Fundamentalist Modernist Controversy

This cartoon, used in a book by famous fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, depicts the standard set of concerns about modernist Christianity.

To more conservative co-religionists in the major Protestant denominations, liberal theological currents were carrying Christians out to sea and away from their moorings in biblical truth. The second half of the nineteenth century had witnessed notable movements galvanized around charismatic leaders calling Christians back to a conservative old-time religion: premillennialist movements like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, Aimee Semple McPherson’s Church of the Foursquare Gospel and the Salvation Army, to name a few. But in the early twentieth century, a movement of conservative Protestants began to identify as Fundamentalists, organized around five “Fundamentals” of the Christian faith: the inerrancy of scripture, the truth of biblical miracles including the account of creation in Genesis, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the substitutionary atonement for sin made possible by Christ’s blameless death and sacrifice. These points were articulated in widely circulated pamphlets, “The Fundamentals,” published in 1910 and bankrolled by a wealthy businessman. Their specificity provides a window into the increasingly reigning views of liberal Protestants, which Fundamentalist intellectuals like J. Gresham Machen described as having departed from Christianity so far as to become a new religion, Liberalism.¹ 

Downtown Minneapolis’s First Baptist Church was an important center of the Fundamentalist movement. Its minister, William Bell Riley, was a leading conservative Protestant on a national and state scale. 

Conservative reaction was less organized in response to such spectacles as the World’s Parliament than by contentious fights over control of denominational institutions, especially seminaries and missionary boards. Missionary institutions, the Fundamentalists argued, were no longer animated by conviction in the unique salvation found in biblical Christianity and a focus on converting souls. Fundamentalists fought for control of mainline Protestant seminaries too, concerned to raise clergy who would preach “old time religion.”

The pulpit of downtown Minneapolis’s First Baptist Church was an important center of the Fundamentalist movement, and its minister created a legacy of conservative Protestantism in the state. Born in Indiana and having already served Baptist churches in Chicago, William Bell Riley took the Minneapolis pulpit in 1897. In church and in revivals he took on the road, Riley forcefully preached the Fundamentals, including railing against dancing, card-playing and theater – the clubs and stages of Hennepin Avenue just blocks from his church gave Riley plenty of material. He earned opposition from other Baptist clergy and among some in his congregation whom he eventually forced out to found their own church.² But Riley could draw crowds. Beginning in 1923, he preached his way through the entire bible over a ten-year period and published the results.³ In Duluth in 1912, a revival led by Riley reportedly produced over 1,000 converts.⁴ Publicly, Riley fought to block the teaching of evolution in Minnesota schools, preaching to large public crowds, giving lectures at the University of Minnesota, and forming the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota. His movement brought a bill to ban evolution in tax-supported schools, but it was defeated in 1927.⁵ But Riley also defied any swift caricature: he vigorously opposed the American annexation of the Philippines and he brought an elite, businesslike persona to his preaching.

"When he steps out on the platform, he looks like a bank director about to address a meeting of the board of directors. And, save for the unusual earnestness of his speech, his tone of voice is that of the same banker. He doesn't rave and he doesn't rant. He doesn't wail and he doesn't weep. He has never wilted a collar in all his years of preaching. He has never torn an ounce of hair from his iron gray pompadour." - Seattle Post-Intelligencer on William Bell Riley, January 23, 1911⁶ 

Like his Fundamentalist counterparts among the Presbyterians, Riley worked to weed out liberal theology from Northern Baptist seminaries. He also built a strong network of Fundamentalist periodicals and institutions. Riley started Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School in 1902, meeting in First Baptist’s education building. It would grow to Northwestern Bible College, and under President Billy Graham in 1948 move to Loring Park and eventually in the 1970s to its current Roseville campus on Lake Johanna, where it is today known as the University of Northwestern.  Riley also started the World Christian Fundamentals Association, the group that would argue the case for a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Excessive July heat moved the 1925 trial of Tennessee v. Scopes, outdoors. William Jennings Bryan, seated, and is here being questioned by Clarence Darrow.

Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925

The Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy became front page national news in 1925, when a public schoolteacher was on trial for violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution. The trial didn’t have to be made famous by the Hollywood film Inherit the Wind, for towering public figures took up the legal case for the two sides. Clarence Darrow represented Scopes, the Dayton TN public school teacher and three-time presidential hopeful Williams Jennings Bryan represented the state of Tennessee. Bryan’s brash embrace of the Fundamentalist position was on trial as much as evolution itself.

Fundamentalists also lost their denominational battles for control of seminaries and mission boards. In Riley’s case, he and like-minded Fundamentalists withdrew from the Northern Baptist Convention and laid low for decades until its time would emerge later in the century.Historians agree that Darrow’s modernist position handily won in the court of public opinion, even as the court charged the teacher with a small fine, which was later overturned on a technicality. That William Bell Riley continued to press the point in the years following would seem to fly in the face of this consensus view, but perhaps it was the Scopes Trial that took the wind out of his sails in the first place and helped defeat the 1927 Minnesota law.  Riley may have stayed on message, but when all was said and done, the headlines kept turning against him. He delivered lectures on the Scopes Trial at the University of Minnesota, but they became more spectacle than debate. He turned his attention to what he called the “rankly liberal” Carleton College and offered a resolution at the Baptist state convention to withdraw any support for the college whose faculty so steadfastly taught evolution.⁷  “Meanwhile Carleton’s football team acquired a new mascot, a monkey the students christened ‘W.B’ for Riley.⁸