In “Chosen Land,” Sutton identifies four streams of Christian belief which emerged as the nation matured: conservative, revivalist, liberal, and liberationist. Christians who drew from the conservative stream emphasized tradition and historic creeds; revivalists prioritized the conversion of souls and the transformation of individual lives; liberals sought to adapt Christian theology to the latest intellectual currents; and liberationists saw faith as a vehicle for social justice. The streams occasionally flowed together in a single, mighty river. At other times, they split and moved in opposite directions.
In the nineteen-twenties, the topology of faith was dramatically shifting. Acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, along with loosened sexual mores and technological progress, threatened to dislodge the church’s primacy in American life. The journalist Walter Lippmann noted the “dissolution of the old modes of thought” and the way the “circumstances of life” had conspired with “the intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative belief incredible to large masses of men.” The needs of religious consumers were changing, and church leaders scrambled to adapt.
On Sunday, May 21, 1922, the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan became the site of a fork in the river. The church’s parklike campus took up an entire block on Fifth Avenue, and its high pulpit was occupied by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a bespectacled liberal Baptist minister. Fosdick had acquired renown as the author of a series of devotional books on prayer, faith, and service. At First Presbyterian, his irenic, empathetic sermons became public spectacles. On Sunday mornings, lines extended outside the sanctuary doors, and ushers seated worshippers in every nook of the church, even on cushions on the altar stairs.
Fosdick was part of the modernist movement in American Protestantism, which grappled with the implications of evolution and with new scholarship about the Bible’s origins. Liberal clergy abandoned certain tenets of Christian orthodoxy—the Virgin Birth, Christ’s miracles—for a more literary and historical approach to the Bible. Many were proponents of the so-called Social Gospel, arguing that believers’ obligations to the poor and needy were just as important as the project of soul-winning. In response, an alarmed cohort of theological conservatives pledged to defend the “fundamentals” of the faith and root out liberalism in their denominations.
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.