Even when the fundamentalist perspective was not directly tied to the South or the Klan, it was often disparaged by opponents as being tightly intertwined with historic racism. In a rhetorical strategy that was not entirely uncommon, Ernest Rice McKinney pointed his readers back to the days of antebellum America, arguing that “it was the heterodox who destroyed slavery in America and England. The Orthodox Fundamentalists wanted slavery to continue.”71 Likewise, in 1926 a Norfolk reporter, having already expressly associated fundamentalism with religious intolerance, concluded that “intolerance and race prejudice sleep in the same bed and are all but indistinguishable.”72 At the close of the decade such religious “fundamentalism,” still largely associated with conservative clerics in the South, continued to be criticized in outlets such as the Chicago Defender as “sectional bigotry opposed to human freedom and adult conscience.”73
Outspoken proponents of fundamentalism within the black community were not exempt from attacks. These old-time religionists were at times accused of holding back the entire African American race. Ernest Rice McKinney, as discussed earlier, railed against the ubiquity within the black community of fundamentalists who worked to “keep us poor, ignorant and weak.” For McKinney, the hope for the race rested in the idea that “some day, we will revolt [against fundamentalist clergy] and then someone will have to get another job or starve.”74 In this brief column, responsibility for the race’s poverty, ignorance, and political weakness was laid largely at the feet of a single group: black fundamentalist clergy. Other writers even went so far as to identify particular religious teachings that were holding the race back. Edward Arbor, writing for the April 1935 issue of the Crisis, was quoted as saying that “being guided by such principles that make one love one’s neighbor, turn the other cheek and ‘take it to the Lord in prayer,’ avails little when opposition is found in masked men with shotguns, closed factory doors, and farmland without seeds to plant.” As multiple news outlets picked up this story, they noted that Arbor contended that racial progress was undermined by the “fundamentalist teachings” of some black preachers in the South who “consigned to hell” militant racial activists.75 That such declamations awaited those who permitted (or were even perceived as permitting) their religious convictions to stand in the way of racial progress and racial solidarity might easily have served as motivation for fundamentalist black Christians to prioritize their racial struggles and racial applications of their conservative doctrine.
A second widespread perception that may have helped motivate black fundamentalists to devote more energy to progressive racial causes than conservative cultural wars was the idea prevalent among many black Christians that true religion required right social action, not merely right theology.76 This theme reverberated all through the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the trendsetting, socially minded Chicago Defender. In December 1923, for instance, popular columnist Roscoe Simmons sardonically observed, “Maybe the Modernists and Fundamentalists arguing about creeds will stumble upon true religion. . . . They may not be much on Christianity, but they are up on theology.” Simmons was convinced that upright social conduct was the essence of “true religion,” which seemed beyond the theologically minded disputants, as evinced by his biting critique: “Suppose they fought sin half as hard as they fight among themselves over creed. This would be a pleasant world, would it not?” Social action, here represented as “fighting sin,” took clear precedence in Simmons’s mind over doctrinal disputations. He resumed the same drumbeat two weeks later, imagining that “looking down from heaven Jesus will say: ‘Look at my children, fighting over faith, when they know that faith without works is as ships without water.’” Without question, social action easily trumped theological considerations in Simmons’s evaluation of “true religion,” as he drew upon the poetry of nineteenth-century Englishman Roden Noel to drive home his point: “What if men take to FOLLOWING where He leads, / Weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds?” Simmons continued on this track in the months that followed, drawing support for his position particularly from John 14:15: “If you love me, keep my commandments.”77
Simmons and the Defender were by no means alone in promoting an emphasis on upright social action. Other figures across the spectrum—from defenders of fundamentalism to its skeptics and critics—likewise saw this as an imperative. As discussed earlier, on the fundamentalist side of things L. K. Williams, president of the NBC, determined in 1928 to travel through the country “to promote the interests of the Negro race through the Baptist denomination” even as he was undertaking an affirmation and defense of fundamentalism. Whereas Roscoe Simmons might have looked askance at this abiding theological emphasis, Williams saw no contradiction. His theological convictions in this context were joined closely with social action designed to advance racial interests, and his concept of upright social conduct was closely connected with explicitly racial concerns.78
Yet even while Williams saw social action and racial advancement as congruent with his theological fundamentalism, other ministers, such as Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pressed for racial interests from a position much more skeptical of fundamentalist proclivities. As the famous minister of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Powell was, in the words of historian Wallace Best, “one of the earliest African American exponents of the Social Gospel” and one of Harlem’s “chief exemplars of theological modernism.”79 From this position of notoriety, Powell warned in the pages of the New York Amsterdam News that the institutional church was collapsing due to its failure to speak out against “present day Philistines” afflicting the land: “the profit system, intolerance, selfishness, racketeering, exploitation, race hatred, mob violence, unbrotherliness, and every form of injustice.” He concluded morosely that “the preachers are feeding the people on fundamentalism and religious traditions instead of telling them how to get food and fundamental human rights.”80 Where Williams saw a congruity between fundamentalist religion and racial progress, Powell saw a disjunction. Clearly Powell believed that practical solutions to social problems—namely, food and human rights—not the exposition of the theological content of “religious traditions,” ought to be foundational to the church’s faith and practice. Likewise J. Raymond Henderson, a Baptist minister in Atlanta, chastised the “great many folk who are gluttons for what they believe to be fundamentals” yet who possessed merely a “convenient faith” that remained aloof of politics. In reality, Henderson argued, true religion dictates that “the church cannot stay out of politics and be true to its mission.”81 True Christianity, it seemed to many in the black community, was just as dependent (if not more so) on right social conduct in the arena of racial justice as it was on creedal specifics.
At times the premium placed on racial militancy was even more obvious, as in the Chicago Defender piece by George A. Singleton in October 1927, which argued that African Americans needed a new type of religion: “The form of Christianity that is generally embraced by the Negro group makes them servile. The type of religion needed by the black man is militantly aggressive. . . . A religion that makes for manhood, group cohesiveness, solidarity, racial self-esteem, brotherhood, shot through with the very life of Jesus is the religion worth having.”82 The purpose of African American religion, in Singleton’s mind, was to advance the interests of the race, replacing servility with racial militancy, racial solidarity, and racial self-esteem. Indeed, in the context of Jim Crow, the notion of social