I remember well an experience I had as a young lad in the late 1930's in the South's Bible Belt when I first heard about evolution. A neighbor was visiting my mother and they were sharing "a dope" (the colloquial name for Coca-Cola in that day, a carry-over from the days when that soft drink contained both caffeine and cocaine). This lady said in her homespun, non-sophisticated way, "I am not descended from no monkey." This conversation took place just 79 years after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 masterpiece, "The Origin of Species through Natural Selection." So in the space of just 79 years his thought had trickled down to the rural, working class poor in North Carolina. In the intellectual community Darwin's thought was engaged much earlier. Less than a year after Darwin's book came out, Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce met Darwin defender T. H. Huxley in public debate in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on June 30th, 1860. Wilberforce, feeling that Darwin was attacking both the inerrant Bible and God, employed ridicule that night. He inquired of Mr. Huxley as to whether it was on his mother's side or his father's side that he was descended from an ape. Ridicule is, however, never an effective weapon against truth and the primary result of this debate was to give Darwin's thought a huge boost in the public arena, guaranteeing that his ideas would inevitably trickle down into the common mind. Trickle down they did.
By 1909 Protestant clergy associated with the ultra-conservative Princeton Theological Seminary had taken up the cudgel against Darwin in defense of what they called "traditional Christianity." To them Darwin was only the latest in a long line of challenges that these devout, but not deeply learned men, felt was eroding "Christian Truth." They also felt a need to refute the rising tide of biblical criticism about which I wrote last week, that had begun to infiltrate America from Europe. It included the New Testament work of David Frederick Strauss in 1834 that challenged the idea that all the details of the gospels were historical and the later Old Testament scholarship of Karl Graf and Julius Wellhausen that obliterated the traditional claim for the Mosaic authorship of the Torah. These Princeton clergy also felt the threat to the dominant Protestant faith in America from the rising tide of Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland and southern Europe, which began to temper the overwhelmingly Protestant nature of America's religious life. This newly arriving Catholic population also diminished the power of this nation's aristocracy as the labor movement placed a new emphasis on building a just society for working people. These clergy interpreted all of these changes as secular and humanistic and therefore anti-Christian. New religious groups were also arising in America like Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science movement and the Mormonism of Joseph Smith, which they viewed with great suspicion, calling them "cults," and regarding each with fear and even disgust.
Mainline Christian theologians, however, who taught in the great academic centers of this nation like Union Theological Seminary in New York, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Yale Divinity School in New Haven and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, busied themselves with the task of incorporating these new learnings into Christianity. In the process they gained for themselves the reputation of being "religious liberals who were no longer bound by core Christian principles." As a direct counter point these conservative leaders became even more aggressive in defending the literal truth of the Bible and especially those claims made for the literal accuracy of such biblical accounts as the Virgin Birth, the miracle stories and the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body as the only allowable understanding of the resurrection. In their minds they were engaged in a fight for God against the infidels. Dubbing themselves the defenders of "Orthodoxy," these self-appointed gendarmes for the Lord organized to fight this growing menace to "revealed truth." Their weapon employed in this war was the publication of a series of tracts designed to spell out in clear detail the irreducible core beliefs of "Orthodox Christianity." Their seemingly quixotic fight caught the attention of conservative, wealthy oil executives in California, who bankrolled this effort. For years 300,000 tracts were mailed each week to church workers in America and around the world. Later the company for which these oil executives worked, the Union Oil Company of California (or Unocal today) financed the further publication of these tracts into permanent books to maximize their impact. It worked.
During the 1920's with pressure arising from this huge public relations campaign, the decision-making bodies of America's main line churches were forced to deal with a growing tension between those supporting this tractarian movement, who came to be called "fundamentalists," and those opposed who came to be called "modernists." At the center of these debates was the issue of the inerrancy of scripture. Clergy scholars in the early 20th century like Harry Emerson Fosdick were vigorously attacked as heretics for denying scriptural inerrancy. Fundamentalist clergy, who at that time constituted the majority of the leadership of the Christian Church, also opposed such liberalizing political measures as giving the ballot to women and women's emancipation. They also, interestingly enough, defended segregation, capital punishment and "traditional morality" (which did not include "flappers" doing the "Charleston"). Their authority in each confrontation was the literal Bible, "the word of God."
Great battles were fought between these two perspectives in the major Christian denominations in the first three decades of the 20th century. Finally the 'modernists,' who dominated the faculties in the centers of Christian learning, slowly but surely were successful in wresting control from the fundamentalists in most of the mainline churches, but that victory would prove to be very costly. In my Church the battle ebbed and flowed. In 1924 the Rt. Rev. William M. Brown, retired Bishop of Arkansas, became the only Episcopal bishop ever to be tried and convicted for heresy. His crime was that he embraced evolution, but people whispered that he was also a communist. At the same time, the Episcopal Church led by such stalwart scholars as Walter Russell Bowie, who served as editor of an influential journal, "The Southern Churchman," defeated attempts to require belief in a literal interpretation of the creeds on pain of excommunication. Other churches experienced similar stress and made similar decisions.
Driven by these defeats, fundamentalism retreated from mainline churches into rural and small town America, especially but not exclusively in the South, and developed denominations that featured congregational control with little loyalty to a national headquarters. Building their own seminaries the more sophisticated of them sought to escape the image of fundamentalism, which was in some circles identified with closed-minded ignorance, by calling themselves 'evangelicals.' Evangelical Christianity thrived in this relatively unchallenged rural or Southern atmosphere and began to dominate those regions. They built seminaries committed to teaching "fundamental Christian truth" unencumbered by either the intellectual revolution of the last 500 years or the rise in critical biblical scholarship during the last 200 years. As the main line churches became more open to new interpretations and therefore, "fuzzier" on core doctrines, the fundamentalist movement grew more isolated, more strident in its proclamations and even more anti-intellectual. This division was hidden politically for years, in part because at least in the South the tensions over the civil war and issues of race had made the South staunchly Democratic. After all the Republican Party was identified with Abraham Lincoln, Civil War defeat and "carpet baggers." That, however, began to change when the Democrats nominated a northern Roman Catholic as its presidential candidate in 1928. Later Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces and defeated the southern wing of his party, led by Strom Thurmond, in the election of 1948. Next the Supreme Court, filled with appointees from the Democratic Roosevelt-Truman era, forced the desegregation of public schools in the 1950's, and then Democrat Lyndon Johnson cajoled Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Racism has always been an ally of fundamentalism. Yesterday's victims of the literal Bible were blacks, while today's victims are homosexuals. Fundamentalism always has a victim.
The foundation of this Southern-based right wing, fundamentalist Protestant religion had been laid out between 1909 and 1915 in those Unocal distributed tracts. In time these core principles were reduced to five in number and they came to be called "The Fundamentals."
1. The Bible is the literal, inerrant Word of God.
2. Jesus was literally born of a virgin.
3. Substitutionary atonement is the meaning of Jesus' death on the cross.
4. The miracles of the New Testament are real. They literally happened.
5. Jesus rose physically from the grave, ascended literally into the sky and would return someday in the "second coming."
The wording of these "fundamentals" varied slightly from document to document, but the battle lines were clear. The Northern Presbyterian Church adopted these fundamentals as defining what was required to call oneself a Christian at a national gathering as early as 1910. That vote did not end the debate, however, for this church had to reaffirm them again in 1916 and in 1923.
One cannot understand present day church tensions without being aware of these roots. Every major church dispute today rises out of a conflict created when new learning calls traditional religious convictions into question. Evolution vs. Intelligent Design; birth control, abortion and women's equality; homosexuality and the Bible, all finally come down to a battle in the churches between expanding knowledge and these five core principles. Critics of every new church initiative claim that in their opposition to "modernism" they are supporting "the clear teaching of the Word of God" or fighting a "godless humanism." It is time to expose those fundamentals for what they are.
--- John Shelby Spong
