Abstract
The field of academic works on Protestant Fundamentalism has been steadily widening since the publication of George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture in 1980. This steady interest in Fundamentalism makes it interesting that so little has been published on Fundamentalism, its interaction with American ideas about race, and its reception among African American persons. With this new volume in the University of Alabama Press’s longstanding Religion and American Culture series, author Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews offers an important contribution to scholarly understandings of Fundamentalism’s reception among black evangelicals in the period between the world wars.
Mathews begins by noting that leading Fundamentalists tended to harbor racial attitudes that ranged from paternalistic to virulent. William Bell Riley made it a point to use black musicians at his events to ridicule the doctrine of evolution, seemingly to capitalize on racial stereotypes. J. Frank Norris’s behavior was far worse, dropping chairs out of the ceiling of his church to frighten African Americans sitting below in the choir loft. When Fundamentalists discussed African Americans directly, they tended to betray their assumption that black Christians were easily misled by fretting out loud about the inroads that Catholicism and Islam could make among them. Beyond this, African Americans were largely ignored by Fundamentalist leaders. Amazingly, Mathews found no evidence that The Fundamentals, the series of booklets famously mailed by oilman Lyman Stewart to “every minister in the United States,” were ever distributed to African American clergy.
African American evangelicals, however, did respond to the Fundamentalist movement, even though white Fundamentalists did not solicit their opinions. Black Baptist and Methodist newspapers ran numerous editorials on various aspects of the movement, to the point that Mathews is able to detect more sympathy with the movement in the publications of the National Baptist Convention, Unincorporated, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church than in those of the National Baptist Convention, USA, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As African Americans debated the merits of the Fundamentalist position in their newspapers, they often criticized Modernism as a movement, casting it as a dangerous aberration specifically emanating from the white church. At the same time, African American evangelicals tended to avoid claiming the Fundamentalist label for themselves, fearing as they did the newness of premillennial dispensationalism and, perhaps more importantly, afraid of the anti-intellectualism lurking in the movement’s criticism of science. For African American clergy focused on the idea of “uplift” as a way forward, nothing could be embraced that might make their community appear backward. African American editors tended not to link Fundamentalism and anti-evolutionism, tending to seek a middle way that would allow qualified acceptance of one and qualified rejection of the other. Mathews argues that such a middle way was elusive, instead of representing an unwitting acceptance of Modernism. Interestingly, the hesitant attitude that African Americans took towards Fundamentalism as an organized program is in many ways similar to the way white Southern Baptists tried to cope with the movement, suggesting opportunities for further research.
Mathews spends a full chapter on the ways in which African Americans largely agreed with the social anxieties of Fundamentalism; like white, northern conservatives, they were bothered by loosening social mores, dancing, and alcohol consumption. African American Protestants were in an unusual position because although they had been advocating changes in American society for decades, the changes they were seeing were not those for which they had asked: while morals loosened, segregation and discrimination remained firmly in place. As a result, African American clergy insisted on a code of ethics that continued to place the burden of racial uplift on the shoulders of black women. Mathews also includes a thoughtful and original analysis of the ways in which African American evangelicals struggled with their options during the presidential election of 1928, during which some among them decided to support a “wet” Al Smith because of his record on race while governor of New York and their frustrations with the Republican party.
Mathews’ final chapter deals with what must be the most important issue separating largely conservative African American evangelicals and white Fundamentalists. While Fundamentalists claimed to stand by the total authority of the Bible, Mathews notes African American evangelicals believed that the equality of all persons was a non-negotiable biblical doctrine. Faced with a white church that worried about the virgin birth while being silent about lynchings, black evangelicals affirmed that America was plagued not with Christianity but with white Christians whose interpretation of the faith was deficient. In other words, if white Fundamentalists wrote Modernists out of the church, black evangelicals did the same to racist whites.
As mentioned above, Mathews’ text is based on a careful reading of African American Baptist and Methodist newspapers covering the period. Although the author avoids reaching conclusions that she feels might not be warranted without further examination of the evidence, the conclusions that she does reach constitute an important contribution to scholarly understanding of both African American Protestantism and Fundamentalism. The volume could be criticized for failing to track any changes in African American responses to Fundamentalism over the decades-long period covered by the book; instead, the book is organized topically, and it may well be that responses to Fundamentalism did not change greatly over the course of the chosen period. At any rate, Mathews has written a volume that opens several doors for future researchers. Students of either Fundamentalism or African American religion will want to read this book and watch carefully for new works that will hopefully follow the trail that Mathews has blazed here.