Evangelicals and Fundamentalists

The Fundamentals

By 1900, liberal theology had won over many leading seminaries and pulpits in the northern United States (see Faith, Science and Liberal Theology). Conservatives feared that core Christian beliefs were being abandoned. Between 1910 and 1915, two wealthy California oilmen funded The Fundamentals, a series of twelve booklets defending traditional doctrines. About three million copies were sent free to pastors, missionaries and students across the English-speaking world. Contributors included respected scholars from America and Britain.

Around the same time, Presbyterian conservatives listed five "fundamentals" essential to the faith:

1. the inerrancy of Scripture;
2. the virgin birth of Christ;
3. Christ's death as a substitutionary atonement for sin;
4. Christ's bodily resurrection;
5. the reality of Christ's miracles.

In 1920 the Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws coined the term "fundamentalist" for those ready to "do battle royal" for these fundamentals. Many fundamentalists also held to dispensational premillennialism, a system popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). It taught that history is divided into "dispensations" and that true believers will be "raptured" to heaven before a period of tribulation and Christ's thousand-year reign.

The fundamentalist–modernist controversy

In the 1920s the conflict exploded in the major northern denominations. In 1922 the liberal Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, preaching at a Presbyterian church in New York, delivered a famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" It pleaded for tolerance of liberal views. Conservatives were outraged. The brilliant Princeton scholar J. Gresham Machen replied in Christianity and Liberalism (1923) that liberalism was not a version of Christianity at all but a different religion. In the end, liberals largely kept control of the northern Presbyterian and Baptist denominations. Machen left Princeton Seminary in 1929 and was later suspended from the ministry. He founded Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

The Scopes trial

The most famous battle was over evolution. In 1925 Tennessee banned teaching human evolution in public schools. A young teacher, John Scopes, agreed to test the law. The Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton became a national media circus. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and a progressive populist who opposed evolution partly because of its use to justify "survival of the fittest" social policies, helped the prosecution. The famous lawyer Clarence Darrow defended Scopes and cross-examined Bryan on the Bible. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, a verdict later overturned on a technicality. But in the national press, especially through journalist H. L. Mencken's mockery, fundamentalists were portrayed as ignorant rural bigots. Bryan died days after the trial.

After the 1920s, fundamentalists largely withdrew from the mainline denominations and from mainstream culture. They built a vast network of their own: Bible institutes, radio programs, summer camps, missions agencies and independent churches. Far from disappearing, they were quietly growing.

American Protestantism in the 20th century

The new evangelicals and Billy Graham

By the 1940s, some younger conservatives felt that fundamentalism had become too negative, separatist and anti-intellectual. They wanted orthodox faith combined with intellectual seriousness and social engagement. They called themselves "evangelicals" (or "neo-evangelicals"). They founded the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), Fuller Theological Seminary (1947), and the magazine Christianity Today (1956), edited by the theologian Carl F. H. Henry. Henry's book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) criticized fundamentalism's neglect of social problems.

The movement's public face was Billy Graham (1918–2018), a farm boy from North Carolina. His 1949 tent crusade in Los Angeles became a national sensation. Over six decades he preached in person to some 215 million people in over 185 countries, with a simple message of sin, the cross and personal decision for Christ. He used every new technology: radio, television, film and satellites. He was a confidant of US presidents from Truman to Obama. He refused to segregate his crusades after 1953, personally pulling down the ropes dividing Black and white sections, and he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York crusade. His cooperation with mainline Protestants and Catholics angered strict fundamentalists, who broke with him.

Lausanne: a global evangelicalism

In 1974 Graham convened the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, with 2,700 participants from 150 nations, half from the Global South. Its Lausanne Covenant, drafted largely by the English Anglican John Stott, affirmed both evangelism and social responsibility as part of Christian duty. Latin American evangelicals like C. René Padilla challenged North American evangelicals, saying the gospel must address poverty and injustice ("integral mission"). The Lausanne Movement became a major global network.

The Black church and civil rights

The greatest Christian social movement in 20th-century America came from the Black church (see Christianity in America). Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), a Baptist pastor's son and himself a pastor with a doctorate in theology, became the leader of the civil rights movement during the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56), sparked by Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat.

King blended the biblical prophets, the teachings of Jesus, Black church preaching, and Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. Churches were the movement's headquarters, communications network, and training ground. Its anthems were spirituals and hymns. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), addressed to white clergy who urged patience, King wrote that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." He criticized the white church for standing on the sidelines. At the March on Washington that August, he proclaimed his dream, quoting the prophet Amos: "let justice roll down like waters." Ordinary believers like the sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, beaten for registering to vote, sustained the movement with faith and song. King was assassinated in 1968.

Many white evangelicals and fundamentalists, especially in the South, did not support the movement, and some defended segregation. Southern Baptists apologized for this in 1995.

The Religious Right and culture wars

In the 1970s, many conservative Christians felt their values were under attack. Issues included the Supreme Court's bans on school-sponsored prayer (1962–63) and legal abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), the sexual revolution, feminism and gay rights. The evangelical intellectual Francis Schaeffer warned of a post-Christian culture. In 1979 the Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, mobilizing evangelicals, along with conservative Catholics, behind Ronald Reagan in 1980. White evangelicals became a central part of the Republican coalition, a role they continue to play. MacCulloch describes this conflict as part of a wider "culture war" over sexuality, gender and the family that runs through late-20th-century Christianity [check].

The politicization of evangelicalism has been deeply controversial among evangelicals themselves. Black, Latino and Global South evangelicals often hold very different political views from white American evangelicals. Many Christians worry that the word "evangelical," which originally meant "gospel," has become a political label.

A worldwide movement

American evangelicalism is only part of the story. Globally, there are perhaps 600 million or more evangelicals, depending on definition. Most live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and many are also Pentecostal (see Pentecostals and Charismatics). Evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on personal conversion, the Bible, the cross and active mission (David Bebbington's four marks), has become one of the most dynamic forces in world religion.