Christian Fundamentalism - Organization

Organization

Fundamentalist movements were found in most North American Protestant denominations by 1919, with the attack on modernism in theology launched by the Fundamentalists in the Presbyterian and Baptist churches. Fundamentalism was especially controversial among Presbyterians. Although it began in the North its greatest popular strength was in the South, especially among Southern Baptists. By the late 1920s the national media had identified it with the South, largely ignoring manifestations elsewhere.

The leading organizer of the Fundamentalist campaign against modernism was William Bell Riley, a Northern Baptist based in Minneapolis, where his Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School (1902), Northwestern Evangelical Seminary (1935), and Northwestern College (1944) produced thousands of graduates. Riley created, at a large conference in Philadelphia in 1919, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA). It became the chief interdenominational fundamentalist organization in the 1920s. Although the fundamentalist drive of the 1920s to take control of the major Protestant denominations failed at the national level, the network of churches and missions fostered by Riley shows the movement was growing in strength, especially in The South. Both rural and urban in character, the flourishing movement acted as a denominational surrogate and aimed at a militant orthodoxy of evangelical Christianity. Riley was president until 1929, after which the WFCA faded in importance and was never replaced.