The Baptists might still combat liberalism in the mission field—clearly an area of denomination-wide concern and practical consequence. At the 1924 Convention the militant Bible Union fundamentalists were prepared to press the case against one particular missionary who had been sent out by the Foreign Mission Board although he had refused to affirm some of the fundamentals. The moderate fundamentalists, however, led by Massee, agreed with the liberals on a compromise in which a committee was appointed to investigate Northern Baptist Missions generally. As is inevitable with the appointment of committees, this blunted the attack of the militants who were by this time thoroughly disillusioned with the moderate fundamentalist leadership.21 In 1925 the appointed committee reported that, although there were some scattered cases where concern might be justified, the vast majority of the Convention’s missionaries were doctrinally sound. Rather than suggesting any specific doctrinal test, the committee proposed that the Convention should ensure that missionaries were, in effect, warm evangelicals.
Pro-fundamentalist sentiments were still strong, and at this point the militant Baptists made their last move that had any reasonable hope of success. Starting from the liberals’ 1922 resolution that the New Testament was the sole Baptist creed, they spelled out some of the specific “fundamentals of the faith” (divine creation, supernatural inspiration of Scripture, Virgin Birth of Christ, other aspects of Christ’s person and work, and the necessity of regeneration). Following the Presbyterian example, they suggested these as doctrines for testing the orthodoxy of missionaries. A tactical delay in bringing this proposal to a vote may have caused its failure,22 but at any rate, the move was defeated and the counsels of peace prevailed. Moderate conservatives promoted reconciliation. J. Whitcomb Brougher was especially effective in urging the Convention to get rid of extremists of both kinds. The real work of the Convention, he said in a speech entitled “Play Ball,” was evangelism. Again the fear of an all-out internal war destroying the evangelical witness of the denomination stopped the militant advance just when it seemed on the verge of success.23
The fury of the militants was now directed against those conservatives who had undermined the movement by yielding to compromise when victory was possible. In a typical statement the fiery T. T. Shields declared that he had more respect for Harry Emerson Fosdick than for J. Whitcomb Brougher. Fosdick, said Shields, at least wore the uniform of the enemy. “Dr. Brougher has worn the uniform of orthodoxy; and while wearing it, has betrayed the Baptist cause absolutely to the enemy.”24 Similarly, Riley said concerning Massee’s defection: “This is not a battle; it is a war from which there is no discharge.”25 This issue was dividing the fundamentalist camp, and it revealed some underlying ambivalence within the movement. Both sides had the same goal—the preservation of doctrinal purity and the promotion of evangelism. Both were militant to a degree, although some of the original fundamentalists defected once the consequences for evangelism became apparent. In addition, there was disagreement about whether the movement was sectarian or establishmentarian. Was their goal to create a pure church, even at the expense of becoming outsiders, or was it simply to clean up the traditional, socially acceptable denominations? Most of the fundamentalist leaders tried at first to work within the denominations and if they eventually left they did so only with reluctance when they were convinced that there was no hope.
In the Presbyterian Church also, 1925 was the peak year for fundamentalist strength, and the militants came even closer than their Baptist counterparts to victory. In fact, they seemed to have won some major battles but were then outmaneuvered by the action that proved decisive in the war. The moderates played a decisive role in the defeat of the militants, who reacted as bitterly as their Baptist counterparts.
Between the 1924 and 1925 meetings of the Presbyterian General Assembly this tension grew among the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary. In that relatively small body were found two conservatives who represented diametrically opposite approaches to dealing with theological liberalism. J. Gresham Machen viewed the new theology somewhat as a medieval Pope or the Puritans in Massachusetts would have viewed the preaching of Mohammedanism in their respective churches. He saw it as another religion and there was no excuse for anyone who claimed to love the faith to tolerate it. At the opposite pole his colleague, Charles Erdman, was the leader of the conservative group who worked for reconciliation. During the school year of 1924–1925, Machen stated in public, as well as privately to a number of dedicated students and correspondents, his opinion of Erdman’s willingness to consort with the enemy. Erdman replied indignantly and there followed a protracted, well publicized, and acrimonious dispute. Both sides attempted to enlist sympathetic delegates to the 1925 Assembly, at which Erdman would again be the inclusivist candidate for Moderator. Machen insisted that it was not a matter of personalities, but one of doctrine. “It concerns the question not of this doctrine or that, but of the importance which is attributed to doctrine as such.”26 “Dr. Erdman,” Machen added, “despite his personal orthodoxy, had the plaudits of the enemies of the gospel.” The exclusivists, on the other hand, “bore the reproach of Christ.” They had “laid aside all personal considerations and stood for the defense of the Christian faith.”27
These attacks were probably counterproductive. At the 1925 General Assembly, Erdman was elected Moderator, despite the fact that the exclusivists seemed to have a slight working majority. The exclusivists used this strength to pass a report of the Judicial Commission dealing with the situation in the New York Presbytery. This measure allowed the Assembly to review the Presbytery’s ordination of ministerial candidates who had refused to affirm the five-point doctrinal test. This was precisely the judicial procedure the exclusivists needed to begin uprooting liberalism. The liberal party was dismayed by this Assembly action, which would have severely limited their freedom. By the most dramatic move in the controversy, the threatened defeat was turned into an inclusivist victory. Henry Sloan Coffin of New York, perhaps the best known of the Presbyterian liberals, “rushed to the platform” and read a prepared statement from the Presbytery of New York, declaring in effect that the Assembly’s action was unconstitutional and that the New York Presbytery would not comply with it. Here was a scene and an issue that closely resembled that which had split the denomination the previous century. A New School party stood defiant against an Old School effort to force New York Presbyterians into doctrinal conformity. Although much more important theological issues were involved this time, in the 1920s among Presbyterians there was far less willingness to split the denomination even at the expense of important doctrinal questions. In the tense moments that followed Coffin’s declaration, the inclusivists made their next carefully planned move. Erdman, leaving the Moderator’s chair, proposed that a special commission be appointed to study the spiritual condition of the church and report back to the next Assembly. This motion received wide support, and was seconded by both Coffin and William Jennings Bryan.28
It was not immediately obvious that the exclusivist fundamentalist movement in the Presbyterian Church would be killed by referral to a committee. In fact, it was. The working strength of fundamentalism everywhere depended greatly upon the national mood. In the early summer of 1925 fundamentalism was at its peak; by the next year its strength was rapidly sinking.
XXI. Epilogue: Dislocation, Relocation, and Resurgence: 1925–1940
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of “the Monkey Trial” at Dayton, Tennessee, in transforming fundamentalism. William Jennings Bryan’s ill-fated attempt in the summer of 1925 to slay singlehanded the prophets of Baal brought instead an outpouring of derision. The rural setting, so well suited to the stereotypes of the agrarian leader and his religion, stamped the entire movement with an indelible image. Very quickly, the conspicuous reality of the movement seemed to conform to the image thus imprinted and the strength of the movement in the centers of national life waned precipitously.
It was part of the libe
rals’ contention that the issues separating them from the fundamentalists were determined by social forces. As Shailer Mathews put it in The Faith of Modernism, “the differences between these two types of Christians are not so much religious as due to different degrees of sympathy with the social and cultural forces of the day.”1 While the fundamentalists argued that the acceptance or rejection of unchanging truth was at issue, the modernists insisted that the perception of truth was inevitably shaped by cultural circumstances. By modernist definition fundamentalists were those who for sociological reasons held on to the past in stubborn and irrational resistance to inevitable changes in culture.
The scene at Dayton in 1925 was unsurpassable as a confirmation of this interpretation. Here were the elements of a great American drama—farce, comedy, tragedy, and pathos. Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken in collaboration could hardly have scripted it better. This bizarre episode, wired around the world with a maximum of ballyhoo, would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.
The central theme was, inescapably, the clash of two worlds, the rural and the urban. In the popular imagination, there were on the one side the small town, the backwoods, half-educated yokels, obscurantism, crackpot hawkers of religion, fundamentalism, the South, and the personification of the agrarian myth himself, William Jennings Bryan. Opposed to these were the city, the clique of New York-Chicago lawyers, intellectuals, journalists, wits, sophisticates, modernists, and the cynical agnostic Clarence Darrow. These images evoked the familiar experiences of millions of Americans who had been born in the country and moved to the city or who were at least witnessing the dramatic shift from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban culture. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis’s famous portrait of the dullness of smalltown America, had since its publication in 1920 furnished a potent symbol of the rural America from which people of education and culture escaped. Dayton surpassed all fiction in dramatizing the symbolic last stand of nineteenth-century America against the twentieth century.
Since 1923 several Southern states had adopted some type of anti-evolution legislation, and similar bills were pending throughout the nation. The law passed in Tennessee in the spring of 1925 was the strongest. It banned the teaching of Darwinism in any public school. This law was immediately tested by a young Dayton biology teacher, John Scopes. Scopes was brought to trial in that small mountain town in July. For his defense, the American Civil Liberties Union supplied three of the eminent lawyers of the day, headed by Darrow, who had recently served as counsel for the defense in the notorious Leopold and Loeb trial. William Jennings Bryan, seizing the chance to meet the enemy head-on, volunteered his services to the prosecution.
Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution (the decision was subse quently reversed on a technicality). But in the trial by public opinion and the press, it was clear that the twentieth century, the cities, and the universities had won a resounding victory, and that the country, the South, and the fundamentalists were guilty as charged. No doubt anything Bryan said would have been seized upon by the press and labeled foolishness. Bryan did not, however, make the task especially difficult. He was better at oratory than debate, but at the height of the proceedings he allowed himself to be cross-examined by the greatest trial lawyer of the day on the subject of the precise accuracy of the Bible. Having urged the self-evident superiority of Biblical faith to infidelity before so many audiences, Bryan could hardly refuse such an opportunity. “I want the papers to know,” he said, “I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst.”2 The result was a debacle. Darrow forced Bryan into admitting that he could not answer the standard village-atheist type questions regarding the literal interpretation of Scripture. Bryan did not know how Eve could be created from Adam’s rib, where Cain got his wife, or where the great fish came from that swallowed Jonah. He said that he had never contemplated what would happen if the earth stopped its rotation so that the sun would “stand still.” More importantly, Darrow uncovered Bryan’s ignorance of the modern literature concerning the origin of ancient religions. Incapable of dealing with many specifics, Bryan was forced to admit that he never had been much interested in examining the claims of other religions. Nor had he read critical accounts of the origins of Scripture. In a masterpiece of ridicule Darrow brought the point home. He led Bryan reluctantly to say that he basically accepted Bishop Ussher’s chronology as printed in many Bibles. Pressing the advantage, Darrow continued: “When was that flood?”
Bryan arrives at Dayton. From The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan, by himself and his wife, Mary Baird Bryan (Philadelphia, 1925).
BRYAN I would not attempt to fix the date. The date is fixed as suggested this morning.
…
DARROW But what do you think that the Bible itself says? Don’t you know how it was arrived at?
BRYAN I never made a calculation.
DARROW A calculation from what?
BRYAN I could not say.
DARROW From the generations of man?
BRYAN I would not want to say that.
DARROW What do you think?
BRYAN I do not think about things I don’t think about.
DARROW Do you think about things you do think about?
BRYAN Well, sometimes.3
Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them)4 to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.
H. L. Mencken revelled in a scene so superbly suited to his talents for derision. In his anti-eulogy to Bryan, who died in Dayton the Sunday after the trial ended, Mencken did not let mere death blunt the sting of his satirical wit. The fundamentalist cause was synonymous with rural backwardness. It was appropriate, he observed, that Bryan had spent his last days in a “one-horse Tennessee village,” because Bryan loved all country people, including the “gaping primates of the upland valleys,” and delighted in “greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen, country smells,” and “the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill.” Bryan had made the grade of a country saint. “His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.”
Moreover, Mencken assured his readers, “what moved him at bottom, was simply hatred of the city men who had laughed at him so long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate.” Bryan “knew all the while that they were laughing at him—if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons.” He had “lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write school-books.” The heyday of American democracy might have seemed 1896 when Bryan was nearly elected, but Bryan had “lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge.” Mencken did not dismiss fundamentalism’s continuing threat to modern culture. “Heave an egg out a Pullman window” he said, “and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today.”
[Fundamentalists] are thick in the mean streets behind the gas-works. They are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouses. They march with the Klan, with the Christian Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, with the Epworth League, with all the Rococo bands that poor and unhappy folk organize to bring some new light of purpose into their lives. They have had a thrill and they are ready for more.5
Two things had changed in the image of fundamentalism now presented by Mencken. Its meaning had expanded considerably. “Fundamentalism” now applied to almost every aspect of American rural or small-town Protestantism. Only those facets that might include a modicum of intellectual respectability, integrity, or social value were excepted. Fundamentalism thus ceased to refer specifically to groups with identifiable Protestant tradit
ions and organized in opposition to modernism. Nevertheless, there was some justification for the expanded use of the term; extensive national publicity had in fact aroused distinctly fundamentalist concerns in a great many more people and religious groups than the movement had previously encompassed. Moreover, at least temporarily, fundamentalism was a focal point for the real hostility of rural America toward much of modern culture and intellect. This rural element was not entirely new to fundamentalism. Some tent-meeting revivalists had long been capitalizing on anti-liberal sentiments. Yet this element had never before been central to the movement. Fundamentalism had been predominantly urban with its strength in the northern and eastern sections of the country. In the past, when its opponents had tried to discern the social base of the movement, they had not perceived a rural-urban dichotomy but were rather inclined to suspect that fundamentalism was controlled by conservative business and political interests.6
Another consequence of the Menckenesque caricature of fundamentalism that held sway after 1925, was the obscurantist label that would ever after stick to fundamentalists. Nor could they raise the level of discourse to a plane where any of their arguments would be taken seriously. Whatever they said would be overshadowed by the pejorative associations attached to the movement by the seemingly victorious secular establishment. This image of fundamentalism was strengthened, for example, by Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Elmer Gantry, published in 1927. While Gantry was hardly a true fundamentalist, he was in part patterned after New York City’s John Roach Straton. Gantry was a charlatan who adopted fundamenalist rhetoric largely because he was not bright enough to understand liberalism and because it served the purposes of his sensational campaigns for moral reform. Lewis was eager to expose any hypocritical use of religion, but he took an especially dim view of fundamentalists. “Men technically called ‘Fundamentalists,’” in his account, “saw that a proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions.”7 “For the first time in our history,” declared Maynard Shipley in his War on Modern Science, appearing the same year, “organized knowledge has come into open conflict with organized ignorance. “If the ‘self-styled fundamentalists’ gain their objective of a political takeover,” warned Shipley, “much of the best that has been gained in American culture will be suppressed or banned, and we shall be headed backward toward the pall of the Dark Age.”8
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