In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a handful of radical white evangelicals began calling for a return to what they defined as the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith. In the context of massive urbanization, the popularization of Darwinian evolution, literary-critical approaches to the Bible that challenged its historical and scientific accuracy, significant Catholic and Jewish immigration, and the systematic study of world religions that undermined Christian distinctiveness, many evangelicals determined that the world was careening toward an inevitable apocalypse. True Christianity, they believed, was under siege, and in these last days they sought to wage war for the authentic faith. Before long a network of many of the nation’s most important white evangelical ministers, radio personalities, missionaries, evangelists, publishers, and Bible college teachers coalesced into a definable movement that adopted the name “fundamentalism.”

Fundamentalists came from every part of the country and represented all economic classes and levels of education. Some were independents, but most worshipped in the nation’s major denominations, identifying as Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Pentecostals. Some lived in rural communities, but many also lived in cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Fundamentalists promoted individual salvation, the authority and accuracy of the Bible, and the imminent second coming of Christ. But fundamentalism was never simply about theology or spirituality. It was always a perspective and an attitude on this world, the next one, and the road between the two.

Fundamentalists contrasted their faith with that of liberal Protestants who at the time called themselves “modernists.” Drawing on the broader modernist movements in art, literature, and culture, modernists focused on the process of being Christian. They interrogated their faith with the goal of making it relevant to the contemporary world. In so doing, they abandoned any notions of an absolute, objective, external, orthodox religion. Instead, they emphasized the process of believing, asking questions of themselves and their faith, and then embarking on an intellectual journey in search of answers to those questions. Theological modernism therefore took shape in part through the social gospel movement, which sought to apply the message of Jesus to the modern condition in new ways. Downplaying individual sin, modernists served Jesus not by preaching the gospel but by transforming their communities.

While theology was important in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, much more was at stake. What fundamentalists opposed as much as what they advocated characterized them. They waged a public battle against modernism and what they interpreted as its many political, cultural, and theological consequences, which ranged from declining morals to liberal politics to women’s popular fashion styles. Modernists, on the other hand, believed that fundamentalism presented a danger to the nation. Fundamentalists, they alleged, encouraged otherworldliness and a lack of commitment to reforming this world.

Americans have long debated what role religion should play in their communities, how it should inform their government, and what it means for issues of race, gender, and class. In the 1920s, such debates took on renewed urgency as the United States assumed a new role in the world made both possible and necessary by World War I.