Conservative Minister Defines Antimodern Identity

W. B. RILEY, The Faith of the Fundamentalists (1927)

In the latter nineteenth century, many Christian ministers found ways to reconcile belief with Darwin’s theories regarding natural selection, but in the early twentieth century divisions emerged between those who favored a more liberal reading of scripture (which made room for Darwin) and literalists who accepted the Bible as the inerrant word of God. Conservatives mobilized, embracing metaphors of battle, waging war against “modernism” and its liberal and atheistic associations. By 1920, these religious conservatives embraced the term fundamentalists to describe their devotion to core Christian beliefs. Riley’s 1927 essay sketched out the fundamentalist identity in an increasingly liberal culture.

Fundamentalism undertakes to reaffirm the greater Christian doctrines. Mark this phrase, “the greater Christian doctrines.” It does not attempt to set forth every Christian doctrine. It has never known the elaboration that characterizes the great denominational confessions. But it did lay them side by side, and, out of their extensive statements, elect nine points upon which to rest its claims to Christian attention. They were and are as follows:

It would seem absolutely clear, therefore, that many of the liberal writers of recent years have never taken the pains to ask for the basis of our belief. Had it been so, an Old World writer could not have said of us that we held to “a flat earth,” to “an immovable world,” to “the circulation of the sun, moon and stars around the same every twenty-four hours,” to “a canopy or roof overhead”; and some New World textbook producers would not have been willing to assail immature student minds with similar absurd sentences. This charge of ignorance in realms of science against the leaders of Fundamentalism has about as much basis of truth as had the statement from the university professor that the author of the Tennessee anti-evolution bill had, upon learning that the Bible was not made in heaven and dropped down, expressed his regret that he ever wrote or advocated the passing of the bill. Modernism when it comes to deal with the Fundamentals movement is suddenly possessed with a strange imagination. If you want to know what the movement is not and who its leaders are not, read their descriptions of both. Certainly as to what we believe, the above declaration leaves no doubt, and only the man ignorant of the Bible or utterly indifferent to its teachings, could ever call into question that these nine points constitute the greater essentials in the New Testament doctrinal system.

Fundamentalism insists upon the plain intent of Scripture-speech. The members of this movement have no sympathy whatever for that weasel method of sucking the meaning out of words and then presenting the empty shells in an attempt to palm them off as giving the Christian faith a new and another interpretation. The absurdities to which such a spiritualizing method may lead are fully revealed in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and modernists in general. When one is permitted to discard established and scientific definitions and to create, at will, his own glossary, language fails to be longer a vehicle of thought, and inspiration itself may mean anything or nothing, according to the preference of its employer.…

Fundamentalism is forever the antithesis of modernist critical theology. It is made up of another and an opposing school. Modernism submits all Scripture to the judgment of man. According to its method he may reject any portion of the Book as uninspired, unprofitable, and even undesirable, and accept another portion as from God because its sentences suit him, or its teachings inspire him. Fundamentalism, on the contrary, makes the Bible “the supreme and final authority in faith and life.” Its teachings determine every question upon which they have spoken with some degree of fullness, and its mandates are only disregarded by the unbelieving, the materialistic and the immoral. Fundamentalists hold that the world is illumined and the Church is instructed and even science itself is confirmed, when true, and condemned when false, by the clear teachings of the open Book, while Liberalism, as The Nation once said, “pretends to preach the higher criticism by interpreting the sacred writings as esoteric fables.” In other words, the two have nothing in common save church membership, and all the world wonders that they do or can remain together; and the thinking world knows that but one tie holds them, and that is the billions of dollars invested.

Nine out of ten of those dollars, if not ninety-nine out of every hundred of them, spent to construct the great denominational universities, colleges, schools of second grade, theological seminaries, great denominational mission stations, the multiplied hospitals that bear denominational names, the immense publication societies and the expensive magazines, were given by Fundamentalists and filched by modernists. It took hundreds of years to collect this money and construct these institutions. It has taken only a quarter of a century for the liberal bandits to capture them, and the only fellowship that remains to bind modernists and Fundamentalists in one body, or a score of bodies, is the Irish fellowship of a free fight — Fundamentalists fighting to retain what they have founded, and modernists fighting to keep their hold on what they have filched. It is a spectacle to grieve angels and amuse devils; but we doubt not that even the devils know where justice lies, and the angels from heaven sympathize with the fight and trust that faithful men will carry on.…

The future of Fundamentalism is not with claims, but with conquests. Glorious as is our past, history provides only an adequate base upon which to build. Fundamentalists will never need to apologize for the part they have played in education; they have produced it; or for their relationship to colleges and universities and theological seminaries, and all forms of social service; they have created them! …

But even that is not enough! Now that modernism has come in to filch from us these creations of our creed, we must either wrest them from bandit hands or begin and build again. In the last few years, in fact, since the modernist-highwaymen rose up to trouble the Church and snatch its dearest treasures, it has shown itself as virile as the promise of Christ, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” ever indicated. Today there are one hundred schools and colleges connected with our Fundamentalist Association, some of which have escaped the covetous clutches of modernism, but most of which have been brought into being as a protest against modernism itself. Their growth has been so phenomenal as to prove that the old tree is fruitful still, and that the finest fruit is to be found upon its newest branches, orthodox churches, Fundamentalist colleges, sound Bible training schools, evangelical publication societies, multiplied Bible conferences and stanch defenders of the faith in ever increasing numbers in each denomination.…

Who are my brethren? Baptists? Not necessarily, and, in thousands of instances, no! My brethren are those who believe in a personal God, in an inspired Book, and in a redeeming Christ.

W. B. Riley, “The Faith of the Fundamentalists,” Church History 24 (June 1927): 434–440.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS