CRCpedia: Fundamentalism

The movement known as Christian fundamentalism in the United States has multiple origins, went through multiple phases of development, and has manifest in diverse regions and cultures. Historian George Marsden lays out at least three origins of fundamentalism. The first, and perhaps most relevant to the CRC, is Old School Calvinism. This group mostly consists of theologians and Biblical scholars who, in the early 20th century, became alarmed at the increasing influence of liberal theology. The intellectual core of this group was a group of theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary who fought the liberals on the ground of doctrine. In 1881, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield of Princeton published their famous defense of the “inerrancy” of Scripture. If Scripture is the Word of God – and did not, as some liberal scholars said, merely contain the Word of God – and if the meaning of Scripture is plain to all intelligence and does not depend on points of view, then Scripture must be completely accurate in both its description of salvation and its recording of nature and history. Another theologian who launched attacks on liberalism was J. Gresham Machen. In his Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923, Machen argues that liberalism, far from a progressive or innovative expression of Christianity, is in fact not Christianity at all, but an entirely different religion. When some liberal theologians argue that Jesus was a human being who procedurally achieved a divine status, or that Jesus did not die a substitutionary death on the cross, they have departed from the essentials of historical Christianity, and were promoting an alternative faith in human rationality or social progress.

Two other origins of fundamentalism that Marsden identifies are the millenarian movement based upon dispensationalism, and the holiness movement that inspired Methodists and Baptists alike. Premillennial dispensationalism was first theorized by the Plymouth Brethren priest John Nelson Darby, and found its most classical formulation in the works of Cyrus I. Scofield. His works gained popularity in the United States in the late 19th century, just as the confident doctrine of postmillennialism began to erode after the Civil War. Dispensationalists found in premillennialism a somber assessment of the present age that reflected the worries about warfare, industrialization, and modern thought that also troubled the broader fundamentalist movement. From 1876 to 1901, renowned premillennialists hosted the annual Niagara Bible Conference, aiming to bring together premillennialism and theological conservatism.

Relatedly, the holiness movement, which constitutes Marsden’s third origin of fundamentalism, was also taking off during this time. This movement had its roots in both Pentecostalism and dispensationalism. Several great Pentecostal revivalists of the early 20th century borrowed and modified the Methodist teaching of the believer’s total sanctification following a “Baptism of the Spirit.” The dispensationalist idea of the age of the spirit fitted this idea well, and as a result, numerous Pentecostal churches emerged that pulled together radical sanctification, premillennial dispensationalism, and the fundamentalist commitment to supernaturalism. Though the Calvinist fundamentalists were often embarrassed by the Pentecostals’ extravagant style, the Pentecostal fundamentalists continue to found some of the largest fundamentalist institutions, such as the Assemblies of God and Aimee Semple McPherson’s Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

These various strands of fundamentalism came together in 1910 for the landmark publication of the pamphlets called The Fundamentals. Funded by oil money, the pamphlet drew together more than ninety articles, and sold more than three million copies. The main theme of these articles was an informed defense against modern bias. True science and true criticism, these authors claimed, were to be applauded, but they do not require an a priori rejection of supernaturalism. Belief in a supernatural world and Biblical miracles does not necessarily conflict with intelligence and science. Following that, the pamphlets emphasized the creation, virgin birth, Jesus’s bodily death and resurrection, and the realness of believers’ spiritual experience as nonnegotiable for Christianity. The restraint they showed on matters of dispensationalism and politics reflected a movement still in flux about its social identity, as well as a willingness to collaborate across doctrinal divides.

A series of events in the 1920s, however, quickly upended the milder kind of fundamentalism and hardened its boundaries. World War I was a watershed when it came to the fundamentalists’ attitude toward politics. While many fundamentalists had been reluctant to wield political power to advance their religious interests, WWI convinced many of them that “German barbarity” flowed out of the higher criticism and secular philosophy of German universities, hence the need to defend the “Christian civilization” of America against German skepticism. A militant and politically partisan wing of fundamentalism began to rear its head. Then, in 1925, the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial marked the social death of many fundamentalists. The trial was a legal victory but a total cultural defeat for the fundamentalists. William Jennings Bryan’s inept defense of Biblical inerrancy, coupled with H. L. Mencken’s relentless satire, seared in the public mind an image of fundamentalists as intellectually impaired country simpletons. In the midst of public ridicule, the fundamentalists turn away from mainstream society and formed a powerful but isolated subculture over the next few decades.

The popular satire of fundamentalism was an exaggeration, but it conveyed a modicum of truth. Fundamentalism, to a significant extent, began as an academic movement led by theologians and Biblical scholars. J. Gresham Machen was a case in point. When Princeton became too liberal for him, Machen led an exodus from there and co-founded the fundamentalist Westminster Theological Seminary, from where he continued to launch intellectual attacks on liberalism. Yet in the decades following 1925, fundamentalism went rural and Southern, and in the process became associated with southern conservatism, segregation, anticommunism, and even anti-intellectualism. The belligerent style of “Texas Tornado” J. Frank Norris and the overbearing personality of Carl McIntire are two examples of the new type of fundamentalists who battled not in academia, but in the arena of culture and global politics.

In the 1950s, fundamentalists enjoyed a cultural resurgence. The “new evangelicals” exemplified by Billy Graham emerged as a movement with fundamentalist roots, but with a more open attitude toward society. Through religious revival, global missions, and parachurch organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals, evangelicals asserted themselves as an unneglectable social force. The boundary between evangelicalism and fundamentalism had always been porous. While some fundamentalists of Southern or Calvinist heritage critiqued Billy Graham’s “progressive” stance on racial and confessional issues, others joined the mainstream evangelical movement and reaped its fruits. In 1980, when the Christian Right emerged as a powerful political force, certain branches of fundamentalism surged in popularity with it. Jerry Falwell was a doctrinally fundamentalist Baptist preacher who saw behind the Civil Rights movement the hand of Moscow. Other intellectual architects of the Christian Right, such as Francis Schaeffer, also borrowed profusely from the “theonomists” within fundamentalism, such as Rousas Rushdoony. The popularity of the so-called New Apostolic Reformation, which combined the Pentecostal prophesying of Paula Cain-White and the theonomy of Douglas Wilson, testifies to the continuous influence of certain branches of fundamentalism in American politics.

What does the CRC have to do with fundamentalism? Historically, the CRC had sometimes been grouped with the fundamentalists, given our conservative theological stance and opposition to liberalism, yet the CRC had mostly walked a third path between the extremes. Instead of abandoning higher education altogether, the CRC’s Calvin College and Seminary had been an intellectual center for many Christians. In the second half of the 20th century, several renowned scholars with CRC background had advanced the cause of historical Christianity in academia, not via exclusion or belligerence, but by making sound arguments that point out real oversights in the predominant secularism of their colleagues. Alvin Plantinga made a good case for philosophers to not reject theism as fundamentally irrational. Nicholas Wolterstorff argued against excluding religious values from public politics, and called for “principled pluralism” as a richer alternative to flat secularism. George Marsden and Mark Noll, both having held positions at Calvin College, brought to the field of American church history nuanced insight of religious communities that secular scholars often overlooked. Few denominations could claim to have fostered so many intellectuals who argued from the perspective of historical Christianity while using the language and methods of widely accepted academic standard.

Theologically, perhaps the most important difference between the CRC and the more militant branches of fundamentalism came down to our different understandings of common grace. As the 1924 CRC synod affirmed, “in addition to the saving grace of God, shown only to those who are elected to eternal life, there is also a certain favor, or grace, of God shown to his creatures in general,” which is called common grace. Therefore, “God, without renewing the heart, so influences human beings that, though incapable of doing any saving good, they are able to do civil good.” This understanding enables us to appreciate God’s work in portions of society and academia that do not visibly acknowledge God’s salvific grace, and to engage people of different beliefs sympathetically. As a contrast, Westminster Theological Seminary, and the theonomist branch that claims to be under its influence, went in the opposite direction. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster, for example, critiqued Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck for incorporating too much “pagan philosophy” of natural law into their Christian thought. In his “presuppositional apologetics,” Van Til insists that Reformed Christians necessarily differ from everybody else on science, politics, morality, and even epistemology, hence “on the Reformed basis there is no area of neutrality between the believer and the unbeliever.” The dichotomy that presuppositionism fosters marks a profound difference between the self-proclaimed Old School Calvinists and the Dutch Reformed theologians.

Several historical factors contributed to the CRC’s distance from the fundamentalist movement. Being primarily an immigrant denomination with strong Dutch heritage, especially in its earlier decades, the CRC had long distinguished itself from the Scottish and British branch of Reformed Christianity. Its avid usage of Thomas Aquinas and natural law reflects the divergent course it traveled. Moreover, as a denomination of immigrants, the CRC might have not felt as strong of a need as the fundamentalist Calvinists did to become stalwarts of the Christian civilization of America. Despite having mostly dodged the worst excesses of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of early 20th century, the “Culture War” of the second half of the 20th century poses a greater challenge, as demonstrated in the CRC’s recent controversies over gender, sexuality, and The Banner’s editorship. For the coming tidal waves, the CRC is better positioned than many denominations to handle its impacts, but it requires us to dig into our own history as one staunchly on the side of historical Christianity, yet not necessarily driven to combativeness or dichotomy.

Bibliography

“Common Grace.” Christian Reformed Church. https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/position-statements/common-grace, visited 4/21/2026.

Hankins, Barry. Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

Hummel, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023.

Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1923.

Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Van Til, Cornelius. A Christian Theory of Knowledge. Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Co; 1969.

Williams, Daniel K. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Xu Ximian. “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism: Retrieving and Reconsidering Dutch Neo-Calvinism in the Chinese Context” in Modern Chinese Theologies, vol. 2: Independent and Indigenous. Edited by Chloë Starr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023.

Footnotes

George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2006), 113.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1923), 1-18.

For an overview of the Calvinist roots and the early popularization of premillennial dispensationalism, see Daniel Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023), ch.2-6.

Marsden, Fundamentalism, 93-94.

Marsden, Fundamentalism, 119-123.

The movie Inherit the Wind, directed by Stanley Kramer (MGM, 1960), is both a fairly accurate depiction of the historical Scopes trial and a reminder of how the image of religious fundamentalists as fanatic simpletons lingered in the public memory even to the 1960s.

Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2010), 171-179.

Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 198.

“Common Grace,” Christian Reformed Church, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/position-statements/common-grace, visited 4/21/2026.

Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Co; 1969), 18.

One recent study that highlights the contrast between the Dutch and the Westminster branches of Reformed theology with regards to common grace is Xu Ximian, “Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism: Retrieving and Reconsidering Dutch Neo-Calvinism in the Chinese Context” in Modern Chinese Theologies, vol. 2: Independent and Indigenous, ed. Chloë Starr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 69-89.