Since the hostage crises in Iran during the Carter Administration (1977–1981), the major American news media have used the term fundamentalist as if it were synonymous with Islamic terrorists and conservative Christians, especially those conservative Christians active in political campaigns. Even before its reassignment to Muslims, fundamentalist had gone from its original use as a self-applied label used by orthodox Protestants in the mainstream, especially Presbyterian faculty members at Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1920s, to an epithet for TV evangelists, snake handlers, and tent-show faith healers.

The leading light of the earlier group was J. Gresham Machen, who had been on the Princeton faculty for twenty-three years. When Princeton Theological Seminary reorganized along more liberal lines, he left it to form Westminster Presbyterian Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929.

When the denomination's mission board refused to stop support for liberal missionaries, he established an independent mission board to support only missionaries that orthodox Presbyterians would feel comfortable supporting. The denomination ordered members of the independent board to resign from it or be stripped of their ordination. He and other members refused to resign and, facing being defrocked, started a new denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

After graduating from Johns Hopkins University and Princeton Theological Seminary himself, Machen had studied in Germany for a year with one of the leading proponents of the higher critical approach to biblical studies, Wilhelm Hermann, at Marburg. In correspondence, he relates that this was a great crisis of faith, because although Hermann disbelieved most of what orthodox Christians consider essential, his faith seemed so radiant that Machen found it magnetic, almost entrancing. By contrast, he said that one of his professors at seminary, B. B. Warfield, revered for his orthodox theology, was “a very heartless, selfish, domineering sort of man.”

The Fundamentals

A decade before Machen became the leader of the early Protestant fundamentalists, an anthology of ninety articles about the essential doctrines of Christian orthodoxy appeared in a twelve-volume set of paperback books titled The Fundamentals. Intended for use by pastors and church leaders to understand the issues that were very controversial in many churches by that time, some three million copies of the booklets were circulated throughout the United States. Some of the titles and authors are:

The History of the Higher Criticism, by Canon Dyson Hague, M.A.

The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch, by Prof. Geo. Frederick Wright, D.D., LL.D.

Fallacies of the Higher Criticism, by Prof. Franklin Johnson, D.D., LL.D.

Old Testament Criticism and New Testament Christianity, by Prof. W.H. Griffith Thomas

Science and Christian Faith, by Rev. Prof. James Orr, D.D.

My Personal Experience with the Higher Criticism, by Prof. J.J. Reeve

These monographs were republished in a four-volume set in 1993, and they are now available online (see Appendix A: Web Resources, and Appendix B: Bibliography). The main focus of the writings these monograms critiqued was the findings of biblical criticism.

New Evangelicalism

The movement that is now positioned in the American media as the leading force in American religion, evangelicalism, fronted for a half century by evangelist Billy Graham, Christianity Today magazine, and longer by Baylor University, Wheaton College, Calvin College, and scores of other similar colleges and seminaries, descends directly from the fundamentalists of the beginning of the Christian century. Seeing the writing on the wall (see Daniel 5) that “fundamentalist” was going to be a hard designation to live with, they intentionally recast themselves as the “new evangelicals” and eventually, just evangelicals. The subject of evangelicals will be taken up further in Chapter 17.