Black Fundamentalists. Daniel R. Bare

was making a name for itself as a major force in the American religious landscape, the theological convictions underlying fundamentalism straddled the color line to the extent that some African Americans began to publicly self-identify as fundamentalists and to discuss the importance of “the fundamentals” to the black community. Yet despite this reality, these black actors are for the most part noticeably absent from the historical accountings of fundamentalism, and in turn fundamentalism rarely engenders much discussion in the realm of African American religious history. The story of fundamentalism has thus often become the story of white institutional leaders who take on Brobdingnagian proportions—men such as Minnesota Baptist pastor William Bell Riley, founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, or sensationalist Texas Baptist firebrand J. Frank Norris, whose dominance in the narrative implicitly paints fundamentalism as a pugilistic white enterprise confined to white social circles. For instance, historian David Harrington Watt’s evaluation of the demography of interwar-era fundamentalism concludes that it was essentially restricted to “native-born white Americans,” while noted sociologist Nancy Ammerman suggests that the term “fundamentalism” itself is broadly inapplicable to the black community both historically and in the present, because “although they share many beliefs with other evangelicals, those beliefs function quite differently in their very different social world” in which black religion offers “a racially based separation in which church and community are bound tightly together.”7 Here again arises the persistent question of racial differentiation in the midst of substantial doctrinal alignment.

      Yet, what of those black conservative Protestants who did explicitly name themselves fundamentalists, or who undertook a traditionalist defense of the fundamentals? This is the driving question that this book aims to explore. It argues that there were indeed fundamentalists among African American Protestants who not only claimed the title for themselves but also aligned with the theological heartbeat of fundamentalism. In making this case, I especially emphasize the series of ninety articles, compiled and widely distributed between 1910 and 1915, which comprised the theological work from which the movement eventually gained its name—The Fundamentals. Sometimes referred to as the sourcebook of fundamentalist theology, The Fundamentals represents an early, forthright, and centralized source for fundamentalist doctrinal expression. Comparing the writings and sermons of certain black authors and ministers with the language and arguments of these articles offers one fruitful avenue for exploring and demonstrating fundamentalist convictions and identity across racial lines. The completion of The Fundamentals also provides a starting date for this study at 1915, the year in which the final articles of the series were published. Hence, the periodization from 1915 to 1940 discussed in this book stretches from the publication of The Fundamentals through the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the 1920s and 1930s, leading up to the emergence of the neo-evangelical movement in the 1940s.8

      But beyond simply chronicling the existence of black fundamentalists, this book further argues that black fundamentalists displayed a type of social engagement markedly different from that typically associated with fundamentalism. Rather than spending the majority of their time and energy on fighting against the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools and similar issues, black fundamentalists advocated social action and religious application that emphasized racial equality, justice for all people regardless of skin color, and the social advancement of the African American community from marginalized minority to full participants in American citizenship. Black fundamentalism was thus not a mere carbon copy of white fundamentalism superimposed onto black churches. Even considering the substantial congruence of theological conviction and exegetical argumentation across the color line that we will examine in this book, black fundamentalism nonetheless represented an internal formulation and expression of religious thought and experience from within black church traditions. Especially as they addressed the topic of race, black fundamentalists applied their conservative religious beliefs in more progressive ways than did their white counterparts.9 This study of fundamentalism across the color line shows how religious expression is influenced by racial context, as well as how racial prejudice in society can obscure those very same dynamics.

      As much as this book challenges the traditional conceptualization of American Protestant fundamentalism, it also shows that theologically conservative religion offered an avenue for African Americans to address racism in ways that are often popularly associated with more theologically liberal (or even secular) traditions in the black community.10 Black fundamentalists managed to combine a traditional brand of theological fundamentalism with a race-conscious, progressive attitude toward social engagement—two perspectives that are usually considered to be profoundly disparate, if not mutually exclusive.11 This is not to say that the ideas or approaches of black fundamentalists were identical to those of their more theologically liberal or secular brothers and sisters in the African American community; like any social or political movement, the quest for black freedom evinced plenty of internal diversity. However, it is to say that they were engaged with the struggle for freedom, justice, and citizenship and that their racial context significantly influenced how they applied their religious convictions. These black fundamentalists of the early twentieth century would undoubtedly have empathized with Dwight McKissic’s frustration during the 2017 SBC annual meeting at the mystery of “how you can so easily affirm standard beliefs about other things, but we get to white supremacy . . . and all of a sudden, we’ve got a problem.”

      Despite the fact that numerous African Americans affirmed fundamentalism or identified explicitly as fundamentalists during the interwar period, the historiographies of fundamentalism and African American religion have, for the most part, failed to intersect. One recent book, Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s Doctrine and Race, marks a noteworthy exception to this trend, offering a much-needed consideration of the relationship between fundamentalism and the black community.12 She rightly notes that “historians of [fundamentalism] have not engaged fully with how fundamentalists understood race and race relations in general” and further points out that “the extent to which African Americans interacted with white fundamentalists . . . and with fundamentalist theories in general has also received scant attention.”13 Mathews argues that both whites and blacks racialized fundamentalism and modernism in ways that excluded the black community from direct involvement in the controversy—with white fundamentalists painting fundamentalism as an exclusively white movement and conservative black Protestants casting modernism as an essentially white problem.14 While she does devote substantial space to discussing some of the expressly theological aspects of fundamentalism, Mathews nevertheless excludes blacks from among the ranks of the fundamentalists, maintaining that (among other reasons) their willingness to entertain and employ certain racially progressive social ideologies and strategies, including a general emphasis on racial justice, precluded such an association or identification.15 African Americans, she contends, were positioned “outside the debate being held by white Protestants—both the fundamentalist/modernist debate and the debates among the fundamentalists themselves,” making black Protestants “free to interpret the Bible and current events without the restrictions of the debates that raged around them.”16 Hence, Mathews draws a consistent terminological distinction between “fundamentalists,” who were necessarily white, and “black Protestants” (or various parallel descriptors), who “declined to self-identify as fundamentalists.” In this vein, she argues that “African American Baptists and Methodists did not explicitly embrace or reject fundamentalism,” and that black Baptists and Methodists “would not side with modernism, but they could not live with fundamentalism either.”17

      Unfortunately, this perspective fails to fully account for not only the black Protestants who were overtly embracing the fundamentalist label in the 1920s and 1930s, but also the assertion coming from both proponents and opponents that fundamentalism was, for good or for ill, a widespread phenomenon in the black Protestant community. I argue, in accordance with Mathews, that black Protestants did often embrace various sorts of racially progressive applications and strategies that distinguished them from white fundamentalists, but in many cases they actually grounded these social positions in their fundamentalist theology and identity. Hence, the discrepancy in social application across the color line should not prompt us to dismiss black fundamentalists as inauthentic or even nonexistent. Rather, it should cause us to recognize that fundamentalist American Protestantism, considered from a historical-theological perspective, may have had