How Did American Christianity End Up Like This?

Fosdick’s sermon on that fateful spring day had been advertised in the city’s newspapers: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” From the pulpit, he argued that “new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination.” He castigated fundamentalism as “illiberal and intolerant.” He suggested that there was room for a spectrum of theological views in the church. “Opinions may be mistaken,” he said. “Love never is.” Fosdick later insisted that he had intended his message as a “plea for good will.” He instead succeeded in starting a war.

A group of conservative Presbyterians, including William Jennings Bryan, the populist firebrand and thrice-failed Democratic Presidential candidate, tried to force Fosdick from the pulpit. The fracas played out in heated sermons, editorials, and denominational meetings. In 1924, Fosdick finally resigned. The following year, however, the fundamentalist advance stalled in Dayton, Tennessee, when Bryan took the stand as a “Bible expert” during the trial of John Thomas Scopes, a teacher who had been arrested for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution. Bryan’s stumbling responses, under questioning from the legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, left him humiliated. The fundamentalist movement became a national laughingstock. Lippmann later wrote that fundamentalism’s ideas no longer appealed to “the best brains and the good sense of a modern community.”

The market had seemingly chosen. Fundamentalists found themselves excluded from the nation’s major denominations, but they were hardly defeated. They threw themselves into establishing their own Bible schools, independent churches, and mission organizations. They experimented with new forms of media, founding radio programs that combined upbeat hymns and accessible messages. They made a point of minimizing denominational differences, lowering barriers to entry for newcomers. Even in exile, the dynamism of the fundamentalist movement enabled it to grow.

In the fall of 1949, Billy Graham, a thirty-year-old evangelist with a square jaw and swept-back hair, began preaching under a giant tent in downtown Los Angeles, dubbed the “canvas cathedral.” Graham was a product of fundamentalism’s wilderness period. He’d graduated from Wheaton College, in Illinois, the preëminent fundamentalist institution of higher learning, and honed his skills as a revivalist travelling the country for Youth for Christ, an evangelistic ministry for teen-agers. In Los Angeles, Graham catapulted to national prominence, preaching for eight consecutive weeks to some three hundred and fifty thousand people.

Graham went on to hold mass meetings, or crusades, as he called them, in dozens of American cities. He became the avatar of a burgeoning “new evangelical” movement whose adherents were deeply influenced by fundamentalism, even as they eschewed the label. As Wilensky-Lanford explains, the new evangelicals hoped to build a more inclusive faith that engaged the broader culture and demonstrated how “Christians could be both modern and conservative.” In Graham, they found an ideal ambassador. His media savvy and relentless focus on an unadorned Gospel message helped him build a diverse coalition that crossed denominational lines.

In the turbulence of the sixties and early seventies, when racial, gender, and sexual norms were upended anew, American churches underwent a “great re-sorting,” as Sutton puts it. White evangelical churches—revivalists, under Sutton’s classification system—experienced remarkable growth, while liberal mainline Protestant churches withered. Sutton points to, among other factors, a gap between the progressive stances adopted by mainline clergy and the more conservative views of the average mainline churchgoer. Sensing an opportunity, many evangelicals—particularly those with what the historian George Marsden has called “fundamentalistic” attitudes—began shifting their attention to the political realm. “They positioned race, gender, and sexuality at the center of their resurrected and refashioned crusade to once again remake the United States as God’s chosen land,” Sutton writes. The result was the rise of the modern religious right. By the end of the twentieth century, this fundamentalism-inflected evangelicalism, with its muscular politics, was the unequivocal winner in America’s religious economy.