It is important to note from the outset that this approach does not entail that the theological content of religious belief is the only meaningful analytical category, or that religious beliefs are entirely unrelated to other commitments. On the contrary, it is an undeniable fact that social circumstances and religious beliefs often inform and influence one another, especially in the essential sermonic (and also more generally religious) task of practically applying theological convictions to everyday life. In this vein we might profitably reflect on what evangelical scholar Mark Noll calls the “social history of theology.” Noll’s approach admits that theological developments and historical developments, far from being partitioned and compartmentalized, must be understood as mutually influential. Theological changes must be considered within their “ecclesiastical, social, political, intellectual, and commercial” contexts. Noll asserts that incorporating this contextual perspective on theological history is “especially useful for explaining why Christian belief evolved along different lines” in disparate social contexts (for Noll, the contexts were the Protestant United States and Protestant Europe).38 My analysis in this book reflects, in part, this “social history of theology” perspective. Recognizing that theological developments take place within the always complex, often knotty, and sometimes discomfiting realities of day-to-day life—rather than in some ethereal vacuum—is the very reason that the topic of “black fundamentalists” is meaningful at all. When we examine the fundamentalist ideas and impulses that manifested themselves in the African American community, social and political and intellectual context matters a great deal, especially in conjunction with the pervasive reality of racial context in American life. So, in line with Noll’s own evaluation of his method, my application of this approach helps to explain the similarities and differences in the evolution of a very particular type of Christian belief in disparate social contexts—in this case, specifically American racial contexts. In the chapters that follow, I argue that the different social and cultural circumstances facing the black and white communities often led to substantially different social actions and applications, even among those who would commonly agree on the most important fundamentalist doctrines.
At the same time, we must also be careful to ensure that the pendulum does not swing too far in the other direction. The theological convictions underlying “fundamentalist” thought (on either side of the racial divide) ought not be boiled down to mere expressions of underlying social, cultural, political, or economic ideological positions. Rather, these bedrock doctrinal convictions should be treated as significant and meaningful in themselves, as markers of legitimately deep-seated belief about the nature of reality and, in many cases, also markers of personal or corporate identity. The historical-theological approach in this book seeks to heed noted historian Albert Raboteau’s warning of the dangers that exist when historians fail to take seriously the theological content of religious belief. Reducing religion to “an epiphenomenon of economic or political ideology,” he cautions, demonstrates both “an inadequate grasp of religion and a simplistic understanding of history.”39 Moreover, the fact remains that many of the historical figures who appear in the following pages considered theology in general, and their own theological positions in particular, to be intrinsically meaningful in defining their identity, and therefore the historical-theological approach seeks to take these religious devotees seriously on their own terms.
One result of this commitment is that some space is devoted to nuanced aspects of doctrinal analysis and comparisons between religionists from across the racial spectrum. While social circumstances and social application unquestionably play a large role in the analysis, similarities and differences in doctrinal positions are also treated as important building blocks for constructing a religious identity. Consequently, while other treatments might focus largely on institutional statements and actions in defining and evaluating fundamentalism, this book utilizes the ninety articles of The Fundamentals as an important reference point for theological and exegetical analysis of fundamentalist theology. These collected essays offer a starting point for evaluating the doctrinal content of fundamentalist religious convictions as “fundamentalism” emerged as an identifiable part of American religious nomenclature from the mid-1910s forward.
Another corollary of this emphasis on religious and theological thinking as intrinsically meaningful is that it helps to illuminate the power of religious ideas to shape, drive, and interpret people’s actions and experiences in this world. In this respect, my examination of black fundamentalism intersects with the topic of black intellectual history. Historians Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, in their recent volume New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, point out that intellectual history not only studies how people of the past used “ideas and symbols . . . to make sense of the world” and “what [historical subjects] thought about what they were doing,” but also allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the world with which our historical subjects were grappling. Such examination “deepens our understanding of social and cultural history, forcing us to investigate the ideas that undergird political and social life and grapple with the theories and ideologies that inform historical actors.” From this vantage, studying the theological ideas of black fundamentalists has the potential to tell us quite a lot about the world in which they lived. This is certainly true when comparing fundamentalist groups across the color line. Shared theological convictions had the power, in some cases, to bridge social gulfs and drive interracial fellowship, but divergences in social application, especially on issues of race, also showed how theological ideas and their consequences were utilized to address contextually specific social and racial concerns. Likewise, with respect to the field of black intellectual history in particular, detecting the voices of black fundamentalists reinforces Blain, Cameron, and Farmer’s argument that the history of black intellectual engagement is “by no means monolithic.” Identifying a fundamentalist facet within the black intellectual tradition, then, adds to “the range and depth of the ideological and social traditions upon which black intellectuals drew in their efforts to address key issues in black communities.”40 This tack illuminates the “sometimes overlooked fact” that, in the words of Albert Raboteau, “African-American opinion has never been unanimous.”41
The historical-theological approach also allows for a sense of the religious variety, diversity, and dynamism among African American congregations and individual religionists. Recognizing that real, substantive theological divisions and conflicts existed within African American communities helps to avoid the temptation to treat “the black church” as a singular, monolithic, undifferentiated whole. Even as many African Americans on opposing sides of the fundamentalist-modernist conflict shared a broad concern for the advancement of the race—and while they may have been inclined to embrace different strategies, some of them were also willing to work side by side in seeking to achieve those goals—they still expressly drew lines of distinction and differentiation on essentially theological grounds. Their commonality in the one arena did not necessarily dictate a congruence in the other; a level of complexity and diversity within “the black church” in general, and often even within a single denominational structure, is apparent. That black fundamentalists sought to balance their recognition of the common oppression facing all black people in a Jim Crow world with their conviction about the spiritual centrality of the traditional “fundamental” doctrines of Christianity also helps to illuminate how and why black fundamentalists tended to be less separatist than their white counterparts. In this respect they represent at once both a theologically distinct facet of a diverse black church tradition and a specifically black manifestation of fundamentalist sentiments.
This situation further reinforces the value of treating theological conviction as a meaningful identity-shaping