It is also notable that the Wichita editorialist’s language and arguments demonstrated remarkable alignment with the sentiments being concurrently expressed by white fundamentalists. Less than two months after the publication of this Negro Star editorial, the fundamentalist contingent of the Northern Baptist Convention (a predominantly white denomination) sent a letter to their convention pressing for the denomination to adopt a stringently conservative statement of faith. The similarity in language between the January 1924 editorial and the March 1924 letter reveal a commonality of concerns between fundamentalist partisans across racial lines. Whereas the Wichita editorialist warned about the “insinuating forward movement of modernism,” the Northern Baptist fundamentalists sounded the alarm about “the subtle and disastrous inroads of modernism”; while the Negro Star writer urged “a hurried beating back to the path of the Fathers,” the white Baptists pressed the need “to restate, re-emphasize, and reaffirm the historic faith of Baptists”; and just as the Wichita author highlighted the necessity of “regeneration” and “a fully consecrated ministry prepared in heart by the Holy Spirit” to combat the modernist threat, the Northern Baptists likewise argued that this task centrally involved not only doctrinal principles such as biblical inerrancy and Christ’s deity, but also a recognition of “the power and sufficiency of the gospel to produce under the operation of the Holy Spirit that regeneration necessary to the salvation and to the spiritual life of our fellow-men.”38 For pro-fundamentalist contingents on both sides of the color line, the supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit—operating in both the regeneration of individual hearts and the spiritual maturation of the church as a whole—stood as a significant bulwark in their resistance to modernist incursions. In this respect, the supernaturalism that newspaper articles like the Negro Star editorial evoked by associating fundamentalism with “old time” religion, including doctrines such as supernatural regeneration, reflected wider currents of fundamentalist thought that stretched across denominational (and even racial) lines.
Similar sentiments found expression in other African American denominational contexts as well. James M. Nabrit, a National Baptist and the fourth president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary, overtly warned against “liberalism in religion” as one of the greatest “foes” facing black ministers due to liberals’ rejection of “old-fashioned regeneration and spiritual power” in favor of naturalistic ideas of “morality, human goodness and mere culture.”39 The old-time religion once again was linked with both an explicit rejection of modernist theology and an express embrace of such supernaturalistic concepts as the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. This work of the Spirit was connected in turn with the idea of a type of “spiritual power” that lay well beyond the reach of modernists and liberals. Combatting the modernist threat, it seemed, entailed a direct reliance on the supernatural power of the triune God—an idea encapsulated in the appellation of “old-time” or “old-fashioned” religion.
Even the disparaging comments of modernists and religious skeptics pertaining to fundamentalism’s “age-old fetishes” and its stark opposition to modern science indicate that the “old-time religion” was characterized by a belief in the penetration of the supernatural realm into the natural world. In 1930 the New York Amsterdam News saw fit to inform its black readers of a mass meeting featuring an assortment of white speakers, but held by the black Hubert Harrison Memorial Church, intended to advance the position that the tenets of “fundamentalism,” “orthodox Christianity,” and “the old-time religion” (all three terms seemingly used interchangeably) were outdated and antithetical to the modern world. “The spiritual, ‘Old-Time Religion’ is a delightful song,” one Unitarian minister at this meeting argued, “but the idea is intellectually fallacious. Why should a religion that was good enough for Moses be good enough for us?” The teachings of the fundamentalists, he argued, brooked “no reconciliation [with] the known facts of science,” and all the speakers agreed that Christianity must rid itself of its “age-old fetishes” in favor of the “freedom and recognition of science.”40 From this point of view, the “Old-Time Religion” of the fundamentalist was irreconcilably at odds with modernity because it entailed supernaturalist presuppositions that necessarily conflicted with modern science, thus relegating old-time religious fundamentalism to the realm of mere superstitious fetishism.
In addition to connoting a broadly supernaturalist worldview, the “old-time religion” label was also at times applied to black fundamentalism as a means of conveying a perceived continuity with religious traditions of the past. For one AME minister, Bishop Heard, it entailed doctrinal faithfulness to the historical beliefs of the AME Church and by association also to the racial heritage represented by the denomination’s revered founder—renowned preacher, uncompromising abolitionist, bold political activist, and lifelong racial justice advocate Richard Allen.41 The Atlanta Daily World reported that the bishop “made a plea for the church to make a return to fundamentalism as laid down by the founder, Richard Allen, in other words return to the ‘old time religion.’” Just as this report seems to indicate that Heard himself associated his fundamentalism with a harkening back to historical tradition, so the Daily World’s reporter associated Heard in much more opprobrious terms with “obsolete ideas” and a dangerously backward-looking intolerance for new doctrines that were being “laid down by young men.”42 Though the relative value ascribed to such a backward-gazing position differed radically from Bishop Heard to his Daily World critic, it is notable that both men recognized continuity with historical tradition to be essential to Heard’s promotion of “old time” fundamentalist religion. Similarly, a short 1925 column in the Cleveland Gazette lamented the lack of “middle-ground” in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy; in doing so, the Gazette painted fundamentalism as, among other things, “old-timeism,” which was seen as “conservative” and “reactionary” and clearly presented fundamentalists, whether white or black, as people tied to—and usually actively looking to—the past.43 Such an orientation of looking for continuity with past church tradition as a justification for their current theological convictions was often shared by both black and white fundamentalists in their defenses of what they understood to be the long, historically orthodox faith tradition that subsisted through all ages—what the Epistle of Jude termed “the faith once delivered to the saints.”
The broad supernaturalism and traditionalism associated with the appellation of “old-time religion” carried along other particular theological associations as well. Among such common traits ascribed to African American fundamentalists, noted and attested by partisans from both sides of the fundamentalist-modernist conflict, was the conviction that the Bible, as the inspired word of God, ought to be interpreted “literally.”44 Unsurprisingly, a propensity for anti-evolutionism also stemmed from the literal understanding of the universe’s divine creation as described in the opening chapters of Genesis.45 Literalism, belief in special divine creation, and anti-evolution attitudes thus all hung together as a major component of the black fundamentalist