoing spectacle of clergymen at each other’s throats. H. L. Mencken suggested building special stadia for these entertainments.1 In the spring of 1924 in New York City Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian, debated John Roach Straton in a highly publicized series that added plausibility to such popular characterizations of the disputes. Certainly the liberals were not willing to let the fundamentalist charges go uncontested, and in 1924 a striking number of liberal spokesmen brought out strong defenses of their views.2

  Probably the most influential of such statements was The Faith of Modernism by Shailer Mathews, Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. While not presented as such, Mathews’s book was clearly meant to answer Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. The antagonist throughout was a “confessional or dogmatic Christian” who held views closely resembling those of the Princeton professor.3 Although liberalism itself was too broad to have one standard view, Mathews’s answer to Machen displays many characteristics of the movement at its height.

  “The use of scientific, historical, and social method in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons,” said Mathews, “is Modernism.” When Mathews said that Christianity was scientific and empirical he had something vastly different in mind from what Machen meant when he said the same thing. The basic premise underlying all of Mathews’s thought, as well as much of the scientific thought of the day, was that ideas and beliefs are not mirrors of external reality but products of the mind shaped by natural evolutionary and cultural developments. Thus religion was not based on static or standardized objective knowledge of God, but rather could best be understood as a social or historical development. Christians had faith that God indeed was acting in history, but they knew of him only through human religious experience which changed as society changed.

  In Mathews’s view, human religious experience provided the data for the scientific study of religion. The Bible, accordingly, was not a source of facts or true propositions about God, but “a trustworthy record of a developing experience of God which nourishes our faith.” Similarly, the doctrines of the church were the products of group religious experience. Christianity “Is the concrete religious life of a continuous ongoing group rather than the various doctrines in which that life found expression.” The goal of the modernist, therefore, was “to carry on this process of an ever growing experience of God.”4

  Since the scientific study of religious faith concluded that faith was always the product of human social circumstances and needs, Mathews saw the current conflict as a clash of “two social minds.” The doctrines taught in the confessions of the church which Machen and the Presbyterian controversialists made so much of were simply the products of the faith of another era. So, said Mathews, “if Christianity is essentially only what the seventeenth century thought it, a theological system inherited from the past, the charge that Modernism is un-Christian is logically sound.”5

  Mathews, however, had a different test for Christianity. Christianity was not doctrine, but life. “It is a moral and spiritual movement, born of the experiences of God known through Jesus Christ as Savior.” Hence the true test was a pragmatic one. “The Modernist Christian believes the Christian religion will help man meet social as well as individual needs.”6 The needs of modern society, which after all is where God is found today, should therefore properly set the agenda for Christians. The principle that God was immanent and revealing himself in the modern world, was at the heart of the modernist impulse.

  Mathews insisted that this understanding of religion as experience and practical morality was indeed Christianity. “Humanity,” he said clearly,

  is not good enough. It must be transformed, regenerated. But if democracy and science alone are not sufficient where is the power for such a change? We confidently reply, in Christianity.

  “Modernists,” he added, “as a class are evangelical Christians. That is, they accept Jesus Christ as a revelation of a Savior God.” It was God in Christ in whom Christian salvation was revealed, “not in a man made into a God.” For the modern Christian, therefore, Christ was the focal point of the revelation of God’s answer to the needs of society. The answer was above all a moral and a practical one. It brought “a full moral life” which was impossible without God. Ultimately it introduced “goodwill” which, “though never fully realized, is of the nature of God, and is the law of progress, the foundation upon which human society can safely be built. …”7

  Despite such able defenses of the modernist position, there was no chance that this view of Christianity would gain official endorsements from the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations. The contending parties were so entirely opposed, both in premises and conclusions, that no compromise was viable. Simple communication, in fact, was virtually impossible, even between two such able representatives of the extreme positions as Machen and Mathews.

  By this time liberalism was being assailed in a number of denominations. When fundamentalism became a national sensation, conservative denominational movements with their own traditions and backgrounds temporarily joined in the fundamentalist fray. Some of them had only a tangential relationship to the rest of fundamentalism. Among the Disciples of Christ, for instance, although the controversy was as intense as among the Presbyterians or Baptists, their conservative party had a unique set of interests. They shared with the main body of fundamentalists a strong opposition to liberalism, especially the liberalism represented by the former journal of the Disciples, The Christian Century. The controversy focused, however, on preserving strict Disciples traditions, particularly Baptism by immersion. This exclusivism separated the Disciples conservatives from other fundamentalists, even though both groups recognized some mutual affinities. By the 1920s the conservative Disciples “Restoration Movement” had been battling liberals strenuously for a decade and a half. In 1924 at the height of the other denominational controversies, the conservatives established the Christian Restoration Association which seriously threatened to split the denomination. Although a formal schism was averted, within a few years separatism had led to the virtual independence of the liberal and conservative factions within a loose denominational structure.8

  The fracas in the Protestant Episcopal Church was even less directly relevant to the main development of fundamentalism. But in 1924 and 1925 an Episcopalian cause célèbre generated enormous publicity. Apparently encouraged by the wave of anti-modernist sentiment, conservative Episcopalians attempted to use the ecclesiastical machinery against the new doctrines. In November 1923 the House of Bishops issued a Pastoral Letter defending the traditional understanding of the Virgin Birth, the bodily resurrection of Jesus and other affirmations of the Apostles’ Creed as a prerequisite for ordination to the Episcopal priesthood. During 1924 a number of heresy trials were threatened or pending, and in 1925 one of these culminated in the expulsion from the ministry of retired Bishop William M. Brown, a theological and social radical. The conservatives in this controversy were led by Bishop William T. Manning, who, although adamantly opposed to liberalism was a strict fundamentalist neither in h
is opposition to evolution nor in his view of Scripture.9

  The Methodist Church in the North did include some full-fledged fundamentalists. Methodists had been prominent in the work of the Bible League of North America, and the dispensationalist prophecy conference movement always included a few Methodist representatives. At the height of the fundamentalist disputes in other denominations, Methodist conservatives, led by Harold P. Sloan, pushed to restrict liberalism, especially in denominational publications. Yet Methodism was too little oriented toward strict doctrinal definitions for its fundamentalists to grow to large numbers or to have much impact.10 In the South, although Methodism had produced at least one major fundamentalist leader in evangelist Bob Jones, Sr., who founded his own college in 1926, conservative efforts in the denomination in the 1920s were even more scattered than in the North.11

  In the South generally, religious conservatism was directly tied to cultural conservatism in ways that differed from the North. The preservation of evangelical religion went hand-in-hand with the preservation of the Southern way of life.12 Their Northern counterparts had experienced the secularization of a society once dominated by evangelical thought. In the South, however, evangelicalism was still a virtually unchallenged establishment. Southerners had made stringent efforts to keep their religion intact since the Civil War, as evidenced by the late nineteenth-century prosecutions of several professors for heresy.

  Up until the 1920s fundamentalism developed its distinct character mostly in the North.13 Then its rise to prominence and early successes in the 1920s exerted an immediate appeal on many Southerners. The Northern controversies reawakened Southern conservatives to the dangers of modernism—a term most Southerners since 1865 instinctively opposed. Southerners in the Southern Baptist Convention and the Southern Presbyterian Church (the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.), quickly adopted moderate declarations of loyalty to the fundamental doctrines of the faith. Evolutionism had long symbolized to the South the inroads of liberal culture. It was now the focus of concurrent controversies over public education, and was especially feared by Southern conservatives. For the most part Southerners retained their own religious style and identity, but some were beginning to find in Northern fundamentalists an identifiable group of outsiders who might be trusted. Even the most moderate liberalism, on the other hand, while present in Southern churches, was widely viewed with suspicion.14

  The closest parallels to the major Northern controversies were not in the Southern United States, but in Canada. Protestant groups in Canada had many contacts with those in the States, and the transdenominational impact of both liberalism and fundamentalism was felt simultaneously in both countries. On the other hand, Canadian Protestants also had a distinct British heritage. In the States, church union efforts collapsed after World War I, but in Canada they led to the formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925. The strongest opposition to this Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational union came from Presbyterian conservatives, who kept about a third of their denomination out of the union.

  Direct carry-overs from the United States controversies were found among Canadian Baptists. T. T. Shields of Toronto, although not a dispensationalist, was one of the most militant leaders of the Baptist Bible Union. During the early 1920s in the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, Shields kept up a steady, well supported and vitriolic attack on modernism at McMaster University. The issue was not settled until 1926 when a Convention majority managed to censure Shields, precipitating his break away to the Union of Regular Baptists of Ontario and Quebec in 1927. In the same year, Baptists in Western Canada, where dispensationalist influences were stronger, experienced a similar schism. As in the States, fundamentalist influences in Canada were not confined to major denominations, but could be found in Holiness groups such as the Salvation Army, and in smaller immigrant denominations.15

  In 1924 and 1925, however, the principal theaters of action were the large Baptist and Presbyterian denominations in the Northern United States, where liberalism was under such heavy assault that it could not even win by direct frontal attack. Mathews and others attempted to persuade the denominations that modernism was a legitimate and superior form of Christianity. A far more effective counterattack, however, was the appeal to the strong American tradition of tolerance. In most American churches this ideal, at least in theory, was regarded as almost sacred. Liberals could cite this tradition as they attempted to gain support in the Northern denominations from large middle parties not firmly committed. Thus began to break up the fundamentalist coalitions. Under strong pressure to disown the fundamentalists’ avowed position of intolerance, many conservatives fell back. Only the most militant held to the logic that, if modernism was not eliminated, the churches must be divided.

  This was the most effective countermove of the antifundamentalist forces in the Presbyterian Church. In reaction against the 1923 decisions that condemned Fosdick and reaffirmed the “five points,” a group of ministers worked for several months following the General Assembly to draw up a public protest. In January 1924 they issued the “Auburn Affirmation” for which they secured some thirteen hundred signatures by the time of the 1924 Assembly. This protest asserted, on constitutional grounds that had been upheld by progressive parties since 1729, that Presbyterian ministers had some liberty in interpreting the Westminister Confession of Faith, the church’s official statement of Biblical teaching. Furthermore, the protest emphasized that the five-point declaration was both extra-constitutional and extra-Biblical. The insistence on the inerrancy of Scripture, they said, went beyond both the Confession and the Bible’s own statements. Furthermore, in its key passage, the Affirmation declared that the five-point declaration committed the church to “certain theories” concerning inspiration, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, and the supernatural power of Christ. Fellowship within the Presbyterian Chuuch, the signers affirmed, should be broad enough to include any people who like themselves held “most earnestly to these great facts and doctrines,” regardless of the theories they employed to explain them.16

  Although most of the signers apparently held moderate or liberal theological positions, a few were known conservatives.17 In fact, by 1924 it was becoming evident that there were at least three major parties in the Presbyterian controversy. There were the theological progressives (moderate or liberal) who were clearly a minority party, but with strength in many seminaries and in the church hierarchy. They, of course, took an inclu sivist view of the denomination. Joining them was a key swing group who were conservative theologically, yet who took an inclusivist position largely because they did not wish theological issues to destroy the peace, unity, and evangelical outreach of the church. Opposing them were the conservative exclusivists or militants, now generally known as fundamentalists.18

  From the outset of the 1924 General Assembly, its central feature was the division between the inclusivist conservatives and the exclusivists. The fundamentalist champion, Clarence Macartney was the exclusivist candidate for Moderator. His opponent was Professor Charles R. Erdman of Princeton Seminary. Erdman had all the credentials of a fundamentalist save one. He was conservative theologically, a premilliennialist, and a contributor to The Fundamentals. But he lacked militancy. The failure to enlist Erdman and his like would in the long run be devastating to the exclusivist cause. In the short run they managed barely enough votes to elect Macartney, but were not able to find leverage in the available constitutional procedures to accomplish much else. The Fosdick question was settled by inviting Fosdick to join the Presbyterian Church—in effect an invitation for him to let himself be tried for heresy. This move, in fact, ensured Fosdick’s resignation from his New York pulpit. Even this accomplishment had involved dealing with substantial doctrinal issues only in an indirect manner. Exclusivists found no effective way to challenge the signers of the Auburn Affirmation, and other attempts to impose general doctrinal tests failed.19

  Despite the wide national interest in and substantial popu
larity of fundamentalism in 1924, the same problems that were impeding fundamentalist efforts in the Presbyterian Church were also rife among the Northern Baptists. The Baptist fundamentalists had even less leverage for centralized or constitutional control of doctrine, and the extreme demands of many of the premillennialists had apparently forced other “fundamentalists” into a conservative-inclusivist position. In 1923, rather than make any attempt to dominate the Convention itself, most of the extreme militants had turned their attention to the formation of the Baptist Bible Union. When they returned in 1924 they found the original “fundamentalist” party in the middle, conciliatory position, with premillennialist J. C. Massee playing a role similar to that of Erdman among the Presbyterians. As the convention preacher, Massee affirmed the ideals of the revivalist tradition with sentiments reminiscent of Dwight L. Moody, calling for a moratorium on debate in order to get to the main business of soul-winning.20 Perhaps it was the tension between these two conflicting emphases—the fight against apostasy on the one hand, soul-winning on the other—that kept many potential fundamentalists from full identification with fundamentalist attitudes. Fundamentalism, as a coalition built around anti-modernism, was always a part of a larger evangelical tradition. Even among the most militant fundamentalists, soul-winning or missionary emphasis was mixed with their exclusivistic doctrinal vigilance. Some who might have considered themselves fundamentalists on the basis of their doctrinal commitments found that when all was said and done their doctrinal militancy was not as strong as their zeal for spreading the Gospel. These sentiments, together with strong denominational loyalties, prevented formation of large organized groups willing to purge the denominations even at the cost of major schism.