Much as Hankins examines J. Frank Norris’s rhetorical connection of the fundamentalists’ institutional fight against modernism with the fight to preserve the segregationist status quo, so historian William R. Glass’s Strangers in Zion likewise ties institutional fundamentalism in the South to segregationist ideals. Glass explains that it is helpful to view fundamentalism as an institutionalized “movement with a specific agenda,” rather than as “a set of [theological] beliefs.”25 For Glass, whose study centers on the development of fundamentalism in the American South, southern fundamentalism was essentially concerned with preserving the doctrinal fidelity of churches and denominations because the movement leaders saw their churches as the moral guardians of their culture and the organizing institutions of their communities; thus, the movement was in large part concerned not merely with doctrinal issues but with preserving the South’s social order. A significant part of that social order, of course, centered on race relations, and the prominence of Jim Crow loomed large as the fundamentalist movement was establishing its roots in the South. Consequently, aside from a passing reference or two to a minimal black presence at a few southern Bible conferences, Glass’s study includes African Americans only insofar as they appeared in white fundamentalist rhetoric. For example, Glass recounts how the fundamentalist opponents of the reunion of southern and northern denominations played on racial fears and prejudices to consolidate support for their cause, demanding that no consideration of reunion would be feasible unless the northerners provided “an explicit statement that the reunited denomination would maintain a policy of racial separation.”26 Thus it seems that Glass’s understanding of southern fundamentalism as “a movement with a specific agenda” rather than “a set of beliefs” limits the degree to which (and the roles in which) African Americans appear in the history of fundamentalism. Given that the movement is presented as one that sought in many respects to preserve the prevailing social and racial hierarchies of the South, African Americans are naturally excluded. There is no room for any conception of black fundamentalists within this particular vision of the “movement.”
Political scientist Michael Lienesch, setting his sights specifically on the anti-evolutionist portion of the fundamentalist phenomenon, argues that anti-evolutionists made similar use of racial prejudice by intimating that “acceptance of evolution would encourage racial equality and the eventual mixing of the races.”27 Lienesch goes further than Glass, however, in at least acknowledging some noticeable degree of black support for fundamentalist positions. He notes that black churches of the 1920s “tended to be theologically orthodox, and many of their ministers were biblical literalists who held strong dispensationalist sympathies,” and further points out that at the Scopes trial “large numbers of black believers rallied behind William Jennings Bryan.”28 Drawing chiefly on the work of historian Jeffrey Moran to argue that shared anti-evolution sentiments caused some black church leaders to ally with white fundamentalists, Lienesch concludes that “while African Americans remained on the outside of fundamentalism’s strictly segregated organizations, many . . . may have considered themselves to be fundamentalists.”29 In this brief statement, Lienesch appears to concur that a strictly institutional focus might obscure connections between fundamentalism and African American religion. Yet although it is commendable that he at least offers some degree of explicit consideration of black support for fundamentalist causes, it is also notable that Lienesch devotes less than one full page to the subject.
In addition to the conceptualization of fundamentalism as an institutionalized movement rather than as a set of particular doctrinal positions, the definitions used to identify the most central aspects of the fundamentalist perspective can likewise tend toward racial exclusion. Most notably, an emphasis on certain types of conservative cultural militancy permeates the historiography of the last several decades, thanks in large part to evangelical historian George Marsden’s seminal work Fundamentalism and American Culture. Marsden defines fundamentalism as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism” and posits that militant opposition to modernism, in both its theological and cultural expressions, was the single mark that “most clearly set off fundamentalism from a number of closely related traditions.”30 Marsden recognizes fundamentalism as a movement that, though largely driven by theological convictions, was most clearly defined by its fiercely oppositional attitudes toward not only modernist theology but also the social and cultural changes that fundamentalists associated with a modernist worldview. Fundamentalists, then, were not engaged merely in ecclesiastical battles for control over their denominations or spiritual battles for the salvation of souls; they necessarily also took part in protracted social and cultural confrontations designed to preserve the society’s status quo—perhaps most famously in the anti-evolution movement and the Scopes trial.31 Indeed, this brand of conservative cultural militancy is so prevalent in the literature as to be nearly axiomatic. And in fact there is little doubt that such cultural militancy was a key element of the formally institutionalized, white-dominated fundamentalist networks. Moreover, for the most visible and influential movement leaders militant cultural antimodernism was clearly a nonnegotiable priority, as when Baptist journalist Curtis Lee Laws, who coined the term “fundamentalist” in 1920, famously proposed “to do battle royal” against modernist foes.32
Apt as this emphasis may be in the context of fundamentalism’s institutional history or the study of major (white) movement leaders, a single-minded focus on this brand of cultural militancy can unfortunately also serve to obscure the presence of those African Americans who self-identified as fundamentalists or championed the theological convictions of fundamentalism, but whose political and social attention may have been occupied with social concerns that hit closer to home—issues such as segregation, racial violence, and unequal access to education and voting rights for black citizens. Consequently, such people receive little consideration in the prevailing historiography.33 For instance, in arguing that fundamentalism was in essence a “lily-white” undertaking, historian David Harrington Watt points to the fact that “few African Americans threw themselves fully into the fundamentalists’ campaign to keep evolution from being taught in the nation’s public schools.”34 For his part, George Marsden contends that “‘fundamentalist’ has seldom been a self-designation” for African Americans due to the movement’s segregationist heritage.35 Yet although it is unquestionably true, as William Glass demonstrates in Strangers in Zion, that many fundamentalist institutions (particularly in the South) have at times been intimately intertwined with segregation and racial prejudice, there nevertheless remain unexplored in the historical record any number of black figures who did in fact call themselves “fundamentalists” or who took up the pen or ascended to the pulpit to stridently defend “the fundamentals” and to decry the insidious threat of modernism. The ubiquitous emphasis in the historiography on anti-evolution activism and other similar forms of socially conservative cultural militancy serves to obscure the presence of self-identified black fundamentalists and to marginalize claims such as that of one Norfolk Journal and Guide editorialist who declared, within mere weeks of the famous Scopes trial, that “Afro-Americans are fundamentalists, for the most part.”36
This is not to say that the approaches outlined above—specifically the emphases on institutional networks or campaigns of conservative cultural militancy—are invalid or useless. On the contrary, these scholarly endeavors have shed enormous light on numerous elements and expressions of twentieth-century fundamentalism. It is merely to say that they are incomplete, because no single approach can adequately capture every facet of the topic—and the particular facet of black participation has remained heretofore largely unexplored. Thus, the approach that I offer here is not intended as a wholesale replacement or repudiation of the perspectives that have come before. However, this book does insist that there is a history of black fundamentalism, and that lifting new voices from the documentary record helps clarify a heretofore opaque chapter in the story of American fundamentalism.
In contrast to the earlier institutional or political approaches