Black Fundamentalists. Daniel R. Bare
speaking, American Protestant fundamentalism was marked from its very beginning by its opposition to the emerging theological modernism of the early twentieth century. Modernist theology typically aimed to bring Christianity into line with the most current patterns of rationalist thought, embracing higher-critical methods of biblical scholarship and often eschewing supernaturalist biblical interpretations that rested on the reliability or historicity of the miraculous events narrated in the text. For example, in his famous lectures from 1899 and 1900 on the nature of Christianity, renowned German liberal scholar Adolf Harnack argued that Christianity’s true “Easter faith” was not dependent on the uncertain historical claims of the apostles’ original “Easter message” of physical resurrection: “Either we must decide to rest our belief on a foundation unstable and always exposed to fresh doubts, or else we must abandon this foundation altogether, and with it the miraculous appeal to our senses.”3 Such modernist attitudes engendered fiery reactions from religious conservatives—both white and black—who undertook to defend the doctrines that they considered to be the “fundamentals” of the faith. Nevertheless, historical scholarship has often associated fundamentalism with certain cultural and social forms that tend toward excluding African Americans. George Marsden’s formulation of fundamentalism as a militant opposition to both theological modernism and “the cultural change associated with it” lends itself to emphasizing protracted cultural battles of a conservative and reactionary nature—most notably on issues such as evolutionary theory and public school curricula—waged by high-profile fundamentalist leaders and their institutional networks.4 The ubiquity of Jim Crow, as well as the overtly segregationist and racist positions of certain towering fundamentalist leaders such as J. Frank Norris, meant that many highly visible fundamentalist institutions emerged from a basically white social context empowered by American segregation.5 As a result, fundamentalism also often carries with it an association with the white racial politics of segregation, and therefore, in Marsden’s words, “‘fundamentalist’ has seldom been a self-designation” for black Americans.6
In contrast to that assessment, the Norfolk editorialist’s argument during the weeks leading up to the infamous Scopes trial that black Americans were “for the most part” fundamentalists—even if we account for the likely hyperbole in that statement—offers an interesting historical counterpoint. In fact, amid the vicissitudes of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, debates and discussions about fundamentalism were prevalent in the black press. This was true not only of explicitly religious or denominational papers, such as the Star of Zion or the National Baptist Union-Review, but even of “secular” black weeklies such as the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, and many others.7 An examination of these black weekly newspapers helps to show that the perception of fundamentalism as a significant internal expression of black religiosity was not limited merely to one editorialist in Virginia; on the contrary, many voices in the black press, on both sides of the debate, considered fundamentalism to be (for good or for ill) a widespread phenomenon within the black Protestant community. Such discourse demonstrates that there were numerous black Protestants who overtly embraced an expressly fundamentalist identity amidst the heat of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.
Since black newspapers were both shapers of public opinion and instruments for cultivating a shared culture, the discourses revealed in their pages can yield instructive insight into the perceptions of race, religion, and fundamentalism within the wider African American community. While localized papers certainly played a part in this process, so too did the growth of a national press. With the population mobility brought on by the Great Migration in the early twentieth century, the national circulation of several popular black weeklies also expanded, meaning that the conversations and ideas advanced in the pages of, for example, the Chicago Defender or the Afro-American often reached well beyond the newspapers’ local or regional settings.8 The disputes over fundamentalism in the black weeklies of this era not only demonstrate that partisans on both sides of the issue understood “fundamentalist” to be a meaningful analytical category for black religious expression, but also illuminate some of the broad elements associated with these black fundamentalists’ worldviews. Writers in the weeklies regularly associated a common array of characteristics with fundamentalist religious expression—including, as one might expect, such conservative theological bellwethers as supernaturalism, divine creation, and biblicism. Moreover, the pages of the black weeklies also tackled issues of racism, segregation, and social oppression in the context of their debates over fundamentalism, revealing racial considerations that undoubtedly influenced both pro- and antifundamentalist writers. The testimony of these black newspapers, then, demonstrates not only a robust debate about fundamentalism, but also a debate whose terms assumed that a substantial “black fundamentalist” presence within the community was a basic fact of life.
“They Are Everywhere and in Everything”
The Journal and Guide’s editorial declaring the race to be “for the most part” fundamentalists was by no means alone in presenting fundamentalism as either widespread within or characteristic of the black community, though the scope of its claim to encompass nearly the whole of “the Afro-American people” was undeniably ambitious, if not somewhat hyperbolic. Still, the pages of black weeklies testify to a sense that fundamentalism was, if perhaps not the predominant view, then at least a noteworthy religious influence among African American Christian bodies. Even as these newspapers published editorial perspectives about fundamentalism that spanned from wholehearted support to vehement vituperation, both sides implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) affirmed that this religious perspective was one that had to be reckoned with inside the black community.
Among those sympathetic toward the movement, some asserted a widespread devotion to Christian fundamentalism within their own particular denominational bodies. For instance, more than a year before the Scopes trial captivated the nation, a 1924 column in Wichita’s Negro Star exhorted that “all loyal members of evangelical churches and especially the Missionary Baptist Church watch close the insinuating forward movement of modernism in its attacks on many of the fundamentals of Christianity and combat such movement whenever detected by a more close adherence to The Church.” In the eyes of this columnist, theological modernism was no mere distant threat, nor was it a problem circumscribed to white churches, but rather it represented an “insinuating” adversary to all loyal gospel-loving churches—a looming, steadily advancing peril whose assaults on the Christian fundamentals not only required Christians to maintain a watchful eye and a vigilant mind, but also demanded an active and combative rebuke. Missionary Baptist Churches were singled out as particularly concerned with “the fundamentals of Christianity” and “the Old Time methods of repentance, regeneration, and absolute compliance to the every command of The Christ.”9 It is worth noting that the fundamentalism in view here, identified by the editorialist as the proper remedy to modernist encroachments, consisted of both theological propositions and personal conduct; the method given to combat modernism was a close personal adherence to the church and its traditional “Old Time” teachings—a category that would presumably include such doctrines as divine creation, the divinity of Christ, and biblical inspiration, which often came under fire from modernist theologians. Even the language that the editorialist employed—warning of the “insinuating forward movement” of the modernist perspective in Christian circles—offered not only an approving nod toward fundamentalism as representing traditional Christian fidelity, but also a recognition of this fundamentalist-modernist conflict as a profoundly significant issue on which black churches and denominations had to take a stand.
In similar fashion, several years later the Atlanta Daily World reported on Bishop Noah W. Williams’s identification of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination as fundamentalist in its outlook and traditions.10 Williams was serving in South Carolina as the presiding bishop of the AME’s Seventh Episcopal District, and in this capacity he displayed a concern for black educational institutions both through his involvement with Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, and, as reported in the Atlanta Daily World, through his desire to establish a new AME divinity school in this region.11 As he lobbied for the creation of a new school, Williams argued that rigorous denominationally specific theological education was