by Bruce Bawer
The "faith of our fathers" position is the very antithesis of a living faith. An attachment to a faith that is based on sentiment, nostalgia, or filial loyalty may be many things, but it is not Christianity. On the contrary, what it amounts to is an equation of faith with social order, stability, and continuity. It is these conservative values, and not faith itself, that fundamentalism has always been fundamentally about. Modernist views, charges Reeve, will "undermine many of the most cherished beliefs of the churches." Cherished is a striking choice of words; it enshrines sentimental attachment, habitual affection, as a key criterion of faith statements. Not recognized at all here is the value—indeed the Christian obligation—of being ready to challenge the familiar (or at least to entertain challenges to the familiar) and the need to confront the comfortable.
• A tendency to connect modernism with elitism and secularism. Ridout notes a recent speech by Fosdick to a packed audience at Harvard University. How, Ridout asks, did that audience "stand from the viewpoint of the evangelical Christian?" He quotes the Christian Century to the effect that at "a recent religious meeting at Harvard," only four of the several hundred present had read the Bible through or had prayed the day before, and "only about one-fourth believed in a personal God." Instead of recognizing that these students had real spiritual longings and sought an understanding of Christianity that made sense to them, Ridout—presaging today's "cultural elite" rhetoric—is cruelly dismissive: "This, then, is the class that Dr. Fosdick wants us to modernize Christianity for. He wants us to reverse the faith of the ages to meet this class of young people!"
Often accompanying the charge of elitism, then as now, is the claim that those who are willing to reconsider entrenched theological propositions are arrogantly setting themselves up as God. As Reeve writes in The Fundamentals, "When one makes his philosophy his authority, it is not a long step until he makes himself his own god. His own reason becomes supreme in his thinking and this reason becomes his lord." Such, Reeve says, is the case with the Higher Critics, who "recognize no authority but their own moral instincts and philosophical reason. Now, as the evolution theory makes all things exist only in a state of change, of flux, or of becoming, God is therefore changing and developing, the Bible and Christ will be outgrown, Christianity itself will be left behind. Hence, there is no absolute truth, nothing in the moral religious world is fixed or certain." Translation: Unless you slavishly accept total biblical literalism, you're "your own God." This has become a standard legalist line. What is expressed here is, of course, a terror of change, a desperate need for propositions that are absolute, fixed, certain.
Fundamentalists covet absolutes: For them, true religion is a matter of giving oneself over to a set of inflexible doctrines and of keeping one's own mind and spirit in check to the extent that they threaten to rebel. The doctrines cannot be questioned, even if they are plainly inconsistent with the testimony of reason and experience and even if they contain blatant internal contradictions. To Fosdick, by contrast, true Christian faith is a matter of attaining an internal harmony of precept, reason, and experience, spiritual and otherwise. Ridout's reading of this is that "Dr. Fosdick is a law unto himself." But of course if Fosdick was being a law unto himself, then so was Darby when he invented dispensationalism.
The Fosdick controversy stepped up in 1923. In January, a group of New York Baptists formed the Baptist Fundamental Association of the Metropolitan Area in order to combat "the increasing boldness of radicals and religious rationalists in the Baptist denomination." The New York Times weighed in on April 14, lauding Fosdick in an editorial as "a preacher whom any pulpit in the world should be eager to welcome" and chiding those who sought to silence him. In June, Fosdick was severely censured by the Presbyterian General Assembly for "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" He submitted his resignation, but his church refused to accept it. That month, 198 New York City ministers attended a luncheon in Fosdick's honor, described by one participant as "a love feast." One of those ministers, Henry Sloane Coffin, praised Fosdick as "an outstanding conservative. He conserves to the Church the many thinking men and women who would otherwise be lost to it. He conserves the central doctrines of the faith by interpreting them in forms which appeal convincingly to the mind of today. He conserves the Church as an institution, building it up and rendering it far more powerful in our city and land."
Fosdick's attack on fundamentalists, and their efforts to oust him, created a sense of crisis on both sides. On June 3, in a sermon entitled "The Present Crisis in Presbyterianism," a Staten Island minister called Fosdick "the most dangerous of all liberals" and a tool of Satan. On the same day the president of the conservative National Bible Institute attacked Fosdick in an address entitled "Christianity's Foundations Impregnable." Meanwhile, at the Brick Presbyterian Church, the modernist minister Henry Van Dyke defended Fosdick in a sermon on "The Perpetual Crisis in the Church." A few days later the Times reported that groups of students from Columbia, Cornell, and Mount Holyoke had written letters in support of Fosdick. When, on June 10, Fosdick mounted the steps of his pulpit, First Presbyterian was packed with an overflow crowd that heard him place individual spiritual experience above institutional dogma: "There are some things that no man can specialize in for anybody else. All vital experiences are individual. There are no proxies for the soul. You must know God for yourself."
The year 1924 began with a bang. On January 1, the Times reported that Lee W Heaton, an Episcopal clergyman in Fort Worth, Texas, had given a sermon denying the virgin birth and been brought up on a heresy charge. Heaton's bishop refused to proceed with a trial, but in the next few weeks, developments in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy came fast and furious. On January 4, Henry Van Dyke gave up his pew in Princeton's First Presbyterian Church because of a sermon given there by J. Gresham Machen, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, who was widely considered the leading figure in the fundamentalist camp. Complaining that Gresham "practically accuses the liberals of denying their Lord" and "said they were both disloyal and pagan," Van Dyke commented: "That is the kind of preaching I can't stand." Later that week the Times reported that the faculty of the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had suggested that the Episcopal Church "make the use of its creeds . . . permissive instead of obligatory." Wrote the faculty: "The Church is greater than the creeds. The central faith in God as He is found in Christ, upon which the Church is built, is not destroyed or diminished by doubts concerning the method of Christ's birth, of His return to God or of His future judgment."
That Monday, January 7, the Times reported that "the controversy between Fundamentalists and Modernists was renewed yesterday in many pulpits in this city." At the Church of the Ascension, Percy Stickney Grant preached on the question "Can Religion Stand New Truth?"; at Community Church, Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst spoke on "The Real Fundamentals of Religion," insisting that Christianity be viewed as a matter of personal experience and not as a philosophical or intellectual system. Two days later, the Times reported that "leading Modernists in the Protestant Episcopal Church made plans to carry on the Church war at a three-hour meeting yesterday morning at the Union League Club." One of the participants stated that the meeting represented "the launching of a serious movement to modernize the Episcopal Church." That same day, the special Presbyterian committee charged with investigating Fosdick's sermons exonerated him of heresy charges. On January 18, the fundamentalist group of the Presbytery of New York held a mass meeting at Harlem—New York Presbyterian Church to defend "historical Presbyterianism." Calling Fosdick "a foreigner within our gates," A. Gordon MacLennan, pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church, demanded that he "leave the Presbyterian fold." Recognizing that denominational pressure would not abate, Fosdick submitted his resignation again later in 1924 and this time it was accepted. He left First Presbyterian in March 1925 and agreed to take up the pulpit at Park Avenue Baptist Church. Every major stage of this job switch—Fosdick's resignation, its acceptance, his farewel
l sermon at First Presbyterian, the invitation from First Baptist, and his acceptance of it—made the front page of the Times.
Yet the defining story of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy would take place that summer not in New York City but in Dayton, Tennessee. It was there, in July 1925, that William Jennings Bryan, the former secretary of state, three-time presidential candidate, and living symbol of Protestant fundamentalism, prosecuted a case against John T. Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old science instructor at Rhea County High School who had been accused of violating a Tennessee law against teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow, America's most famous lawyer, a notorious agnostic, and a leading defender of underdogs and of progressive learning, served as the defense attorney. It didn't take long for both sides of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy to recognize the case's symbolic importance. To read the New York Times reports on the trial—which appeared on the paper's front page every day for nearly three weeks—is to be reminded again and again of today's legalistic Christians:
• Bryan, upon arriving in Dayton for the trial, told the Times that "the contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death.... If evolution wins in Dayton Christianity goes—not suddenly, of course, but gradually—for the two cannot stand together." This flat-out insistence on the utter incompatibility of Christianity and evolution continues to be a standard element of legalistic Christian rhetoric.
• The Times noted that "nobody paid any attention to the anti-evolution law or the fact that evolution was being taught until Scopes was arrested. Now that the flood has descended upon them, Dayton folk feel that something momentous is in the air, and that Mr. Bryan is the champion of God, but that about ends their mental reaction." Today's legalistic multitudes often seem to operate in the same way, finding little or no problem with certain social developments until their leaders tell them to.
• In an emotional jeremiad delivered on the eve of the trial, Bryan's fellow prosecutor, Attorney General A. T. Stewart, asked, "Would they have me believe that I was once a worm and writhed in the dust? Will they take from me my hope of a hereafter? I want to go beyond this world to where there is eternal happiness for me and others." What is at once manifest about this plaint is that it implicitly sets aside any question of truth or falsity: Evolution is opposed not because it is wrong but because, in Stewart's view, it quashes his hope of heaven. This is an essential aspect of legalistic Christian thinking: It evinces, as does the thought of devotees of other totalitarian systems, a fanatical desire to suppress propositions that contradict those by which they have chosen to live, and that are feared precisely to the extent that they do indeed appear to be true.
• Stewart's speech was countered eloquently by Darrow's defense-team partner Dudley Field Malone, who, in response to those who would say "destroy science, but keep our Bible," commented, "Keep your Bible, keep it as your consolation, keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs—in the world of your own conscience, in the world of your individual judgment, in the world of the Protestant conscience that I heard so much about when I was a boy." That Malone's comment was well received by his fundamentalist audience shows that legalistic American Christians are not necessarily incapable of being reached by modernist thinking. Though complex intellectual arguments by nonlegalists often backfire because legalists tend to respond by bristling at perceived condescension and by retreating defensively from confusing ambiguities into simplistic putative certainties, appeals that address them with an implicit assumption of their basic fairness, good humor, and good sense, and that frame the issues at hand in clear language that doesn't seem to pose a threat to their highest values and hopes, are not automatically doomed to fall on deaf ears.
The Scopes trial lasted over two weeks, but the high drama didn't come till the last day of testimony, July 20. "At last it has happened," began the article on page 1 of the Times the next morning. "After days of ineffective argument and legal quibbling, with speeches that merely skirted the matter which everyone wanted discussed in this Scopes anti-evolution trial, William Jennings Bryan, Fundamentalist, and Clarence Darrow, agnostic and pleader of unpopular causes, locked horns today under the most remarkable circumstances ever known to American court procedure." What was most remarkable was that Bryan, who agreed to be put on the stand by Darrow as an expert on the Bible, ended up making a fool of himself and being jeered at by his own supporters. In order to accommodate more spectators, the trial had been moved from the courtroom onto the courthouse lawn, and it was there, wrote the Times reporter, that a huge crowd of locals "saw Darrow and Bryan in actual conflict—Mr. Darrow's rationalism in combat with Mr. Bryan's faith—and forgot for the moment that Bryan's faith was its own."
In a scene that was, years later, pretty faithfully reproduced in the play and movie Inherit the Wind, Darrow posed a series of questions that revealed Bryan's almost total ignorance of ancient history and modern science and that also devastatingly exposed the conflicts between, on the one hand, common sense and universally accepted scientific fact and, on the other, biblical literalism. For example, in a time when people accept that the earth goes around the sun, what does it mean to say that Joshua made the sun stand still? And what of the passage in the Bible about Cain, one of Adam and Eve's two sons, taking a wife: Where did she come from? "He was entangled," pronounced a Times editorial about Bryan's disastrous performance, "and made to turn himself inside out; and there was little or nothing inside. It has long been known to many that he was only a voice calling from a poorly furnished brain-room. But how almost absolutely unfurnished it was the public didn't know till he was forced to make an inventory." Though the judge found for the plaintiffs, the trial dealt Bryan a terrible blow. A week later, still in Dayton, he died suddenly of an aneurysm complicated by a cerebral hemorrhage.
Yet the trial's repercussions reached far beyond Bryan. It also caused a dramatic change in the status of the fundamentalist cause. For the mainstream media—which were controlled by urbanites who were either modernist Christians or members of the nascent secular culture—the trial established Protestant fundamentalism as a crude, rustic, marginal phenomenon that was not to be taken seriously. Certainly the utter humiliation of Bryan's testimony made fundamentalists realize that they could not confront the Darrows of the world in fair public debate and come out ahead. For many on both sides, Bryan's death seemed to foreshadow the imminent passing of fundamentalism. As a consequence of Bryan's humiliation in Dayton, then, fundamentalists proceeded to withdraw from the public square and remained essentially withdrawn from it for nearly half a century. Ralph Reed has described this period as "two generations of self-imposed retreat from political involvement." During these two generations, Reed writes, "fundamentalists and their evangelical brethren built a picket fence against the encroachments of what they came to call 'secular humanism,' a faith in the capacity of man to solve his problems without the help of God."
Though the fundamentalist-modernist controversy did not die out after the Scopes trial, it did disappear, to an amazing extent, from the front pages and from most Americans' consciousness. For a time, fundamentalist preachers had believed that if they mounted a vigorous defense of "tradition," modernist thinking might be driven out of the church; for a time, modernists had believed that if they could only get people to listen and think, they could bring church doctrine into line with "the new learning." What each side discovered, however, was that its opposition would not be easily conquered or driven out. Over the years, fundamentalists introduced resolutions in national church bodies that would forbid modernist teachings in seminaries, ban modernist preaching from pulpits, and deny ordination to candidates who failed strict tests of doctrinal orthodoxy; though such resolutions won passage in the Southern Baptist Convention, fundamentalists generally proved unable to muster enough votes to pass similar measures in the other major denominations. Marsden, in writing about what appeared, in the 1920s, to be the triumph of modernist Christianity over fundamentalism, emphasizes the
importance of the fact that the modernists "took their stand on the question of tolerance"; since "most American Protestants were neither modernists nor militant fundamentalists," he writes, "overtures for peace and tolerance often could command substantial support." By 1926, then, "it became clear that policies of inclusiveness and tolerance would prevail."
The conflict between modernism and fundamentalism did not evaporate overnight; yet by 1927 the subcategory of "fundamentalism vs. modernism" in the New York Times index had shrunk to a handful of minor entries. Preachers on both sides began declaring the issue dead. Most major denominations began to steer around controversial questions. So firmly did modernism establish itself as a part of the mainstream culture that, just as the word talkies became unnecessary when silent movies disappeared, so the word modernist gradually ceased being used to mean "nonfundamentalist Christian." Eventually Americans would forget that it had ever meant such a thing.
In the years after the Scopes trial, Fosdick's career flourished. With fundamentalists out of the mainstream picture, he came to be seen less as a controversial figure than as an ornament of mainstream American religious culture. In 1931 he began preaching at New York's interdenominational Riverside Church, which John D. Rockefeller (a modernist Baptist) had built for him. Fosdick went on to be the country's most celebrated minister, preaching on social justice and on his vision of Christianity. Yet he largely left the fundamentalist-modernist controversy behind him, generally choosing not to attack fundamentalists directly. It was as if everyone on both sides had begun to feel that there was no point in further attacks: The fundamentalists were about one thing, and the modernists were about another, and the situation seemed destined to stay that way. In any event, most modernists believed that as rural education improved, as the South advanced, and as younger generations of Americans grew to adulthood, fundamentalism would die out of its own accord.