from the site:
The Gospel Coalition
* _
Thomas S. Kidd_ (https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/evangelical-history)
AFRICAN AMERICAN
CHRISTIANS AND FUNDAMENTALISM
April 4, 2017
Today I am interviewing _Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews_
(http://www.umw.edu/directory/employee/mary-beth-mathews/) about her new book
_Doctrine and Race:
African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism Between the Wars_
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817319387/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativ
e=9325&creativeASIN=0817319387&linkCode=as2&tag=evangel-20&linkId=e2f5b5d0a3
a7cbd973edb62fc33453ea">Doctrine%20and%20Race:%20African%20American%20Evange
licals%20and%20Fundamentalism%20between%20the%20Wars%20(Religion%20&%20A
merican%20Culture)</a><img%20src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=evangel
-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0817319387"%20width="1"%20height="1"%20border="0"%20alt=""%2
0style="border:none%20!important;%20margin:0px%20!important;) . Dr. Mathews
is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Mary Washington.
[TK] In the early twentieth century, white Protestants engaged in a
theological war known as the “Fundamentalist-Modernist conflict. “ Instead of
clearly aligning with either faction, however, you say that African Americans
“created their own traditionalist conservative evangelicalism.” What were
the chief characteristics of that kind of black evangelical Christianity?
[MBSM] White fundamentalists framed the conflict they had with modernists
in an all-or-nothing way. If you, for example, denied the Virgin Birth or
read the Bible as a literary remnant of a long past group of believers, then
you had departed the Christian fold. White fundamentalists tended to
believe that only people who embraced fundamentalist doctrines were
Christians..
African American evangelicals rejected this all-or-nothing approach, even
as they issued their own ultimatum—that to be a Christian, one had to treat
all people as equals. They had no quarrel with, say, conservative white
evangelicals’ rejection of modernism’s embrace of historical criticism, nor
did they wish to see black Christians drinking, dancing, or gambling. But
they insisted that a strict reading of the Bible, especially the New
Testament, would produce an ecclesiology that taught that only those
individuals
who preached love and equality could truly claim the mantle of Jesus.
Why did most African American Baptists and Methodists keep the
fundamentalist movement at arm’s length, even as they construed theological
modernism
as a “white” phenomenon?
It was not so much that African American evangelicals kept the “
fundamentalist movement at arm’s length” as it was that the white
fundamentalists
never invited them to the table. White fundamentalists constructed a
theological world in which the norms for everything were white: white
leadership,
white biblical interpretation, white organization, and so on. White
fundamentalists explicitly believed that African Americans were incapable of
making
a meaningful contribution to the discussion. Instead, white
fundamentalists thought that African Americans as a whole were so
impressionable and
easily misled that it was white Protestants’ job to protect black Christians
from theological harm. The marginalization of African American preachers meant
that, even if they had wanted to join with the fundamentalists, they could
never be a full-fledged part of the movement.
And most of the writers I studied rejected premillennial
dispensationalism. (See below)
Can you tell us more about a specific African American church leader from
this time period who illustrates your argument?
The Reverend Eli George Biddle, Civil War veteran and AME Zion minister,
was one of my favorite writers as I did the research. Biddle was born and
raised in Massachusetts, fought with the Massachusetts 54th Infantry
Regiment, and became a minister after the Civil War. By the time
fundamentalism was
emerging as a movement, Biddle had pastored several churches and wrote a
weekly column for the Star of Zion. In it, he toyed with dispensationalism,
drew from several different translations of the Bible, and recommended
Reinhold Niebuhr to his colleagues. His columns showed how voracious a reader
he was and how he adopted portions of his reading to advance the cause of
African American equality and salvation.
The writers and pastors you studied were sympathetic to most points of the
white fundamentalists’ theology, with the notable exception of
premillennial dispensationalism and its forecasts about the end times. Why?
To be fair, I should note that not all white fundamentalists were entirely
comfortable with premillennial dispensationalism. J. Gresham Machen,
notably, refused to call himself a fundamentalist in part because of this
version of eschatology.
But for African American Baptists and Methodists between the wars, there
was a single theological objection to dispensationalism—it was, in their
opinion, a newfangled and contrived way of reading the Bible. In this respect,
they were more traditional than the white fundamentalists who claimed to
only read their Bibles in traditional ways. For them, a recent (within the
last 50 years) method of interpreting scripture which required alternative
meanings beyond the traditional literal and allegorical was a wrong-headed
practice.
Augmenting this theological objection was the difference between how white
and black evangelicals saw the world around them. While the events of
First World War and concurrent and subsequent social and economic changes
weighed heavily on African Americans, they were already contending with a
whole
host of issues that white Americans did not—racism, lynchings, segregation,
oppression, and violence. White fundamentalists were more likely to see
post-World War I events as signaling a sudden downturn in the world’s
fortunes, while African American evangelicals were already living in a
dangerous
world to begin with.
We often think of evolution as the defining issue for 1920s white
fundamentalists, because of the Scopes Trial. How did the African American
Christians in your book react to evolution, and to teaching it in schools?
The Scopes Trial did indeed lead to the association in the American memory
of anti-evolutionists with fundamentalists, although recent scholarship
has questioned just how much white fundamentalists enthusiastically joined
the movement against evolution and how much they were co-opted into it,
thanks to William Jennings Bryan.
For the African American ministers in my book, however, evolution was a
thorny subject. Many of these ministers were well-educated, and they
respected the scientific progress of their era. To deny evolution would risk
being
seen as uneducated or backwards. But to embrace it meant that they would
have to give up a literal reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. Doing
so smacked of the theological modernism they disdained. In the end, many
straddled the fence—refusing to condemn evolution outright while also
insisting that the Bible was divine revelation and crucial for the salvation of
its readers.
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