Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era by Daniel R. Bare

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era Daniel R. Bare Curtis J. Evans Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Probably no religious groups in American history, with the exception of Puritans, have received as much attention and scholarship over the last decade or two as white evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. Beginning with George Marsden’s groundbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture, the scholarship has continued to flow. Two books serve as bookends of one era of this scholarship: Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997) and Matthew Sutton’s A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2017). Before Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism (2017) came out with its fuller treatment of black fundamentalism, Sutton’s book was the only synthetic account to take seriously the experience of African American fundamentalists. One of the most striking insights from Sutton’s book is how seemingly little shared theological positions between white and black fundamentalists mattered for white fundamentalists insofar as their political and civic responsibilities toward African Americans. White fundamentalists supported segregation, espoused and propounded racist and buffoonish caricatures of black religiosity, and almost universally rejected any attempt to reform American society according to a Social Gospel model that found a notable [End Page 128] and important following among black (liberal and conservative) and white (liberal) Protestants. Daniel R. Bare’s Black Fundamentalists stands squarely in the midst of this historiographical debate and argues that black Americans have been excluded from the scholarship on Protestant fundamentalism. He seeks to correct that lacuna by examining the ways in which some African Americans accepted self-identification as fundamentalists and adhered to a number of “fundamentalist” doctrines. Bare argues for the salience of theological doctrine as a marker of identity and as a “meaningful analytical category.” The latter argument is a driving force in his narrative, though its plausibility is less compelling as it lays out the details of what the fundamentalist label meant apart from opposition to certain modernist positions. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the details of the lives of these black fundamentalist leaders. They appear like spectral figures; we know almost nothing of their educational background and the kinds of church contexts in which they preached. Bare makes no significant mention of the Great Migration as a force in catalyzing these divisions within black Protestantism. Even when social context comes into play, Bare tends to misconstrue the power dynamics of racial oppression by insisting that “the different social and cultural circumstances facing black and white communities often led to substantially different social actions and applications, even among those who would commonly agree on the most important fundamentalist doctrines” (15). To speak of black confrontations with racism as merely “different social actions and applications” of theological doctrines indicates at best a serious misunderstanding of the harshness and circumscriptions of social existence for blacks, as though the two groups were equal in merely “applying” doctrines to the circumstances of their lives. Black Fundamentalists has five chapters and a helpful introduction that points out the ways in which race and African American fundamentalism have not been adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Bare makes a compelling case for the inclusion of African Americans in narratives of fundamentalism, but his specific doctrinal approach to black Protestants leaves a lot of missing parts. The first chapter uses African American weekly newspapers as a source for discussions about the prevalence of fundamentalism in black communities. Given the complicated, critical, and sometimes adversarial perspective that black newspapers took on black religious life, it seems doubtful that their claims about fundamentalism as a widespread phenomenon among black Protestants should be taken as the last word. Calling someone a fundamentalist was often a way to denigrate their entire religious perspective, and black newspapers and secular critics often resorted to this tactic (a point that Bare notes in respect to claims about what was best for black civic and political life). [End Page 129] Bare’s second chapter looks at the five fundamental doctrines across black Protestantism and compares black...