This paper examines the origins, development, and ongoing conflict between Protestant fundamentalism and liberalism in American religious history. Beginning with the evangelical revivals of the 18th century and the theological challenges posed by Darwinism and Higher Criticism, the paper traces how each movement formed its distinct identity. It analyzes key figures—Jonathan Edwards, Henry Ward Beecher, William Jennings Bryan, and Reinhold Niebuhr—alongside landmark events such as the 1925 Scopes Trial and the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary. The paper also explores how mid-20th-century disillusionment with secular modernity fueled a fundamentalist revival, ultimately reshaping American electoral politics through the rise of the Christian Right.
The paper demonstrates effective use of historiographical synthesis: it weaves together multiple scholarly sources (Marsden, McKenna, Hankins, Longfield, Carpenter) to construct a coherent narrative rather than summarizing each source separately. Direct quotations are deployed sparingly but purposefully to anchor interpretive claims in authoritative voices, while the author's own analytical voice remains clearly in control of the argument's direction.
The paper opens by establishing the definitional problem at its core—what fundamentalism and liberalism actually mean historically—before tracing each movement's 18th- and 19th-century roots in parallel. It then examines the institutional crystallization of fundamentalism through The Fundamentals and denominational splits, pivots to the Scopes Trial as a turning point, profiles Niebuhr as a complicating case, and closes by connecting the post-WWII fundamentalist revival to contemporary electoral politics. This roughly chronological structure is interrupted productively by thematic detours (dispensationalism, the Social Gospel), giving the essay analytical depth beyond simple narration.
Defining fundamentalism and liberalism in Christianity is hardly an exact science, especially because prior to about 1920 there was not even a term for fundamentalism as it exists today. While present-day fundamentalists often claim descent from the Puritans and Calvinists of the 17th and 18th centuries, Puritans were not really fundamentalists in the modern sense. They were not in conflict with 20th-century-style liberals, supporters of evolution, or proponents of Higher Criticism, because those movements did not yet exist. As George McKenna put it, "if there were no liberalism there would be no fundamentalism" to react against it (McKenna 231).
Today, about one-third of Americans define themselves as evangelical Protestants, and all Republican Party politicians have to make appeals to the Christian Right (Hankins 1). In 1976 there were at least fifty million "born again" evangelical Protestants in the United States, and today their numbers may be as high as 80–90 million. In the 1970s and 1980s they broke from their traditional alliance with the Democratic Party over issues like Black civil rights, gay rights, abortion, evolution, and prayer in public schools. Even though this culture war was particularly intense, some of these battles had been fought before in the 1920s (Provenzo 3). Indeed, the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan championed the fundamentalists in their battle against the teaching of evolution in public schools, "prefigured the red state/blue state dichotomy that was later to play such an important role in shaping the outcome of national elections" (McKenna 234).
Fundamentalism is rooted in the evangelical and revivalist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. The leading theologian who emerged from that movement, Jonathan Edwards, was an orthodox Calvinist and believer in predestination rather than free will. Edwards was decidedly not a "ranting evangelist that one might see on late-night television," stereotypically sweating ignorance into the microphone with a Southern drawl (Hankins 5). He was a leading thinker of his day and highly influential beyond theology, combining his Calvinist religion with the philosophy of John Locke, the Scottish Common Sense realists, and the science of Isaac Newton. In fact, this school of thought constituted the mainstream of American theology, philosophy, and education until it was challenged by the newer scientific thought of Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud (Marsden 7).
As it gradually shed its Calvinist roots, this tradition was radically democratic in affirming that all persons were equally able to perceive the world with their senses, understand the Newtonian laws that governed the universe, and that individuals were "moral agents capable of free choice" (Marsden 14). Revivals gave American Christianity its "distinctly populist and democratic cast," unlike Europe, where established churches were allies of kings, aristocrats, and ruling elites. In the United States, "religious institutions are the refuge against power," and historically the evangelicals and fundamentalists have not necessarily been allied with the party of the economic elite. On the contrary, that alignment is a fairly recent development in American politics (Hankins 16).
Liberalism also has its roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly among Deists and Unitarians who doubted the literal truth of the Bible and were skeptical of the divinity of Christ. In the 19th century, Darwinism seemed to have abolished any scientific basis for the belief that God created the universe in six days or that Adam and Eve had ever existed as literal historical figures. Liberal Protestant ministers like Lyman Abbott and Henry Ward Beecher simply accepted the idea that evolution was "God's way of doing things," even though theistic evolution undermined the literal truth of the Bible (Longfield 13). They acquiesced to the views of the Higher Critics that the Bible could not be read literally, although many evangelicals like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday emphatically rejected both evolution and Higher Criticism (Longfield 18). As early as 1869, the Unitarian Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted that the Bible's books "cannot be taken as literal statements of fact," while D. F. Strauss and other Higher Critics in Germany had already undermined the idea that the Bible was literally true or that it had been written by the divinely inspired prophets whose names appeared on the books (Marsden 17).
Immanuel Kant and the other Romantics and Idealists had already offered a way out for religion by effectively removing it from competition with modern science, making it a matter purely for the moral and spiritual sense in each individual human being—a matter of faith and personal experience—under which "science could have its autonomy, and religion would be beyond its reach" (Marsden 21). Beecher was a Kantian Idealist who rejected Calvinist predestination and believed that evolution would mean the gradual progress and improvement of civilization until the Kingdom of God was established on earth. He was a liberal of the 19th-century type rather than a 20th-century progressive or socialist, and his theology appealed greatly to the Victorian middle and upper classes, who were uncomfortable with their newfound material wealth and success (Marsden 22). For the new rich of the Gilded Age, wealth seemed to conflict with their traditional Calvinist upbringing, especially given that the United States was experiencing tremendous social and labor problems, with more and more wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of large corporations and the upper ten percent of the population.
In the era from 1880 to 1920, the United States was rapidly becoming an urban, industrialized nation, dominated by giant trusts and corporations and with a new workforce of millions of immigrants. Protestants of both liberal and conservative views were deeply uneasy at these developments and struggled to keep Christianity relevant to modern society and its social problems. Crucially, there was no neat political division between theological liberals and conservatives: evangelicals who would today be considered fundamentalists, like William Jennings Bryan, were often politically liberal, progressive, or even radical. Evangelicals stepped up their missionary activities in both the cities and foreign countries—the Student Volunteer Movement alone trained 13,000 missionaries between 1886 and 1936. Other evangelicals campaigned for prohibition and Sunday schools, while many also supported the Social Gospel (Longfield 18).
Evangelicals were slow to engage with labor and social questions, or to break with the assumption that the Bible endorsed free-market capitalism, although this began to change in the 1870s with the publication of Washington Gladden's Working People and their Employers. Along with Joseph Strong and Walter Rauschenbusch, Gladden advocated Christian Socialism as the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God on earth—a position also endorsed by populists and progressives like William Jennings Bryan, regardless of whether they accepted theological liberalism (Longfield 20). On the other hand, many fundamentalists embraced the dispensationalist ideas of John Nelson Darby, who argued that there would be seven one-thousand-year ages of the world and that humanity was living in the sixth, just before the end times. This age would conclude with a rapture, a seven-year Great Tribulation, and ultimately the Second Coming of Christ, after which the Kingdom of God would be established on earth for one thousand years (Longfield 20).
Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gilkey, Langdon. On Niebuhr: A Theological Study. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Hankins, Barry. American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.
Longfield, Bradley J. The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and Modernity. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Marsden, George W. Fundamentalism and American Culture. Oxford University Press, 2006.
McKenna, George. The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. Yale University Press, 2007.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932; rpt. 2006.
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. University of Chicago Press, 1952; rpt. 2006.
Provenzo, Eugene F. Religious Fundamentalism and American Education: The Battle for the Public Schools. SUNY Press, 1990.
Sharlet, Jeff. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. University of Queensland Press, 2008.
Torrey, Reuben Archer, Ed. The Fundamentals: The Classic Sourcebook of Foundational Biblical Truths. Kregel Publishers, 1958; rpt. 1990.
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