Defining the American Evangelical Movement: Doctrine and Denominations

In January 1953, the Reverend Donald Gray Barnhouse published a striking New Year's resolution in his magazine Eternity. After 25 years of building a ministerial empire — through Bible conferences, books, a widely syndicated radio broadcast, and a national magazine — Barnhouse confessed that he had fallen short in one significant area: unity. Long known for his willingness to call out anyone he disagreed with, even on minor points, Barnhouse declared that he wanted to widen his "circle of Christian fellowship" — defined not by doctrinal alignment, but by a simple question: Is this person going to be in heaven with me?

It was a remarkable resolution for a man forged in the fires of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. And as historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fea discuss, it offers a revealing window into the dynamics of American fundamentalism — a movement defined as much by its internal fractures as by its battles with modernism.

This episode dives deep into one of the most defining and contested threads in American evangelical history: fundamentalism. What does it actually mean to be a fundamentalist? Where did the term come from? How did the movement evolve — and fracture — across the twentieth century? And what does it have to do with debates still raging today?

The conversation traces fundamentalism from its origins in The Fundamentals pamphlets of the early twentieth century, through the cultural watershed of the Scopes Trial, to its complex relationship with the neo-evangelical movement and Billy Graham. Along the way, the historians examine:

• The three core characteristics of fundamentalism: Protestant militancy, doctrinal orthodoxy, and a deep sense of certainty
• Why fundamentalism was originally a Northern movement centered in Baptist and Presbyterian denominations — not the Southern, rural phenomenon it later became associated with in popular memory
• The crucial divide between premillennialist and amillennialist eschatology, and how it fractured the movement and gave rise to rival institutions like Dallas Theological Seminary and Westminster Seminary
• The Scopes Trial of 1925 — what it actually meant, how it was misrepresented by journalists like H.L. Mencken and later by films like Inherit the Wind, and why the fear about children and Nietzschean philosophy was central to William Jennings Bryan's case
• How fundamentalists didn't disappear after Scopes, but built a thriving parallel subculture of Bible institutes, radio broadcasts, Christian schools, and media empires
• The surprising ways fundamentalism was thoroughly modern — embracing new technology, print culture, and a rationalist, inductive approach to Scripture — even while opposing certain hallmarks of modernity
• The relationship between fundamentalism and politics, from Frank Norris's anti-Catholic crusade to Karl McIntyre's anti-communism to the emergence of the Christian Right

The episode closes by reflecting on what fundamentalism teaches us about evangelicalism more broadly: that the movement's most significant tensions have often been internal, and that to understand fundamentalists, we must take seriously their own sense of what they were doing — and why.

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation. 

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:10

In January of 1953, Reverend Donald Gray Barnhouse published a New Year's resolution in his magazine Eternity. Though not an uncommon practice in magazines at the time, it was certainly not a yearly tradition of Dr. Barnhouse. In fact, he wrote that he had not participated in the practice since he was a child. However, the previous year had been one of reflection as he reached the milestone of 25 years of ministry, during which he had built a veritable ministerial empire. Through his Bible conferences, magazine, books, as well as an influential radio broadcast that was heard on hundreds of stations across the nation, he had undoubtedly reached millions. Yet in thinking about his ministry, the Reverend also came face to face with the reality that he had fallen short in one significant aspect unity. Barnhouse forged his primary theological convictions in the thick of the fundamentalist modernist controversy. Fiercely independent, he struck out at modernists with little hesitation, even going so far as to advise congregants to avoid certain churches within his own denomination, because the ministers there, in his words, did not preach the gospel. That stunt earned him an official admonition from his presbytery in 1932. After receiving the censure, he rather defiantly issued his own statement, accepting the censure, but noting that he had not actually been asked to retract any of the statements he had made and had no plans to do so. In his New Year's resolution, Barnhouse wrote of his harsh approach to those who disagreed with him. Early in my ministry, I conceived the idea that I must strike out against all error wherever I saw it. I used only one kind of ammunition. I hit an error wherever I saw it. If it was in Christian science, Unitarianism, or in Romanism, I swung hard. If it was in some fundamental leader with whom I was in 95% agreement, I swung hard at the 5%. And indeed, Barnhouse had a reputation of being a hard man. Like many other conservative evangelicals, he had built his ministry by criticizing so-called modern trends in the churches, and rarely lost an opportunity to point out the shortcomings of other ministries or leaders who stood against him. Interestingly, he doggedly refused to join the come-outer group who left his denomination, the Presbyterian Church of the USA, PC USA, after they shifted away from fundamentalism in the early 1930s. He faced criticism for the choice, but resolutely stated that he was where he belonged, ministering to several millions of baby believers within the denomination. He was also fond of comparing himself to a foreign missionary, saying that he would stay and preach the true gospel in his Presbyterian church just as he would gladly go and preach in a Hindu temple if he was invited. Barnhaus imagined himself as an outsider within his own denomination and acted accordingly. He remained aloof to denominational ties, picking and choosing affiliations according to his own convictions. For example, the PCUSA was a member of the National Council of Churches, but Barnhouse refused individual membership and would not send funds from his church to the NCC, believing their teachers to be too liberal. His animosity toward Carl McIntyre, which was definitely mutual, prohibited any affiliation with the fundamentalist alternative to the NCC, the American Council of Christian Churches, ACCC. Barnhouse was, however, a member of the National Association of Evangelicals, the new kid on the evangelical block, and remained close with editors of key conservative evangelical publications and institutions. To be clear, Barnhouse was a powerful figure in the evangelical world. In 1949, he experienced the hostile takeover of his own magazine after he opposed the marriage of the managing editor and the very newly divorced printer/slash board member. That scandal is a story for another day. Only a couple months later, after quickly mobilizing his extensive network, he not only had the subscriptions he needed to support a brand new magazine, but he also shut down any chance the old magazine had to survive. Yet in his 1953 New Year's resolution, Barnhouse declared that he wanted to have Christian fellowship with a much wider circle of people. He was tired of going to Christian functions and speaking to leaders who were not on speaking terms with one another. They had been, in his words, victims of a religious McCarthyism. He went on to explain what he meant. Just as the senator from Wisconsin has yelled communist at almost anyone to the left of center, so there are men who have yelled modernist at anyone who disagreed with them on points which are certainly secondary. It was time to widen the circle. His criteria? He wanted to make his circle of Christian fellowship on the basis of the fact that a man is going to be in heaven with me. If he is, then why not get a little closer together here and now? After all, he quipped, don't these men realize that this is 1953 and the H-bomb has been perfected? The time had come for a different tact. Admittedly, it was a lofty goal, and Barnhouse quickly clarified that he would continue to disagree with those who took a different view of Scripture than he did, but not with the intent to break fellowship over so-called secondary concerns. After his 1953 resolution, Barnhouse made efforts to include Seventh-day Adventists and Pentecostals into the fold, spoke out against separatism for anything other than apostasy, and even took more speaking engagements at mainline Protestant events, or even secular ones. One such speech, however, illustrates the limits of Barnhouse's resolution. In 1959, Barnhouse spoke at a Chicago Sunday evening club, which had, according to one conservative critic, an international reputation for being the sounding board of the rankest kind of modernism to be found anywhere in the country.

unknown 6:14

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SPEAKER_02 6:14

T. Ketchum, that conservative critic, and the national representative of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, along with his wife and secretary, attended the talk, prepared to be disappointed. Much to his astonishment, Ketchum instead, by his own admission, listened to one of the clearest distillations of the gospel he had ever heard. There was a straightforward, hard-hitting presentation of the simple gospel of salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ, he wrote, and there had been no attempt to stay up in the intellectual clouds or to play to the intelligentsia of his audience, as Ketchum had been expecting. He was so surprised that he sent a memo to the leadership of his association to declare his approval of Barnhouse's message. Though the wisdom of his decision to speak at such an event was still up for debate, a copy of the memo made it to Barnhouse's desk. And Barnhouse responded to Ketchum that it touched him deeply and helped him move on from a past grievance. In a past publication, Ketchum had cast aspersions on Barnhouse's character and disqualified the Reverend Statement by arguing that, this is the Barnhouse who has said he would not leave the Presbyterian Church, even if she were the great whore of Babylon. Barnhouse had, of course, never said any such thing, and wrote to Ketchum asking for a retraction, but the slight was never corrected. But it was in the past now, and Barnhouse was delighted to see his prayers answered. Alas, such reconciliation was not meant to be. In a rather scathing response, Ketchum wrote back that he wished he could close the matter on this plane of mutual consideration and respect, but he regretted that he cannot do so. The issue, it seems, was that immediately after experiencing the high of hearing the gospel so plainly preached, all joy was erased when Ketchum heard about a conversation that Barnhouse had about Carl McIntyre in the foyer. Apparently, an audience member inquired of Barnhouse what he thought of Dr. McIntyre, to which Barnhouse replied, Carl McIntyre is an insane liar. That, Ketchum pointed out, was in bitter vindictiveness, and was certainly not in keeping with your boasted new discovery of a few years ago that you should love everybody. And indeed, Ketchum had more receipts. Another conversation, this time at a Philadelphia airport, was brought up where Barnhouse ostensibly said, I say unto you, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, the American Council of Christian Churches is of the devil, and Carl McIntyre is a liar. Such slander was a step too far for Ketchum, and he could not abide it. He was a loyal supporter of McIntyre and would stand by him. Less than a year after this exchange, Donald Barnhouse passed away from a malignant brain tumor. He had less than a decade to live out his resolution and had experienced only limited success. But in a culture that was built on the power of reputation and often defined by who was outside of your circle rather than within it, Barnhouse's theological mellowing and attempt to do better stands out and offers us a glimpse into the complexity of ideas and motivations within the conservative evangelical movement.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Welcome to American Evangelicals, a history podcast. In this episode, we're diving into one of the most defining and often misunderstood threads in evangelical history: fundamentalism. What role does right belief play in shaping evangelical identity? And how did fundamentalism emerge, evolve, and sometimes clash with the broader evangelical movement? Along the way, we'll look at key moments like the Scopes trial, the rise of separatist movements, and the surprising ways fundamentalists both resisted and embraced the modern age. We'll also wrestle with the tension that still echoes today: unity versus separation, certainty versus complexity, and belief versus practice. Let's join the conversation with historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fia.

SPEAKER_03 10:13

So thank you, Maggie, for that story. Can you tell us why you picked uh talking about Barnhouse and company to start our conversation today?

SPEAKER_02 10:21

So I enjoy looking into what's going on with interfundamentalist, interconservative evangelical communities. And uh, this story comes somewhat out of my own research. Um, I have a chapter on Barnhouse. And I found this, um, particularly the quote uh where he talks about McIntyre being an insane liar in a letter uh in the archives, and I was like, oh, that's just too good. So part of it comes from just finding a really good primary source and wanting to tell a story about it. But to zoom out a little bit, I also think that this story reveals a lot of things about the dynamics that we wanted to talk about in this third episode, which is really what's going on in the 20th century, how does the questions of right belief play a part in thinking about evangelicalism, and sorry, sort of what's the story of fundamentalism in American evangelicalism as well. So I thought that this was a good on-ramp to talking about those things and also just an interesting episode. Also, getting a fundamentalist to make any kind of argument about unity with people they disagree with is not normal. So it's also kind of fun to bring that into the narrative.

SPEAKER_04 11:34

Larhouse is an interesting character because the way you frame it in the story, uh, Maggie, is he he's a fundamentalist, kind of part of the National Association of Evangelicals, kind of softening of fundamentalism. But he's also never kind of quite loses the kind of militancy and the I'll fight anyway. Like I love that quote where he says, even if I disagree with you five percent, I will still I will still uh you know call out your error, right? But he seems like he's changing at the end of his life a little bit more.

SPEAKER_02 12:06

Yeah, had that desire too. One of the things that I thought was really interesting in his actual letter to his audience was the way he frames it around the Cold War, right? Like this could be the end of all things. Maybe let's try and get along a little bit more. So I thought that was really fascinating as well.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

Maybe one thing we can talk about here at the beginning of the episode is if we're going to be talking about fundamentalism a lot, what is fundamentalism? Um, I think there's a few different popular definitions that maybe connect but aren't at the core of what we think. I I think of we sort of use that term fundamentalist to mean just anyone who is very convinced of a position and is wanting to push it to the extreme. And so, you know, that can be part of what we mean by a sort of a militancy, you could say. Um I think there's an even narrower but still really broad definition that has to do with a type of religion that is anti-modern or some type of reaction to modernity, whatever you know, uh industrial society or new norms around gender and race and other things. And so fundamentalism is the reaction to that. It doesn't have to be Christian, it could be Islamic fundamentalism or Buddhist fundamentalism or something else. So those are two definitions. And of course, there's something that we're talking about that is much more specific, or at least the the version we're talking about is specific to Protestantism in largely America, though there's there's some uh a spillover. But maybe to start with you, Maggie, what what do you when when you asked to define fundamentalism in this way we're talking about in the history of evangelicalism, uh, what do you mean by it?

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Aaron Ross Powell In a lot of ways we have the OG fundamentalists, right? Because they formed around a series that was of pamphlets that were printed called The Fundamentals. That was in the early 20th century. And it was definitely a reaction to modernism, and it was kind of self-proclaimed. And we're talking about the group of people that coalesced around those ideas. How do we defend a historic traditional Christianity in the face of challenges? It then ebbs into something very different after World War One, where it gets this really militant edge and certainly takes on a sort of cultural warrior approach to evolution, which is where I think it culturally is best placed because of the scopes trial. But yeah, it's definitely a very specific group of people that evangelical historians are talking about when we talk about fundamentalists, um, even though it has become a term that can apply rightfully so, can be applied to different groups of people. When we're talking about it, we're talking about those that are connected to that original fundamentalist. Right.

SPEAKER_03 14:44

And by original, you mean this is actually where the term comes from, right? Is is the uh Curtis-Lee Law's 1920 Baptist journalist saying we're gonna do battle royale for the fundamentals, these particular doctrinal convictions within the Baptist denomination.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

And actually, I think also that's that term fun we are fundamentalists, and fundamentalism comes out of that exact moment.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

That's right. Yeah, so it's coined sort of right there. And then we've social scientists and others have really expanded the definition since then, but these are the original fundamentalists.

SPEAKER_04 15:14

You know, the the point you make about the sort of broader definition of fundamentalism, you know, anyone who's militant or doesn't like social cultural change, backlash, those kinds of things. Uh, just to put some larger context on that, when I was kind of coming up in the profession, uh, this would have been uh the late 80s, I think it was the late 80s, 90s, the University of Chicago Divinity School had this fundamentalism project. And it was Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, who's now studies things related, I think, to peace at Notre Dame. It was these massive volumes. I remember I remember thinking it was important to get those volumes. Fine used copies and have them in my library where they would discuss everything from Islamic fundamentalism, uh, you know, and I was studying fundamentalism in the Protestant sense that we're talking about today, and just just kind of my head spinning, right? Because the I think that had a profound effect, at least on journalists and the popular mind, about how the term fundamentalism should be used in culture. So today you see Islamic fundamentalists and so forth. I guess it was back in, I want to say 1994, which I'm just thinking it's like 30 years ago. I wrote a piece in Trinity Journal, Associated with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, published it in there on the four, I think it came out of a seminar paper or something, the four phases of fundamentalism, similar to what you were just talking about, Maggie, right? You know, you had the kind of fundamentalists that rallied around uh the, who was it, Lyman Stewart funded the, was that his name? Lyman Stewart, the the oil Milton and Lyman Stewart. Milton and Lyman Stewart. And, you know, I mean, even B.B. Warfield, this prince and theologian, what wrote into fundamentals, and he believed in some form of theistic evolution at the time. So it was a little hard to nail down like what a fundamentalist was. Then I think you're right, Maggie, you have this sharp edge like after World War I. And then I think in your story, we're introduced to some of the folks like Ketchum and McIntyre, put John R. Rice, Bob Jones in this category, who, despite the move towards the National Association of Evangelicals and this more moderate kind of we want to engage the world, kind of evangelicals, engage the culture, engage intellectual life, they want to cling to this term, right? While everyone else is kind of running away from it. Those are kind of fundamentalists that uh, you know, are kind of, I think I called them the fourth phase.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

I actually can't remember what the third phase sort of separatism was really inherent to the movement whether they were separate from other people. Right.

SPEAKER_04 17:50

So it was like anti-e anti-Billy Graham. If you didn't like uh Billy Graham uh because he was working with modernists, you championed fundamentalism, right? And then there was this second degree of separation. We don't want to fellowship with Billy Graham or people who fellowship with Billy Graham. So you saw a lot of that going on. I think that's some of the stuff that um Arnhouse was reacting against, at least coming from the from his right. I always like uh George Marsden's definition where he said, I can't remember where he said this, but it was something like the difference between uh evangelical and a fundamentalist, right? A fundamentalist is an evangelical who's mad about something and or has this kind of militant edge to it. Or they said also this sense of certainty. Like these are the fundamentals of the faith. There's a kind of fortress thinking there. We will defend these, we will not kind of expose ourselves to any kind of liberal modernist doctrine, and we will uh fight for the faith. And every engagement with the world comes out of that fortress mentality rather than a more kind of engagement.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

Yeah, their posture is very different towards culture and even other evangelicals.

SPEAKER_03 19:01

One interesting thing that might be surprising if you haven't sort of read on the history of fundamentalism is that originally in the 1920s in particular, it was largely a northern uh movement, uh particularly among Baptists and Presbyterians, um, within those large denominations. And that was where the more conservative people in those denominations started to organize because they were perceiving the encroachment of what they understood to be bad theology and modernism. I think today we'd often associate Southern Baptists and others with a sort of at least somehow connected to fundamentalism, and they certainly are in some sentiments, but back in the 1920s, that really wasn't the main arena of action. It was in the North. And we have a story that's much later in the 1970s and 80s about the Southern Baptist Convention, where a similar type uh battle, you could say, that the same that was happening in the 1920s in these northern denominations happens, and the conservatives take over the Southern Baptists uh convention in the in the late 70s. But uh I remember doing uh plenty of research around the 1920s and 30s, and there were certain Southerners who really associated fundamentalism with Yankees, with like that's something that is sort of the problem of northern Christians. And down here we have our house in order and all that kind of stuff, at least theologically. So uh that definitely is another way that the term expands as fundamentalism itself grows, but also because the the challenges that these northern denominations were having also expand into other parts of the country as well.

SPEAKER_02 20:36

So, one of the things that I think is really important for us to kind of pin down is that fundamentalism is part of evangelicalism, but evangelicalism is not necessarily always a fan of that. Like there are others within the evangelical movement that's like we would rather not include fundamentalists in our numbers, and that there's kind of peaks and valleys of that relationship throughout the 20th century. There's so much that we could talk about and talking about what fundamentalism is and how it played a role in 20th century evangelicalism. So I think this would just be kind of fun. You guys can play along with it if you want. What would be three things that you would say in order to understand American fundamentalism for evangelicals in the 20th century? Here are three things you have to understand. What what would be your your top three?

SPEAKER_04 21:22

So I've mentioned a few of them already. I have a kind of Protestant militancy, right? A fighting spirit, like the fighting fundamentalists, or or as Dan mentioned before with Curtis Lee Laws, right? Doing battle royale for the faith. Again, a commitment to orthodox Christianity, but in a very narrow kind of way that's filtered through. Sometimes it's filtered through, like, you know, the Bible prophecy conference and dispensationalism. Sometimes it's just filtered through the experience that many of the fundamentalists had fighting so called Modernism within their denominations and worried about, you know, people rejecting the virgin birth or the inerrancy of scripture, those kinds of things. So doctrine. The third one I also mentioned is a real sense of certainty, right? There's no mystery. The mystery of God is something that's very foreign to fundamentalists. They have a kind of rationalism about them that wants to figure it out and defend a position, right? You know, so they are very rational. You know, historians have talked about the influence of this kind of common sense thinking on fundamentalists. So those would be my three militancy, a defense of doctrine, and somewhat related to that as the third point, uh, certainty. And now I probably stole, stole some of the things that I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_03 22:44

No, well, I took it as a much different um assignment, Maggie, and I thought of uh sort of three um pieces of like historical artifacts uh that could define it. So the first uh that I was thinking about was there's a really famous sermon gave by given by Harry Emerson Fosdick uh in 1922 called Shall the Fundamentalists Win, and this sort of kicks off a lot of the debates in the northern denominations that we were just talking about. There's a response to that by a guy named Clarence McCartney, who's a Presbyterian pastor in Philadelphia, right along there with with Barnhouse. He responds with a sermon called Shall Unbelief Win. And I thought that was it's a really interesting uh sermon if you if you read it, in part because you see that the that McCartney, who is a very well-educated, he actually has a University of Wisconsin-Madison under undergraduate degree, then goes to Princeton, very well-educated Presbyterian is trying to create this sense of shared cause among himself and revivalists and all types of different Christians, but still quite learned. And so it's a it's a it's not the usual fundamentalist way of talking. It's very much informed by systematic theologians and John Calvin and others. And it's also very proper. You could say it's sort of like a high culture way of responding, but it really focuses in on the atonement as sort of the core of what McCartney thinks is at stake, uh, is sort of the doctrine of the atonement. And you really see the theological stakes that someone like McCartney understands is is at stake in this. So that's one. The second is I wrote about this in a previous book on the really central role that hymns play in fundamentalism as sort of the soul of the movement, you could say. So there's a hymnal called Gospel Truth in Song Number Three that was published in 1924 by someone in Chicago who was sort of associated with Moody Bible Institute. And you really, if you flip through that, if you grew up in any type of evangelical world, you'll recognize a lot of the hymns are pretty standard ones. But there's also the introduction in that hymnal of some of the key hymns that become sort of core to fundamentalism. The one that I've done some research on is the hymn Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus. Uh, and it goes look full on his wonderful face and it keeps going. This was a hymn that was actually created just a couple of years before 1924. It debuted at Keswick in Great Britain. But it's one of these sort of, it's a very sad hymn. If you if you actually it's got sort of a sad tune to it, and it's the only hymn in this hymnal that that says um sing with expression or with feeling. So anyway, I I think um that that's a one interesting hymn, but there's a broader sense of one of the things that tied together fundamentals a lot was not just the doctrine as laid out in a sermon, but it was singing and the sort of broader culture of fundamentalism that was you know constructed by these people and they found it you know very appealing.

SPEAKER_04 25:31

And and and the things of this earth will go strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. That's right, that's right.

SPEAKER_03 25:39

So you see the sort of otherworldliness right there in that hymn. It's also like one of the verses is all about missions work and sort of going to other parts of the world. The last thing I was thinking of was there's a pretty famous, along with a lot of the fundamentalists, the separatist fundamentalists John mentioned, there's a guy named J. Frank Norris, um, who was a Texan and had a large church in Texas, uh in I think the Dallas area. And then in a way that I don't know if there's a lot of other examples of this, but he ended up co-pastoring another church in Detroit. That's a quite a feat in the early 20th century to like co-pastor church in two regions of the country. But there's an interesting way where his message really appealed to working-class white people in Detroit and working class white people in Texas. And I mention white because in part Norris was known for having a pretty strong view on segregation and the sort of the separation of the races. But he was also very typically fundamentalist in his theology, in propounding biblical inerrancy, in being against evolution, being a premillennialist in his eschatology. What I find interesting about that is that he's able to translate this fundamentalism in both the South and the North. And we see sort of the different those two churches have very different sort of trajectories over the 20th century. And he shot a guy.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

And he shot, yeah, his church office. Good stories there.

SPEAKER_04 27:04

Check out, check out Barry Hankins' biography. Maybe we could put that in show notes if we're gonna have to go. God's Rascal. I think it was.

SPEAKER_03 27:11

God's Rascal, yeah. Um yeah, so he's also a very colorful figure, and I think a lot of people associate fundamentalism with these charismatic, sort of larger-than-life personalities that are have a lot of CD sides, you know, uh uh rough edges to them, along with their Christianity.

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Fantastic. Yeah, I think uh I in typical historical fashion took the question even a different way. So this is working out beautifully. I do want to emphasize a couple of things, Dan, from what you said. One is that in thinking through a response to modernist kind of challenges and the Fosdic McCartney Exchange is a really good example of that, uh, that the fundamentals that fundamentalists were rallying around are actually ones that are very recognizable to a lot of Christians that would not consider themselves fundamentalists today. And so if you go back and you're like the virgin birth, okay, that seems central. Atonement also seems central. Like there's there's some things that really were being challenged in very new ways because of modernist ideas. That I I mean, there's certainly those within Christianity that have different theories of those, but it it is at least reasonable for most Christians who look at those early documents to be like, yeah, this was a discussion that needed to happen. And in fact, like a lot of times when the fundamentalists were trying to push out the modernists, they really saw it as like a false religion, not just a different interpretation of things. They're like, this is stripping Christianity of everything that makes it Christianity.

SPEAKER_04 28:38

And so it really was which was which was Jay Greshamation's argument, right? Christianity of the Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

And I think to emphasize that there is an intellectual kind of component to fundamentalism that is not what it is remembered for in that early kind of foundational period. So along with that, Dan, can you just clarify? Because we're using some terms that people might not be super familiar with. And I think as the person who literally wrote the book on it, can you explain pre-millennial like theology, dispensationalism, how they're related, how they're a little bit different?

SPEAKER_03 29:10

Yeah, and this is actually something that some of the major figures in the fundamentalist movement had a lot to say about, including McCartney. So premillennialism is the end times eschatology uh view that Jesus will return before the millennium. And so um, this has one is how you it's an interpretation of the scripture, uh, but it has effects on how you view the relationship of your action right now and the church's role right now in relation to what's going to happen in the future. And so premillennialists have tended to be people who have been eagerly awaiting the return of Jesus as sort of like something that will happen possibly any moment, but like in this current age that whenever we're talking about is. And um, they've tended to be um people who, in their biblical interpretation, have read the Bible what we call a little more literally, or or they take prophecies about the future, and they're really trying to look for the fulfillment of those prophecies in the world in a sort of way that you could see with your eyes and observe. And so premillennialism is a, it's one of the, in the Protestant world at least, it's one of the major camps of viewing eschatology. The one that McCartney and people like B.B. Warfield and Jerry Gresham Machem, all these people are Presbyterians of a sort of Westminster confession type. We call them a millennial, which means that they are not looking for Jesus to come back to establish the millennium because they think the church right now is playing that role in a sort of more symbolic sense. It's not a literal thousand years, that's what millennium means. It's that the church is the new age, it's it's the new kingdom of God, though not brought uh yet to full uh fruition. This was a big debate within the fundamentalist world, and you might find this to be not that important of a debate, but there were implications for how to view politics and engagement with society. And there were also concerns by the all-millennialists that premillennialism sort of was disrespectable. It was something that led to people getting really excited about the World War I as a prophetic event. It got people interested in Zionism, um, which is where a lot of fundamentalists started taking interest in what was happening in the Middle East. And so this became a real big tension point. And when the fundamentalist movement emerges in the 20s, there's the both of these camps. And they end up saying, for the moment, we are going to basically push this aside because we have bigger battles to fight. But this is right under the surface the whole time. So by the end of the 1920s, actually, you see the fundamentalist movement actually breaking along some of these lines around theology, eschatology being a key one, and really prompting within the fundamentalist world a lot of institution building in an attempt to sway where fundamentalism is going to go. Which of these camps is going to have more of a sway over the fundamentalist world? And so the way I tell this story is um there's a pretty, it's one of the largest seminaries in the country right now, still is Dallas Theological Seminary. And it's founded in 1924 as a dispensationalist seminary, which means it's premillennialist and it even has some more distinctives on top of that about how it reads the Bible. It's in Dallas, which is interesting because it's founded by people in the north, but um it becomes a sort of a major source of the fundamentalist culture and and world for the next century. And then there's another seminary called Westminster Seminary that's founded in Pennsylvania that is really a continuation of the Princeton sort of reformed Calvinist tradition. And a lot of the fundamentalists gravitate toward that. And so you have for a good chunk of time in the 20th century, sort of a dispensationalist sub-network within fundamentalism and a more reformed Calvinist network. And these are divided by the Dallas one is premillennialist, the Westminster one is amillennialist, and they write tons and tons of books, they create journals, they create conferences, denominations have to pick a side on sort of which one they're going to have in their statement of faith. And this all comes out of this fundamental difference that they never reconciled about eschatology among, among other things, though it had to do with a lot more um than that. So this is a through line that we still see happening today in various ways. This sort of debate, um, we're talking here in 2026, there is plenty of action in the Middle East that some evangelicals and fundamentalists are calling prophetically significant, and other evangelicals and fundamentalists find that so embarrassing that some of their co-religionists would go that way. And that all, at least some of that goes back to these debates all the way back a hundred years ago about sort of where the fundamentalist movement would go with its theology.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

And then to the point about the historiography, right? Like if you read the earlier works on fundamentalism, its connection with premillennial theology was really central to a definition, right?

SPEAKER_03 33:49

That's right. Yeah, the the the main uh sort of book that made this interpretation, at least in more recent decades, was Um Ernest Sandine's The Roots of Fundamentalism, which was published in 1970, so you know, quite a while ago. And he really saw fundamentalism as an expression of premillennialism, that basically these things, two things are tied together. There is also the sort of, along with premillennialism, was biblical inerrancy, was his other sort of key thing that defined fundamentalism. And so um he he really set a certain interpretation that that made your eschatology really close to whether you're a fundamentalist or not. People like Marsden and Joel Carpenter and others in the 80s and 90s push back and really wanted to broaden out how we talked about fundamentalism from just talking about how they viewed the end of the world. And I think that they had a a lot of um purchase with that interpretation and it created a lot of creative uh scholarship, but not a lot of it focused on uh eschatology because it was sort of demoted. But in more recent years, and partly it's because of reinterpreting all of evangelicalism through looking at politics and society and things like that. We've had a number of interpretations of fundamentalism and evangelicalism that have really re-emphasized eschatology. So Matt Sutton's American Apocalypse from about 10 years ago did that. And um there's there's a lot of books sort of around the Cold War and evangelicalism that really emphasize the end times, the way that evangelicals thought uh and fundamentalists thought the end times were sort of uh happening in the Middle East and through the Cold War. So that's been a really dominant interpretation. I think it's something that I've I both appreciate that because it sort of centers things I'm interested in, but also I've been, you know, in my own work on dispensationalism, really been trying to like understand how it's part, but not the whole, of something like fundamentalism. And so some of this is really getting into at least how I thought about like if you're a historian who gets more into the formal theological or seminary world to sort of learn about what fundamentals thought about this, you tend to think it's a lot more complicated. If you tend to spend your time more on pamphlets or televangelists or politicians or Christian activists, you tend to think it's a lot simpler. And there's a lot clearly no line to draw between these two things. Depending on your method, you might actually come to a different conclusion. And the last thing I'll say is just we're here in Madison. Um, one of the most important books that interpreted sort of the closeness between end times and fundamentalism was Paul Boyer's uh When Time Shall Be No More. Paul Boyer was a longtime cultural historian at UW, um, who really spent in that book, which is a sort of classic from the 90s, really spent his time looking at mostly pamphlets. So the sort of like like tracks that people would hand out on the corner of a street, or you know, radio shows where they would talk about theology. So, really what you call like middle brow or lowbrow culture. He didn't spend as much time looking at sort of uh the systematic theology textbooks and stuff. So that that's another example of one of these histories that really, depending on your method, you're gonna lean one way or the other, just based on what you're looking at and how you see the people you're looking at connecting their beliefs about the end to their politics and the way they view the world.

SPEAKER_04 36:59

You know, as I listened to you talk, Dan, another thing, if I could add a fourth thing about fundamentalism is it's really a Protestant idea, but fundamentalism takes this on steroids, so to speak, the idea of splitting over doctrinal issues and forming new denominations. As I hear you talking, Dan, about Westminster, Machen and company leave Princeton, and then it's like a year or two, right? When a person who figures in Maggie's uh uh piece here, Carl McIntyre breaks with Westminster and forms his own seminary, faith seminary, because and oh one of the issues is dispensationalism, right? He's a dispensationalist. And then later, later, this church he forms the Bible Presbyterian Church, uh, which he breaks away from Machin's uh I think it was called the Presbyterian Church of America, maybe back then, his breakaway from the PCUSA. Then there's a break in the 1950s when Francis Schaeffer, who came up through through McIntyre's kind of empire, and I want to get back to empire. You asked, you're gonna talk about that, breaks away and forms, you know, his version, which later becomes kind of the PCA, Covenant Seminary, those kinds of things. Baptists are breaking all over the place. Ketchum is representative of the General Association of Regular Baptists, which is the fundamentalist group that broke away from the American Baptist Church. You know, again, that's what I mean. Protestants, right? You put the Bible in the hands of the people, they're going to read it their own way. This is a Protestant idea, and they're going to form their own denominations. Something about fundamentalists, you know, it's maybe it's that 5% that Barnhouse, right, says, I'll argue with anybody, even if I disagree with him 5%, and then boom, there's another denomination based on that 5% difference. So there's it, you really need a scorecard uh to keep track of all of these divisions within fundamentals. And then like the fundamentalists, even the fundamentalist phase four, like the Bob Jones gets mad at Carl McIntyre and they don't speak. Pretty soon, you know, you have people, they're kind of out on an island by themselves, like the only purists, you know, who are the true fundamentalists. So I think that's also part of the story. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Which is one of the reasons why Barnhouse's attempt to unify or say that he was dedicated to unity is strange. Although he is someone who did stay within the PCUSA while being a fundamentalist and like received crazy letters um about that and how he was a traitor and all these sorts of things because he wouldn't come out of his denomination.

SPEAKER_04 39:26

It really wasn't until so I might get the chronology wrong, but when Barnhouse dies, he's replaced, I think, by James Montgomery Boyce, who was a I don't know if there was someone in between them, but that 10th Presbyterian Church only recently, I think it was under Philip Riken, who is the now the president of Wheaton College, when Philip Riken was pastor of 10th Press, was only then that they finally broke away from the PCUSA. I think it was in the 90s, maybe or 80s. It was always a flagship conservative evangelical church in the PCUSA. And then finally I think they had enough. And it might have been the it might have been the same-sex marriage debate or something that led them to leave and join the PCA Presbyterian Church in America. But they hung on in the PC USA. I think I think it could have been because of Barnhouse's kind of legacy. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Yeah, that would make sense. For me, I was thinking about fundamentalism in terms of change over time in the 20th century, because I think one of the things that I know for my students, they have a hard time understanding is how much the fundamentalists kind of change character and who they are when they started and and what kind of happens to their political presence and then non-presence and then presence and things. And so I think for me, understanding the role of World War One is really central to understanding fundamentalism. Because one of the things that becomes that central characteristic, as John pointed out, is that militancy. And if you look at what World War One showed people was possible with technology and the kind of disenchantment of what modernity could do to people in a very real visceral way, it can obliterate them. I think it brought that fear home. But there's also like Dan pointed out, there is prophetic um components to interpreting World War One. There's also anti-German sentiment that becomes part of anti-modernism, um, particularly German higher criticism is how we talk about higher criticism of the Bible. And that is one of the core things that fundamentalists are going to be fighting against. So I think understanding that is really going to be important to kind of seeing the way that they shift from the 1910s to the 1920s and their militancy. And then in thinking about the 1920s and sort of cultural relevance, the scopes trial. People always know the scopes trial because they probably learned about it in high school. They might have watched Inherit the Wind, which is the worst way, I think, to learn about the Scopes trial. Great movie and play, but not the greatest way to learn about the trial itself. And connected with that scopes trial is for those who aren't, we can kind of talk about the scopes trial. I love talking about the scopes trial, is that it was when evolution theoretically was on trial itself. And the statesman fundamentalist, William Jennings Bryan, who is an odd fundamentalist because politically not aligned with anybody else, takes the stand in defense of evolution, does terribly, especially uh in the hands of Clarence Darrow, who is grilling him on evolution, because he's not necessarily a young earth creationist. And so Brian does very poorly. He dies before um he even leaves town. And so it's seen as like this great disgrace of fundamentalism that they failed to actually in a court of law where the bias was definitely in their favor, they failed to defend creationism well, is sort of the grand narrative of that. And then they fall into cultural irrelevancy is and are maybe less likely to be politically active. So that's that's one of those historical stories that's out there. I I would challenge quite a bit of it, but that's kind of the meta-narrative. And then Joel Carpenter, Dan, who you already brought up, uh that makes the argument, but what they did after that is they didn't disappear. They actually just built up, you know, alongside denominations, their own institutions, which is one of the reasons why you get a Frank Norris who is in Detroit and Texas, and you get these media empires that start to grow, and you get fundamentalist Bible institutes and Bible conferences, and there's a whole subculture where they are flourishing that then sets up a political emergence later that we need to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_04 43:36

Christian radio is part of that. Suddenly you have these Christian schools, uh K through twelve schools, right? You said that you have this Christian subculture as a part of the art that wasn't there prior because there was no split. Yeah. There was, you know, it was a Christian nation, so to speak, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:55

Yeah. So understanding that I think is very key to understanding what fundamentalism is and the mid-20th century. And that also helps explain this Barnhouse McIntyre fighting over the, you know, American Council of Christian Churches versus the Federal Council of Christian Churches versus the National, they're the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals, all of that's emerging within this like institutionalization of evangelicalism. And then you get that kind of Billy Graham turn where fundamentalism sort of becomes mainstream evangelicalism again a bit with the sort of neo-evangelical movement, um, where you get a bit of a merger. Not all fundamentalists merge into this neo-evangelicalism, but there is this shift that happens with Billy Graham. And so those I think would be sort of my places to root historical understanding of of fundamentalism with change over time, obviously ending pretty early in the 20th century, but that was what I had to do because I gave myself only three.

SPEAKER_04 44:51

It's interesting because you have you said a little earlier fundamentalists are evangelicals or you said something to that extent. And I think it's important to remember that doctrinally for the most part these kind of new evangelicals, these neo evangelicals, people like Graham and Carl Henry and you know people associated with like Fuller Seminary and Christianity Today magazine they do share the core convictions of the fundamentalists who came before them on most things. So it's more of sort of a style almost or an approach than it necessarily is a rejection of certain fundamentalist beliefs from say 1910 or 20. I don't know, is that right Dan? I mean it's or do you see it differently?

SPEAKER_03 45:36

There's a lot of continuity. There there are there are differences um including dispensationalism. So one of the things that the new evangelicals they associate dispensationalism with fundamentalism so they want to get away from that. So they create that another one that is really apparent in the National Association of Evangelicals is their willingness to fellowship with Pentecostals. Yeah. The biggest denomination in the NA at the beginning is the Assemblies of God. Most fundamentalists of the sort of Baptist variety don't think Pentecostals are legitimate people to partner with. On other things like probably the five fundamentals or the you know the the the fundamental statements of the early 20th century there would be agreement there on the miracles in the Bible, the inerrancy of the Bible these are not the things under debate but there's a lot of other theological things that are under debate. And then there is this really um this drive in the event the new evangelical movement to do the Barnhouse type unity. I mean that's really what they're trying to they're trying to find ways to you know that I I believe the NAE's um slogan was cooperation without compromise. And so there was this idea of cooperation is really what they were trying to get at. Now there were definite limits to that um based on theology and and frankly race and and other things that that made the NAE very particular but um but cooperation as opposed to separation was what they were after and they saw themselves as correcting the problem of fundamentalists that were too eager to be separatist.

SPEAKER_04 47:03

And this is I think Maggie right you're you you mentioned how Barnhouse said like let's find unity around the core things and then the second so-called secondary issues right we can disagree with. But yeah what I was trying to what I was saying was you know the three things we've talked about in the last three episodes right the new birth the need to pursue sanctification and right doctrine they transferred over over directly from fundamentalism. But yeah you're right Dan to suggest that they were much more interested in in cooperating and unity and so forth on these things.

SPEAKER_03 47:39

And they'd identify certain of these theological things as like barriers to cooperation. Right. And so then really pick on them in in their own way create division around those things. Right.

SPEAKER_02 47:48

And there's different theories too that are starting to emerge about kind of interaction between Christians and the larger culture as well and that's really changing post-World War II with what is the role of the Christian. And I think for post-World War I, especially the fundamentalists, like I think of John Roach Strayton, right, in New York um who if the kind of idea that fundamentalists are fuddy duddies who are opposed to dancing and cards and all of that, um which I think is is kind of a a legacy that's still around um that's absolutely coming from where he centered himself, right? In in New York was very anti like he was a culture warrior before that was a thing. And some of his his pieces are really interesting because he saw feminism as being a a big problem, right? So he was opposed to the new woman that was emerging in the 1920s. He thought he had a long essay on how women were replacing babies with small dogs. So he would sometimes rant about the presence of small dogs on New York streets and that it was you know women that are putting all of their energy into their pets instead of their children, which is interesting when I I see that kind of argument repeated again a hundred years later. So yes. But he also had a radio empire. He was very well known he also debated a lot and that's another component of fundamentalists is that they were willing and often wanted that kind of attention of we're different, we're separate, here's what we offer. And so I think that that's also going on in that kind of as far as where they're aligning themselves with culture is it is opposed to it, right?

SPEAKER_04 49:24

They are fighting the interesting thing though is I think that for Stratton for I think this is true of Mark Matthews this fundamentalist in Seattle I'd have to go look TT Shields was in Toronto. These urban fundamentalists were also very engaged in what today we might call like social justice kind of they wouldn't have liked that term because it was too close to the social gospel you know but without going into a kind of social gospel where you know the gospel is just serving others and helping the poor and so forth they had like robust ministries like urban ministries, homeless ministries, a lot of these shelters I'm thinking of like Meltrotter and Grand Rapids and what was the big one? I'm blanking on the the there was another big one in several cities that were dealing with urban problems, the problems of industrialization as well.

SPEAKER_03 50:17

Sometimes we forget about that aspect uh at least among the urban fundamentalists they were very engaged in this the another one would be uh William Bell Riley and William Bell Riley yeah First Baptist Minneapolis yeah I mean a lot of the people we've mentioned over the last time we've been talking are actually urban based this would be one of the other sort of maybe myths that comes out of the Scopes trial and other things that fundamentalism was really like a sort of rural uneducated uh movement. It was actually again it was in the north and then it was driven a lot by the urban areas. And um yeah these churches are you know the closest thing to a megachurch at that time they were they often had thousands and thousands of members they had schools they had shelters different ministries and charities involved and that was a big part of it. I think that that goes to something we haven't talked about yet but it's one of the things that historians debate a bit about with fundamentalism which is is it really right to pit fundamentalism against modernism? If we mean modernism not in a theological sense which is there's a certain movement called modernist theology that they're opposed to but in terms of are fundamentalists actually anti-modern in how they understand the world? And I think you you can see in certain things like their views on feminism where you could say if feminism is modern then they're opposed to it. But in other ways they are some of the most modern people in American society at the time they're embracing new technology as quickly as they can including radio and then television. They're embracing you know print culture as much as anyone in American the society. There's so many pamphlets and sermons and and uh publishers that are fundamentalist in origin. And then there's an even deeper philosophical sense Meg you talked about them wanting to debate there's a deep optimism at the heart of fundamentalism that like good ideas will win out if you can sort of like get your argument across and convince someone they think science is on their side so we we often portray them as anti-science because they're opposed to evolution or whatever but in their own way of understanding it that's bad science and good science would prove the Bible right. This also gets to the way that many fundamentalists read the Bible as as literal and they understood that to be the more the the way where you could extract data from the Bible like sort of propositional truth about the world and who God is. And this is a very you could say modern way of reading the Bible that they tended to I'm thinking more of the dispensationalists or the Baptists but they they tended to not like allegories or metaphors in the Bible because they thought those were not factual um they couldn't lead to sort of inductive reasoning about what was out what was really in the world. And so they they preferred literal readings and this includes Genesis one where they said if it says six days and you know God rested on the seventh, that means six 24 hour cycles around you know the rotations of the of the earth whereas you know throughout church history throughout history of Christianity there've been all types of takes on what a day meant in Genesis one. But for these fundamentalists it was very much about a sort of very modern way of reading the Bible that would actually produce empirical sort of proof that the Bible was true in a very on the terms of you could say the scientists or the scholars. So in that sense you could say fundamentalism is actually quite modern. And this is something that the fundamentalisms project that John mentioned at University of Chicago that produced all these volumes on all types of fundamentalism, they actually had that as one of their ongoing conversation pieces was it's not just Christian fundamentalism, it's in Islamic fundamentalism and other phenomena as well that there's actually these ways that fundamentalists are really, you don't get fundamentalism without modernity in some sense. Like it's it's both a reaction to it and also an expression of some of the core values of modern society. Anyway that that's that's another sort of thing to throw in the mix is we can talk about them being anti-modern in certain ways, but then in other ways it doesn't really make sense to talk about people who are basically the first to in the 1970s adopt satellites as ways to communicate their television like that that sounds very modern to us, almost naively modern in a way like they they think that like any technology they embrace can just help them expand their reach.

SPEAKER_04 54:39

We need to somehow square that with their opposition to other things we define as modern but yeah the the the sort of you know the Baconianism the inductivism that you describe is is where I think they get this sense of certainty, right? Like science, interestingly enough the early fundamentalists did believe in science was on their side you know wasn't the devil or you know some kind of you know some kind of uh uh fake stuff that people say during pandemics you know I mean they did believe that they did believe that something you know and they that's why they had this sense of certainty because they did apply this scientific method to their to their reading of scripture. Now of course they the one major difference that they had with uh modernity was their view of history right you know how history was moving you know progress only went so far right there was this kind of eschatological this kind of T loss towards God's return whether you're in pre-mil, omil, right, God was coming back and wrapping it all up. So they they did kind of when push came to shove they didn't believe it enlightenment progress you know that you know we can cheat death or you know with science or those kinds of things. But yeah I think you're right Dan about that. That's an interesting observation.

SPEAKER_03 55:49

There's one more thing I can say on the on that front there there's a talking about the scopes trial whether or not the sort like exactly what happened is less important uh for the moment than it was a real big PR hit for fundamentalism at the time and since it's been sort of it's sort of crystallized a stereotype and there's an anthropologist named Susan Harding who's written a lot on fundamentalism and she really makes a lot about how scopes in particular becomes this touch point for basically observers of fundamentalism for the rest of the century as the essence of fundamentalism. It's it's sort of ignorance and world culture and uh anti-modernity and all that kind of stuff. And in a provocative way she she says you know fundamentalists in American culture are the internally orientalized other that's a big phrase but she's talking about this idea of orientalism which is often applied when Western people look at other parts of the world and see them as in need of civilization or in need of more complex ideas or in some senses don't think those places have histories like places in the West do. And so she's taking that idea and saying actually that's something that has happened to fundamentalists often when you think about how some scholars have treated fundamentalism. She has the example of like the New York Times when the New York Times covered had up to when she ever she was writing this how they covered fundamentalism it was very you know sort of shallow and like this group of people just sort of has bizarre ideas and they never change um and they're sort of a problem like like they're a problem to be solved. And Harding is not a fundamentalist herself she's a uh I don't even know if she's a Christian but she's a very practic she was a practicing uh anthropologist and I thought it was an interesting insight because it it it goes to some of the ways that even I probably the three of us when we're reading fundamentalist sources or thinking about fundamentalists it's often very hard to sort of keep the the full scope of their their their sense of the world we can reduce it really quickly to all types of things that seem really bizarre to us. But it's incumbent upon historians if no one else to sort of do our best to try to get at what were the motives that they understood them, even if we don't think they were the right motives or even the actual motives that were driving them. What did they think they were doing what did it mean to them and sort of work from there to try to talk about them.

SPEAKER_02 58:08

And I think it just going back to why it is that we have that sort of in our cultural memory there's a lot of reasons that the Scopes trial went poorly for the fundamentalists. It was I think the first nationally broadcast trial is that is it was WGN Chicago. Yeah so it was it was I mean everyone was listening to it so that's a big thing. And so William Jennings Bryan's inability to kind of defend his main point well went poorly not just in that courtroom but in homes across the country. But there's also H.L. Mencken um who was a very well known satirist and writer who did not like the fundamentalists.

SPEAKER_04 58:45

I mean he called them the homoboobians right was I think the quote drop an egg out a Pullman window and you will hit a fundamentalist anywhere in America or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 58:54

I used to have that quote that much he's someone who was very much so characterizing it as a rural phenomenon. Like he saw that as being part of like this is rural America this is urban versus rural and so he mischaracterized it and then that kind of became the story. And also there was a the history I think it's called an informal history Frederick Louis Allen's only yesterday which was an informal history of the 1920s that was written in the 30s and that also became a really like oh this is what happened and Inherit the wind which you mentioned before yeah yep which is really a little bit more about the red scare um than it is about the scopes trial but it became the way that people taught the scopes trial I mean up until when I was student teaching one of those the teachers was like oh we'll just watch inherent the wind and and have the students talk about it. And I was like I don't I don't think that seems quite right. That that's not that'll meet the that'll meet the uh the the standard exactly right and so it's a great piece of historical evidence for the way that the trial was remembered not necessarily what happened I think one of the things that is really important for kind of shaping it and again this connects with the way that fundamentalists were reacting to the post-World War I world is the way that fear for children played a part in the scopes trial. And I think that's very much so underplayed. So one of the things that is a connection is that the scopes trial was the year after the Leopold Lowe trial in Chicago where you have two young men who murdered a younger kid in their school who's only 13 basically based on Nietzschean philosophy because they thought they could. And that sort of like Nietzschean philosophy that connection with German ideas that idea that the intellectual corruption is going to lead to disaffected youth who might then become murderers. And Clarence Darrow was actually their lawyer. He got them off the death penalty they were convicted and one died in prison and one spent most of his life in prison. But his argument in that case was that it's because they had been corrupted by bad ideas. And then he's the one who comes to defend John T. Scopes in the Scopes trial and it was the perfect opportunity for William Jennings Bryan who wanted to point out that evolutionary teaching is I mean not to say that they didn't think that evolution was incorrect science was cited as one of the three triangles in Satan's triangle and S.J. Bowl's piece in the King's Business, the other two being philosophy and criticism. Bull was a professor of biology at Wheaton at the time, mid-1920s, um so at the exact same time a couple months after the scopes trial. But they also think that it's going to be one of those things that corrupts an entire generation and turns their kids into murderers. And that was going to be part of William Jennings Bryan's closing statement actually that then is published in the New York Times after the trial is over and Brian dies. And so there's a a different thread there that I think sometimes people lose sight of when they think oh this was just this ridiculous like fear of the modern in the sense that they don't want science taught well. They actually had some real reasons for being concerned about what science was going to do to the generation. And again in the context of World War I where you have and literary scholars have traced this really well you have this disillusionment of an entire generation of very enlightened thinkers that there's a way that that impacted the kind of average American as well which is that maybe we got things wrong in teaching how we are responsible for other people in society. And that evolutionary debate was part of that as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:41

So then there's there's the argument I've also heard related to this of Jennings Bryan as a you mentioned him before Maggie as like a really unusual fundamentalist. I mean he's he was a populist he's a populist he's really known for challenging the you know the famous uh cross of gold speech right where we're being crucified in a cross of gold challenging the monetization system he wants to monetize silver so that ordinary farmers in the Midwest and elsewhere can can benefit financially economically right in this sense he's a sort of man of the left we would call him today in some ways but I think he really also sees Darwinism especially social Darwinism as a way that will eventually leave behind his people you know the survival of the fittest right many kind of poor farmers that voted for him you know he ran for president four times and four, right? Three, four three three and lost all three times. You know, but these kinds of people who who vote for him, you know, they're in the bottom rungs of society. They can't rise up without say government's help. And if you're going to embrace a kind of survival of the fittest, they'll always be on the lower rung and that's what Darwinism, at least in the social way, represents. So I think that's another angle you know that he's coming at at this you know in a way that maybe like another fundamentalist might not come at it that way. But I think it you have to connect his economic populism with his critique of evolution.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:10

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:10

There's a complexity to their arguments that I think is really fun to dig into and as opposed to just it's still the anti-intellectual looking local yokels rural farmers the fundamentalists, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:21

William Jennings Bryan was also a pacifist, which I think is really interesting post-World War I. Yeah as Wilson's Secretary of State he stepped down right yeah he was like I don't think we should go to war and he left his office as a result of it. So yeah he was he was an interesting character.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:36

Yeah that's one of those interesting Brian doesn't necessarily represent other fundamentalists on this but one of the differences between World War I and World War II for fundamentalists was there's actually during World War I we mentioned sort of they connected German theology with German aggression um in World War I. Well they were being critiqued by the modernists the people at University of Chicago and elsewhere as being insufficiently patriotic during the war. During the war because they were you know seeing the war as a fulfillment of prophecy and something that really the U.S. couldn't change. And so they actually I'm thinking here of like Ruben Torrey at Biola and they had a magazine called The King's Business that wrote a lot about World War I, but it was from this very skeptical angle about what was happening and then also a concern about the centralization of power in the U.S. due to the war um and historians talk about World War I and World War II being these not just massive foreign policy episodes but also like re remade American society because of the way that the federal government was able to centralize and empower different parts of society. So fundamentalists were very skeptical of that and actually received a lot of criticism from other Christians. World War II is a different story where fundamentalists and evangelical sort of the the new evangelicals really do identify with the American cause in that war. And they they see coming out of that war, they see the US as a force For good in the world, as representing Christian values, as really needing to turn quickly to fight against communism in the Cold War. And so you have a very different orientation to the state and to politics after World War II, where fundamentalists are very pro-America in a way that would have been surprising to the people right after World War I or during World War I, where there was a much more circumspect uh approach to the state. And even through the 1930s, fundamentalists were very skeptical of FDR, of the New Deal, which might be consistent. Fundamentals have tended to be sort of small government people all the way through. But they were even skeptical of FDR's foreign policy. They thought he was getting too involved with trying to support Britain in the late 1930s and stuff like that. But you really see in the late by a decade later in the late 1940s, fundamentals retain their social conservatism and their political conservatism, but they're very much bought into the idea of American power needs to be projected to advance religious freedom, to advance democracy, to oppose communism. And they really see that as part of the exceptionalism that America brings, that this is actually sort of God's role for the United States. So you get people like Carl McIntyre who are saying that. You get evangelicals like Billy Graham, who certainly in his early career was very much about that, and a lot of people in between who are who are who are making a same version of that case.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:23

During World War I, as you mentioned, Dan, it was the Protestant liberals, the modernists, right, who were the, as you said, the Patriots, really hawks. They wanted to spread democracy because they believed that the spreading of liberal values and democracy around the world, they had an eschatology of their own, right? Would usher in, you know, or lead to some kind of millennial kingdom, right? Whether it be a millennial, kind of on this earth or however they they viewed it. Wilson was one of their own.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:50

I mean, he he was a progressive Protestant.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:53

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. And Wilson was their hero. Right. You know, but then it also you also had it's complicated because you also had, like, I remember reading uh biographies of Billy Sunday, you know, where where Billy Sunday would get on the floor of Congress and you know, they'd ask him to pray before the meeting of the Senate or something, and he'd pray, you know, we pray God that you would crush the German Kaiser whose fangs drip with blood and gore, you know, these graphic uh anti-German kind of and the premillennialists, right? Um, another way of getting at what you said is, Dan, is you know, why spread democracy, right? If the world's all gonna wrap up pretty soon anyway, if Jesus is coming, what do we have to spread democracy and liberal values around the world for, right? We just wait for the kingdom. So it's so interesting seeing the the way change over time happens with these kind of conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists in the 20th century.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:42

And one way that that manifests too, this kind of debate over what is Christianity's role globally, was on missions boards. Um, and I think that's another big component of debate and what's going on with the split between modernists and fundamentalists within evangelicalism is that there are these boards that control missions. And a lot of fundamentalists in their concern over modernist theology coming into their denominations was that missionaries were going abroad to spread the gospel, but they didn't believe in it anymore.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:17

This was the big issue in the PCUSA. Who was the missionary? Uh the modernist missionary. She was a woman who they use always used as an example of liberal pro buck. Pearl buck. And that was one of the reasons why Machin left. Matter of fact, you could argue it was the biggest reason why he left the PC USA and formed the Westminster group.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:40

Yeah, so fundamentalists, I mean, and certainly were for spreading the gospel. They always had a kind of global perspective in some ways, but definitely split with their more liberal counterparts where it wasn't just the gospel that was supposed to be moving through the world through their agents. Okay, so I think one final thing that I think will probably lead us to future conversations is that um the relationship between fundamentalism and politics is always there. Yeah, right. Like they're like Norris, we brought up earlier in Texas, he's also one of the reasons why Texas voted against the Democratic Party for the first time after the Civil War, because of his campaign against Al Smith, who was a Catholic. Um and so uh they they are out there and they're activists, Carl McIntyre and his anti-communism. Um, there's a historical argument out there that he was perhaps a sort of early Christian right guy, like he was trying to get more and more political influence for um like actual literal political influence.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:45

I think he bridged like what Leah Robuffo has called the old Christian right and the new Christian right. You know, there's a few figures like that. Who's the other guy? Billy Billy Hart Billy James Hargis or Billy James Hargis. Billy James Hargis, and there were a few others who served as that bridge. So it it it goes against the whole kind of like 1925, they disappeared, and then oh, they came back in, you know, 1979 when Jerry Forwell started uh the moral majority. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:11

Yeah. And so I think that's sort of the one thing that I if we could kind of comment on that, like if there's one thing to remember about fundamentalism. Um, for me, the big thing to remember is that they did change dramatically over time throughout the 20th century, um, and that they should be taken intellectually a little more seriously than kind of what popular culture has remembered them as. Um, and they were an extraordinarily diverse group, um, even though when we look at the way they define themselves, it's very purist. Like you can boil us down to like just these simple things. But in fact, those simple things were just different enough to make for a great variety amongst the movement. So is there anything that you would like to add to how we should sort of be thinking about fundamentalism and its role in evangelicalism in the 20th century?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:58

If I were just to impart something, it'd probably be two things, and they're a little different directions. But one is to go with your comment, Meggie, that they changed over time, is it's really important to understand the wider culture within which fundamentalists have operated because they're part of that culture. So it's really important what's happening in economic history and cultural history to understand why fundamentalists sort of reacted the way they did and why they formed. Theology might have been at the heart of it and it might have been the thing that really rallied them, but it's really important to they didn't just emerge out of nowhere. It was an early 20th century situation. And it was about the ideas, it was about philosophy and criticism and evolution, but it was also about American culture and American society. We talked about the urban context within which a lot of early fundamentalist leaders came out of. So that's one thing is just like they're part of the culture, they're not separate from it. But then the other is I think to understand why fundamentalists do what they do as a community, it's far more important to understand how they're relating to each other than to modernists. If we if we put up this sort of big divide between modernists and fundamentalists, and we see this as like two teams and they're fighting each other. It's like that's not how it happened. Like they, for large stretches, they barely interacted, particularly after the 1920s. They separate, the fundamentalists create their own parallel institutions, and then the story is really about how those the fate of those parallel institutions more than it is how they're taking back the culture or not from the modernists. That comes about over time, but I found it far more fruitful to understand how fundamentalists are basically, once they separate, are really animated by the fate of their own movement. And they they might tie up the fate of that movement into the fate of America or into the fate of the church in America or something like that. But what they often really mean by that is the part of the culture that they see as theirs, that they feel that they have some type of stewarding role over. And these did these divisions between northern and southern fundamentalists, between more confessional Presbyterian type fundamentalists and more revivalistic type fundamentalists, between dispensationalists and non-dispensationalists, these to me seem to be like really significant fault lines that we can often miss if we just frame it in this much bigger sense of well, there's fundamentalists on this side and um there are opponents uh on the other side. So paying attention to those details and those divisions within is often really important. I liken it sometimes to how historians talk about communism. And there's a way to talk about communism, which is it's communism against the free world. And but if you study communism, you know it's actually really important if you're a Maoist or a Stalinist or a Trotskyite, these like different factions within communism. In fact, a lot of the drama is the fighting between them, is actually what's occupying most of their energy. And I think there's a there's a comparable thing happening in fundamentalism for a lot of the 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:06

As this episode comes to a close, one theme stands out: the tension between theological and historical approaches to evangelicalism. Theological perspectives emphasize clear definitions and belief, while historical approaches focus more on context, lived experience, and cultural forces. Yet belief remains central. Evangelicalism has long been driven by what people hold to be true. That tension also creates practical challenges. If theological definitions are applied, how should they be used in historical work? Who is included and how might those boundaries reshape the narrative? Ultimately, and historically, evangelicalism has resisted fixed boundaries. Its fluidity has been frustrating, but it is also what makes the movement so dynamic and so worth studying today. This concludes our three-episode overview of the definition of American evangelicalism. We look forward to the journey ahead as we unpack the history of the American Evangelical Movement together. Thanks so much for listening to American Evangelicals, a history podcast. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's next. And if this episode sparked your curiosity, consider sharing it with someone who wants a deeper, more nuanced understanding of evangelical history. Until next time, thanks for listening.