Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919–1925

Andrew Christopher Smith

• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781621902287
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

Scholars and journalists have paid significant attention to the contemporary Fundamentalist tendencies of southern Protestantism. However, many studies neglect to consider how the Fundamentalist controversies that roiled the Baptists and Presbyterians of the North during the 1920s affected the Southern Baptist Convention schism of 1970–2000.

Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919–1925 explores the scope and character of the interaction between Southern Baptists and early Fundamentalism during the late 1910s and early 1920s. By focusing more closely on the Southern Baptist Convention, Andrew Christopher Smith examines the interaction between the northern Fundamentalist movement and southern religion during the era. Though scholars agree that Fundamentalism is not native to the South, no book thus far has considered the effects of the Fundamentalist movement and how it influenced southern Protestant denominational organizations, independent of southern rejection of Fundamentalist-sponsored interdenominational evangelistic and educational institutions. Smith proposes that Fundamentalist ideas, lingering in the atmosphere of the South after wafting there through hearsay, national religious periodicals, and the secular press,likely influenced Southern Baptist self-understanding during this critical period.

Examining documentary evidence, Smith explains that following the First World War, Southern Baptists pushed toward bureaucratization. The “Seventy-Five Million Campaign,” a fundraising and organization-building drive that the convention approved in 1919, was the denominational movement through which the selective appropriation of Fundamentalist ideas occurred. Exploring the interplay of Southern Baptist claims and northern Fundamentalist precepts, Smith fills a void in scholarly examination of early-twentieth-century Baptist history.

ANDREW C. SMITH is assistant professor of religion at Carson-Newman University. His articles have appeared in Perspectives in Religious Studies, Baptist History and Heritage, and Tennessee Baptist History.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword, Keith Harper
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Transformation of Baptist Identity: E. Y. Mullins and the New Baptist Democracy
• Chapter 2. The Clock of the World: Southern Baptists, the Interchurch World Movement, and the Seventy-Five Million Campaign
• Chapter 3. The Fundamentalization of Cooperation: Southern Baptist Reaction to the Fundamentalist Movement, 1919–1925
• Chapter 4. Carrots and Sticks: Reward and Coercion in the Seventy-Five Million Campaign
• Chapter 5. The Right Arm of Our Power: Southern Baptist Higher Education and the “Scarborough Synthesis”
• Chapter 6. The Empire’s New Clothes: Dissent against Denominational Centralization during the Seventy-Five Million Campaign
• Conclusion. The Legacy of the Seventy-Five Million Campaign and the Impact of Fundamentalism among Southern Baptists
• Appendix. J. Frank Norris’s Relationship to the Southern Baptist Convention
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index