Journalists Might Ask: Did Fundamentalists Actually Win Their Debate With Modernists?
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(OPINION) Countless sermons each weekend may prove inspiring for American churchgoers, but historians “will little note nor long remember” most of them.
The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick at New York City’s First Presbyterian Church. Creative Commons photo
One great exception, titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was delivered 100 years ago this spring by the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick at New York City’s First Presbyterian Church.
Fosdick threw a bright spotlight on the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, both predicting and demanding that his fellow modernists would win the era’s theological war. The Presbyterian Church had been debating whether to expel biblical liberals since 1892 and in 1910 mandated what later became known as the five points of fundamentalism.
Yes, some of the pioneers of the “fundamentals of the faith” were part of the old Protestant mainline.
Fosdick’s oration attacked three of these beliefs, including the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ’s literal virgin birth and second coming. But his third target was pivotal, the contention that as the inspired word of God, the Bible is free of error on history as well as spiritual and moral teachings. Fosdick conveyed the canard that this meant God “dictated” the words to earthly stenographers and then championed “progressive” revelation as promoted by scholarly biblical criticism. Along the way, he remarked that rigid interpretation of the Quran was a similar “millstone about the neck” for Islam.
A dictionary note is required here. Fosdick defended what he called “evangelical” religion, using the word to broadly signify Protestants of whatever theology. In the 1940s, conservative Protestant foes of the modernists began embracing that same word to distinguish themselves from the unpopular hard-line “fundamentalists.”
Got that? The label has stuck ever since, though some contend it now signifies a Republican political bloc more than a theological movement. (Click here for years of GetReligion posts on efforts to define “evangelical.”)
Fosdick eventually was removed from his pulpit, technically not for heresy but because he was a Baptist minister, not a Presbyterian. He became the celebrated pastor of Manhattan’s elegantly showy Riverside Church, built with John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s money as a cathedral for American liberal Protestantism — and whose recent history would produce a good feature, as in “Bad vibrations: Riverside Church war offers perfect case study of @NYPost vs. @NYTimes.”
In an anniversary article about the Fosdick sermon, Florida freelance writer Jacob Lupfer contends that, contra Fosdick’s forecast, “the modernists lost.” Indeed, if today’s evangelical heirs of the old fundamentalists have won, that’s surely a big-picture news story.
Journalists should examine if that claim is true and what it means.
Lupfer’s scenario is more about the left losing — in practical terms — than the right winning. Insofar as the Southern Baptist Convention typifies evangelical conservatives, its 21st century shrinkage invites analysis. Evangelicals display all sorts of hustle and innovation. But The Guy is among those calling attention to crucial weaknesses and squabbles within the evangelical movement and the troublesome gap between its elite thinkers and grass roots.
As for what we call the “mainline” Protestant churches, religion beat specialists are well aware of stunning membership declines that started around 1965. Perhaps more significant and less-discussed are disastrous numbers for baptisms, marriages and Sunday school enrollments. As an index of dynamism, The Guy would also cite the declining ranks of foreign missionaries, once a massive mainline enterprise and point of pride sparked by a small spontaneous prayer meeting at Williams College in 1806.
The Guy would also advise the media to ponder matters of belief. Consider a large survey of Americans ages 20 to 30, as reported in the 2019 book “The Twentysomething Soul.” Respondents were asked to choose among concepts of God — first, “a personal being, involved in the lives of people today.” That’s about as basic a belief as one can imagine, not just for Christianity but Judaism and Islam. The other options were an impersonal “cosmic life force,” a creator “not involved in the world now,” or that no sort of god exists.
No surprise, the evangelical young adults embraced the first option by just under 100%. But only half of those identifying with mainline churches affirmed this simple traditional belief, versus 40% who went for the impersonal “life force.” Catholics fell between the two rival Protestant camps.
Those numbers appear to tell the media a whole lot about what’s been going on.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.