Fundamentalism

As a movement, fundamentalism emerged in response to the rise of liberal views within American Protestant denominations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liberal thinking had been influenced by evolutionary theory and German "higher criticism," a type of biblical criticism that sought to interpret the text in light of new philological and archaeological evidence, free from dogmatic and confessional assumptions. Liberals eschewed traditional theology, with its attendant belief in miracles and the supernatural, fostering instead a rational, human-centered vision of Christianity. Most offensive to fundamentalists, liberals turned accepted doctrines of faith, such as the creation story, virgin birth, atonement, and resurrection, into figurative myths, replete with meaning but devoid of historical reality. For liberals, the findings of science and the secularism of the day were fully compatible with Christianity rightly understood. Indeed, liberal theology fostered an image of Christ as immanent within the culture and thus an active force for the kind of progressive social change that modernity itself seemed to promise.

For fundamentalists, the accommodating trend of the liberals threatened to undermine both Christian faith and the moral society it had nurtured in the United States. The most coherent reply to the liberal challenge came in The Fundamentals, a multivolume set of essays that began publication in 1910 and lent the movement its name. While the essays did little to stem the liberal tide, they did serve to clarify the ideological rift within Protestantism. Sedate and scholarly, The Fundamentals appealed to an intellectual audience. The broader public, however, took notice of the doctrinal debate when the populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) toured the country warning of the grave danger posed by liberals. The debate reached a national audience—and something of a fevered pitch—in the Scopes trial of 1925, which saw John Thomas Scopes (1900–1970), a Tennessee public school teacher, charged with breaching state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution.

Bryan, one of the prosecutors, presented the case as a referendum on the eternal truths of the Bible and their revered place in public life. The main defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, made academic freedom and separation of church and state the issues at stake. Clearly in violation of the law, Scopes was convicted, though the verdict was later overturned on a technicality. Bryan and the fundamentalist cause, however, emerged from the trial the real losers. Under harsh questioning from Darrow, Bryan proved incapable of offering a rational defense of biblical literalism; and news reports, especially those written by the Baltimore critic H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), portrayed fundamentalists as anti-intellectual and backward—an image from which they never fully recovered.