5. Contested Identities: Fundamentalism, Race, and Americanism

Abstract

Debates within the black community over the value of fundamentalist religion often involved evaluations of how fundamentalism affected the race as a whole (for good or for ill) in the quest for justice and racial equality. This consideration, in turn, was often paired with assertions about the nature of American identity and how African Americans could best stake their claim as full, rightful participants in the American experiment. In this context, fundamentalism was treated not only as a matter of religion, but also one of race and politics. Black fundamentalists argued for their race’s true Americanism by drawing on the idea that the United States was a historically “Christian nation” and connecting their “old-time” fundamentalist faith with American ideals such as emancipation and democracy, while critics cast fundamentalism as a regressive blight on the black community, out of step with such American ideals as free thinking, free expression, and religious toleration. In newspapers, in epistolary exchanges, and in pulpits the debate over whether fundamentalism ought to be understood as a religion of racial progress or a religion of racial regress continued into the 1930s and beyond.