History of the Church
17 – Twentieth Century Christianity in America
Enduring Two Wars and a Depression
Although the United States did not enter the First World War until late, the mood of the nation changed from an
aversion to war to a unifying war fever, expressed in pulpits across the nation, to “save civilization.” The war was
sufficiently costly and the war fever strong enough that there was little interest in America in leniency against the
German enemy; in fact there was little interest in even joining Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, advanced
as a forum for resolving international conflicts. The 1920s might have been “roaring,” but they were a time of
enmity against things foreign, and judging by the increase in membership in the Ku Klux Klan, enmity against
blacks, Jews, and Catholics as well. The hunt for subversives, Communists, and radicals ensued.
As church leaders wrestled with the “anti” movements and tried to stem the tide, there were splits with the rank
and file members in numerous denominations, a kind of “liberal/conservative” split which would characterize
much of the century in the Protestant churches. Almost all denominations became divided over the issue of
fundamentalism – particularly the inerrancy of Scripture. The “Scopes Trial” controversy of 1925, based on
teaching a “non-Biblical” approach to creation (Darwinism), showed the level of divisiveness which would later
lead to schisms within the Protestant denominations. In 1936 Princeton Seminary Professor Gresham Machen,
staunch defender of fundamentalism, left and formed a rival seminary (Westminster) and the Orthodox
Presbyterian Church.
Some of the controversy heightened with the coming the Great Depression. The optimism from war success was
dealt a severe blow. The New Deal represented a radical departure from laissez-faire economics; it was
considered to be form of socialism by many. Socialism was lumped with Russian Communism, and both were
deemed ungodly. When the nation was drawn into World War II, the national loyalty of anyone opposed entering
the war was questioned. Christianity, national pride, and “the American Way” became entwined.
The post war years brought prosperity to the nation and its churches. Relatively prosperous whites moved to the
suburbs, leaving the inner cities to minorities and the poor. The churches moved with them. Worldly success
overshadowed the church for many. Billy Graham began a revivalist movement in the early 1050s to address this.
This era brought out various “rights” movements. Led by the black clergy, the civil rights movement showed
determination to defy oppressive laws and practices. The movement found much of its inspiration in the Christian
faith of the black community. Churches became gathering places for protesters. A “black theology” emerged
which was Christian and an affirmation of the black race. Christianity was not everywhere, so numerous blacks
turned to Islam to escape the “white man’s religion.”
By the middle of the century, most churches did not allow the ordination of women, and a strong women’s
movement developed, not only for ordination but also for a less male-oriented theology. On the international
scene the long standing tension between the West and the Communist world, which had erupted in Korea in the
50s, flared again in Viet Nam. Challenges to the status quo seen by the civil rights and women’s rights
movements fueled vicious protests against the government’s decision to wage war in an unpopular cause. The
linkage between national pride and Christian values was severely stressed. Television and other media brought
war atrocities, Watergate scandals, and radical values to the national attention, further weakening respect and
loyalty to authority.
The Christian response to the Viet Nam era and its aftermath was mixed and more fragmented. Para-church
organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, Young Life, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, worked
to establish Christian values in the younger generations. Bible Study Fellowship worked to strengthen the
Biblical foundation for committed Christians. Other churches and Christian groups took to the airways to spread
the message of hope through Christ. The majority of these broadcasts present a fundamental view of Christianity,
stressing salvation and commitment.
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Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy
The Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy was a religious controversy in the 1920s and 30s within the
Presbyterian Church in the United States of America that later created divisions in most American Christian
denominations as well. The major American denomination was torn by conflict over the issues of theology and
ecclesiology. Underneath those struggles lay profound concerns about the role of Christianity in the culture and
how that role was to be expressed. Actually it was a modern rephrasing of a much older distinction in religious
history, that between the fundamentals and non-fundamentals of faith. This process resulted in the modern
division of Protestant American religious life into mainline Christianity on the one hand and evangelical and
fundamentalist Christianity on the other.
American Presbyterianism had gone into schism twice in the past; these divisions were important precursors to
the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. The first was The Old Side-New Side Controversy, which occurred
during the First Great Awakening, and resulted in the Presbyterian Church in 1741 being divided into an Old Side
and New Side. The two churches reunited in 1758. The second was the Old School–New School Controversy,
which occurred in the wake of the Second Great Awakening and which saw the Presbyterian Church split into two
denominations starting in 1836-38. In 1857, the "new school" Presbyterians divided over slavery. In 1861, the Old
School Presbyterians split, with the Southern Presbyterians taking on the name the Presbyterian Church of the
Confederate States of America (which would be renamed the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1865).
Although those Controversies involved many issues, the overarching issue had to do with the nature of church
authority and the authority of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The New Side/New School opposed a rigid
interpretation of the Westminster Confession. Rather they preferred an emotional style of religion that made use
of revival techniques. They were much more likely to ordain as clergy men who had not received a university
education, were more lax in the degree of subscription to the Westminster Confession they required, and were
generally opposed to using heresy trials as a means to ensure the orthodoxy of the clergy. They accused the Old
Side/Old School of being dry formalists who stressed the Westminster Confession and Calvinism at the expense
of a personal encounter with the Bible mediated by the Holy Spirit. The Old Side/Old School responded that the
Westminster Confession was the foundational constitutional document of the Presbyterian Church and that, since
the Confession was simply a summary of the Bible's teachings, the church had a responsibility to ensure that its
ministers' preaching was in line with the Confession. They accused the New Side/New School of being much too
lax about the purity of the church, willing to allow Arminianism, Unitarianism, and other errors to be taught in the
Presbyterian Church. The two sides also had different attitudes towards their seminary professors. Princeton
Seminary, the leading institution of the Old School, demanded creedal subscription and dedicated a large part of
its academic efforts to the defense of Calvinist theology. The New School's Union Theological Seminary was
more willing to allow non-Presbyterians to teach there and was more broadminded in its academic output.
The first major proponent of Higher Criticism within the Presbyterian Church was Charles Briggs, who had
studied Higher Criticism in Germany. Higher criticism is the study of biblical writings to determine their literary
history and the purpose and meaning of the authors. In 1891, Briggs was appointed as Union's first-ever Professor
of Biblical Theology. His inaugural address, entitled "The Authority of Holy Scripture", proved to be highly
controversial. Whereas previously, Higher Criticism had seemed a fairly technical, scholarly issue, Briggs now
spelt out its full implications. In this address, he announced that Higher Criticism had now definitively proven that
Moses did not write the Pentateuch; that Ezra did not write Ezra, Chronicles or Nehemiah; Jeremiah did not write
the books of Kings or the Lamentations; David only wrote a few of the Psalms; Solomon did not write the Song of
Solomon or Ecclesiastes and only a few Proverbs; and Isaiah did not write half of the book of Isaiah. At any rate,
the Scriptures as a whole are riddled with errors and the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy taught at Princeton
Theological Seminary "is a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children." Not only is the Westminster
Confession wrong, but the very foundation of the Confession, the Bible, could not be used to create theological
absolutes. He now called on other rationalists in the denomination to join him in sweeping away the dead
orthodoxy of the past and work for the unity of the entire church.
The inaugural address provoked widespread outrage in the denomination, and led Old Schoolers in the
denomination to move against him. At the 1891 General Assembly, Old Schoolers successfully got through a
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motion to veto Briggs' appointment. The faculty of Union Theological Seminary, however, refused to remove
Briggs, saying that it would be a violation of scholarly freedom. In October 1892, the faculty voted to withdraw
from the denomination. Heresy charges against Briggs were taken to the 1892 General Assembly, held in
Portland, Oregon. The General Assembly responded with its famous "Portland Deliverance", affirming that the
Presbyterian Church holds that the Bible is without error and that ministers who believe otherwise should
withdraw from the ministry. In 1893 Briggs was declared guilty of heresy and defrocked.
Henry van Dyke, a modernist who had been a major supporter of Briggs in 1893, now headed a movement of
modernists and New Schoolers to revise the Westminster Confession of Faith. Since 1889, Van Dyke had been
calling for creedal revision, to affirm that all dying infants (not just elect dying infants) go to heaven; to say that
God loved the whole world (not just the elect); and to affirm that Christ atoned for all mankind, not just the elect.
In 1901, he chaired a 25-man committee and drew up a non-binding summary of the church's faith. It mentioned
neither biblical inerrancy nor reprobation, affirmed God's love of all mankind, and denied that the Pope was the
Antichrist. This was adopted by General Assembly in 1902 and ratified by the presbyteries in 1904. As a result of
these changes, the Arminian-leaning Cumberland Presbyterian Church petitioned for reunification, and in 1906,
over 1000 Cumberland Presbyterian ministers joined the Presbyterian Church in the USA.
In 1909, there was heated debate in the New York Presbytery about whether or not to ordain three men who
refused to assent to the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus. (They did not deny the doctrine outright, just said that
they were not prepared to affirm it.) The majority eventually ordained the men; the minority complained to the
General Assembly. The General Assembly subsequently passed the Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910. This
Deliverance declared that five doctrines were "necessary and essential" to the Christian faith:
 The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
 The virgin birth of Christ.
 The belief that Christ's death was an atonement for sin.
 The bodily resurrection of Christ.
 The historical reality of Christ's miracles.
These five propositions would become known to history as the "Five Fundamentals" and by the late 1910s,
theological conservatives rallying around the Five Fundamentals came to be known as "fundamentalists."
The splits between fundamentalists and modernists had been bubbling in the Presbyterian Church for some time.
The event which was to bring the issue to a head was Harry Emerson Fosdick's sermon of May 21, 1922, “Shall
the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick was ordained as a Baptist, but had been given special permission to preach in
First Presbyterian Church in New York City. In this sermon, Fosdick presented the liberals in both the
Presbyterian and Baptist denominations as sincere evangelical Christians who were struggling to reconcile new
discoveries in history, science, and religion with the Christian faith. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, were cast
as intolerant conservatives who refused to deal with these new discoveries and had arbitrarily drawn the line as to
what was off limits in religious discussion. Many people, Fosdick argued, simply found it impossible to accept the
virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, or the literal second coming of Christ in the light
of modern science. Given the different points of view within the church, only tolerance and liberty could allow for
these different perspectives to co-exist in the church.
Conservative Clarence E. Macartney, pastor of Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, responded to
Fosdick with a sermon of his own, entitled "Shall Unbelief Win?" which was quickly published in a pamphlet. He
argued that liberalism had been progressively "secularizing" the church and, if left unchecked, would lead to "a
Christianity of opinions and principles and good purposes, but a Christianity without worship, without God, and
without Jesus Christ." Led by Macartney, the Presbytery of Philadelphia requested that the General Assembly
direct the Presbytery of New York to take such actions as to ensure that the teaching and preaching in the First
Presbyterian Church of New York City conform to the Westminster Confession of Faith. This request would lead
to over a decade of bitter wrangling in the Presbyterian Church.
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Darwinism and Christianity
A giant of Old School Presbyterianism at Princeton, Charles Hodge published his What is Darwinism? in 1874,
three years after The Descent of Man was published. He argued that if Charles Darwin's theory excluded the
design argument, it was effectively atheism and could not be reconciled with biblical Christianity. Asa Gray
responded that Christianity was compatible with Darwin's science. Both he and many other Christians accepted
various forms of theistic evolution, and Darwin had not excluded the work of the Creator as a primary cause.
Most churchmen, however, took a far more prosaic attitude. When evolution became widely accepted, most
churchmen were more concerned with establishing ways to reconcile Darwinism to Christianity.
William Jennings Bryan, a former lawyer who had been brought up in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church
(which would merge with the PC-USA in 1906) and who was also a Presbyterian ruling elder, was elected to
Congress in 1890, then became the Democratic presidential candidate for three unsuccessful presidential bids. By
1905, Bryan had concluded that Darwinism and the modernism of Higher Criticism were allies in promoting
liberalism within the church, thereby in his view undermining the foundations of Christianity. When the General
Assembly met in 1923, Bryan was determined to strike against Darwinism and against Fosdick, so he organized a
campaign to be elected as Moderator of the General Assembly. He lost the election to a strong proponent of
allowing evolution to be taught at Presbyterian-run colleges and universities. Undaunted, Bryan took to opposing
Darwinism on the floor of the General Assembly. He proposed a resolution that the denomination should cease
payments to any school, college, or university where Darwinism was taught. Opponents argued that there were
plenty of Christians in the church who believed in evolution. Ultimately, the Assembly simply approved a
resolution condemning materialistic (as opposed to theistic) evolutionary philosophy. He did succeed in having a
report passed re-affirming the denomination's commitment to the Five Fundamentals of 1910.
Bryant ultimately opposed Clarence Darrow in the famous trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a public
school in Dayton, Tennessee. The 1925 trial proved to be a media circus, with reporters from across the country
descending on the small town of 1,900 people. Although the prosecution of Scopes was successful, the trial is
widely seen as a crucial moment in discrediting the fundamentalist movement in America, particularly after
Darrow called Bryan to the stand and he appeared little able to defend his view of the Bible.
At the 1926 General Assembly, a Special Committee delivered its report. It argued that there were five major
causes of unrest in the Presbyterian Church: 1) general intellectual movements, including "the so-called conflict
between science and religion", naturalistic worldviews, different understandings of the nature of God, and
changes in language; 2) historical differences going back to the Old School-New School split; 3) disagreements
about church polity, particularly the role of General Assembly, and lack of representation of women in the church;
4) theological changes; and 5) misunderstanding. The report went on to conclude that the Presbyterian system had
traditionally allowed a diversity of views when the core of truth was identical; and that the church flourished
when it focused on its unity of spirit. Toleration of doctrinal diversity, including in how to interpret the
Westminster Confession, was to be encouraged. The Five Fundamentals had no binding authority. The
committee's report was adopted.
The Battle for Princeton Theological Seminary, 1926–29
By 1920, Princeton Seminary was arguably the only remaining Old School institution in the Presbyterian Church.
The majority of the faculty in 1920 remained convinced Old Schoolers, including J. Gresham Machen. However,
to combat a perceived lack of training in practical divinity, a number of more moderate New Schoolers were
brought in. By 1925, the Old School's majority on the faculty was threatened. After many spirited issues, the 1926
General Assembly formed a committee to study how to reconcile the two parties at Princeton. The committee
reported back at the General Assembly of 1927. The report concluded that the source of the difficulties at
Princeton was that some of the Princeton faculty (i.e. Machen) were trying to keep Princeton in the service of a
certain party in the church rather than doing what was in the best interest of the denomination as a whole. The
General Assembly renewed the committee's mandate and ordered them to study how to re-organize the seminary.
This led Machen to declare that the 1927 General Assembly was "probably the most disastrous meeting, from the
point of view of evangelical Christianity, that has been held in the whole history of our Church." Machen
composed and had circulated in the denomination a document entitled "The Attack Upon Princeton Seminary: A
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Plea for Fair Play." He argued that Princeton was the only seminary continuing to defend orthodoxy among the
older theological institutions in the English-speaking world. The loss of the seminary would be a major blow for
orthodoxy. The moderates and liberals had control of pretty much every seminary in the denomination: why
couldn't the conservatives be left with one?
The 1929 General Assembly voted to re-organize the seminary. Rather than contesting this decision in the courts
as had been threatened, Machen now decided to set up a new seminary to be a bastion of conservative thought.
This institution would become Westminster Theological Seminary (named to stress its fidelity to the Westminster
Confession of Faith) and several conservatives on the Princeton faculty, including Machen, would leave Princeton
to teach at Westminster. Some initially opposed setting up Westminster, arguing that conservatives should stay at
Princeton where they could continue to provide an orthodox voice. Machen responded that Princeton was in a
state of apostasy and that he couldn't serve alongside apostates. As a result of the departure of Machen and the
denominational conservatives, especially of the Old School, the shape of the Presbyterian Church in the USA as a
modernist denomination was secured.
The dispute between the fundamentalists and modernists would be played out in nearly every Christian
denomination. By the 1920s, it was clear that every mainstream Protestant denomination was going to be willing
to accommodate modernism, with the exception of the Presbyterians and Southern Baptists, where it was still
unclear. When the outcome of the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy brought the Presbyterians into the
camp willing to accommodate modernism, this left the Southern Baptists as the only mainstream denomination
where fundamentalists were still active within the denomination. Although the 1930s and 1940s and the ensuing
years neo-orthodox theological consensus mitigated much of the polemics, disputes erupted again beginning in
the mid-1960s over the extent of involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, the issue of ordination of women,
and, especially since the 1990s, the issue of ordination of gays and lesbians.
Mergers and Splits
The PCUSA would eventually merge with the United Presbyterian Church of North America (a branch of the
Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church) in 1958 to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of
America. The UPCUSA developed the Confession of 1967 which was the church's first new confession of faith in
three centuries. The UPCUSA also adopted a Book of Confessions in 1967, which would include the Confession
of 1967, the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Second Helvetic and
Scots Confessions and the Barmen Declaration. A conservative group broke away from the Presbyterian Church
in the United States in 1973, mainly over the issues of women's ordination and a perceived drift toward
theological liberalism. This group formed the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)
Attempts at union between the churches (UPCUSA and PCUS) were renewed in the 1970s, culminating in the
merger of the two churches to form the Presbyterian Church (USA) on June 10, 1983. At the time of the merger,
the churches had a combined membership of 3,121,238. A new national headquarters was established in
Louisville, Kentucky in 1988 replacing the headquarters of the UPCUSA in New York City and the PCUS located
in Atlanta, Georgia. The merger essentially consolidated those moderate-to-liberal American Presbyterians into
one body. Practically all other U.S. Presbyterian bodies (the Cumberland Presbyterians being a partial exception)
profess some measure of doctrinal Calvinism, literalist hermeneutics, and conservative politics.
For the most part, PC(USA) Presbyterians, not unlike similar mainline traditions, are fairly (in some instances,
strongly) progressive (liberal) on matters such as doctrine, environmental issues, sexual morality, and economic
issues, though the denomination remains divided and conflicted on these issues. A recent phenomenon is that of
conservative-minded groups in the PC(USA) (such as the Confessing church movement) remaining in the main
body, rather than leaving to form new, break-away groups, as those most theologically conservative usually did.
However, a new split-away denomination has been established as of January 2012 called the Evangelical
Covenant Order of Presbyterians.
The social tensions and prejudices created by the Fundamentalist-Modernist split would remain very active within
American Christianity into the twenty-first century, with modernists seeing fundamentalists as intolerant, and
fundamentalists seeing modernists as overly willing to compromise with the forces of secularism, abandoning
authentic Christianity in the process. Fortunately, the future is in God’s hands.
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