Let us begin with the problem of binaries. Stark differentiation strengthens the consequences of difference. If you label something “sacred” for example, and suggest its opposite is “profane” the maintenance of that difference becomes quickly outsized because their difference is contingent on their connection. “Sacred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions,” Émile Durkheim writes. “Profane things are those things to which such prohibitions apply and which must keep their distance from what is sacred.” There is no profane without the maintenance of the sacred; the sacred is established through its labored separation from the profane. Binaries are not static opposition as much as they are descriptive of a tense purlieu of their differentiation. In the case of the sacred and profane, Durkheim describes that space as religion itself. “Religious beliefs are the representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they sustain among themselves or with profane things,” he famously explained in 1912, setting the stage for the modern study of religion as one devoted to the analysis of the perpetuation of that binary.Footnote ¹

It is tempting to connect that historical advent (the 1912 publication of The Elementary Forms of Religion) with the concurrent unfolding of the so-called “modernist-fundamentalist” controversies in the United States, to think about how the naming of one scholastic binary in France might connect to, even inform, the denominational and cultural experience of another dramatic dualism underway in the early twentieth-century United States. Such a connection might situate those intense denominational squabbles within a broader epochal story about naming the religious. After all, nineteenth-century archaeological discovery, colonial encounter, Biblical criticism, positivism, and evolutionism informed the emergence of the social sciences and theological argument in the early twentieth century. In both contexts, a certain binary formulae emerged as central to the right description of religion and descriptions of right religion. I am not seeking to force a literal transatlantic dynamic where sociological exposition effects fundamentalist vitriol, or modernist theology inspires European social thought. Rather, I want to hold these two artifacts together as indicative of a common context of the modern.

There has been no greater advocate for the examination of binary distinctions as the subject for religious studies than Jonathan Z. Smith, who agreed with Durkheim's emphasis on religion as a project of oppositional maintenance, and added that the study of religion must focus on the development of taxonomic principles for the classification and diagnosis of religious subjects.Footnote ² Smith criticizes scholars who “assert some form of affirmation of transcendence” through the description of dualistic classes within religions. But he still holds that scholars must find ways to continue analysis of oppositional classes despite such hierarchical inclinations, since the oppositional forms comprise religion. “Much of the intellectual work of religion is devoted to the making of fine distinctions,” Smith implores, pushing our intellectual work to be focused upon the particular delineative scrupulosity of theirs.Footnote ³

In one sense, there is no more obvious subject for the scholar of religion than that of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies, insofar as they were controversies first and foremost obsessed with the differentiation between us and them, between the rightly Christian and the wrongly Catholic, between doctrine and heresy, between the true and the false.Footnote ⁴ A study of the archival record of those controversies results in a sky-high pile of dualistic thinking and oppositional discourse. Six years before he would break from Princeton Theological Seminary to found Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) tried to reason with his Christian public through the pages of Homiletic Review. In its September 1923 issue, he wrote: “two mutually exclusive religions are being propagated within the Presbyterian church, as with other ‘evangelical’ churches. One is the great redemptive religion known as Christianity; the other is the naturalistic or agnostic modernism represented by Dr. Fosdick and by many Presbyterian ministers.” Machen's text pulled no punches: “if one of these is true the other is false. It is, therefore, quite intolerable that both of them should be propagated by the same funds and with the endorsement of the same organizations.”Footnote ⁵ Since the northern Presbyterian church of which he was a part failed to agree to his preferred “redemptive” Christianity, Machen would eventually break altogether from his denomination to found a new one, in a sectarian pattern that would unfold as well within the Baptists and Disciples of Christ.Footnote ⁶ This is a familiar fracturing template in U.S. religious history. Whether it is the Antinomian crisis or Civil War schisms, the 1883 “trefa banquet” in Cincinnati or the 1964 break by Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam, it seems the story of U.S. religions is often boiled down to a series of point-counterpoint plots in which new syntheses emerge from poetic reform, tireless protest, or bitter secession. The modernist-fundamentalist controversies slip into this arrangement beautifully, since there were, indeed, serious doctrinal fights, profound ecclesiastical battles, and some melodramatic courtroom trials entirely orienting around an intensely dichotomous differentiation between what could be understood from either posited side as true religion and what was accused to be absolutely false religion. Machen's words are just the documentary tip of the iceberg. We can, therefore, get off scot-free with the ongoing assertion of two sides to this story, right?

Something itches in such a conclusion. I want to locate that itch in the problem of the very binaries propagated by it. However taxing one might find the sheer invocation of the postmodern turn, we must admit that its intellectual result was to be profoundly wary of anything divided as either this or that, as primitive or modern, liberal or conservative, straight or gay.Footnote ⁷ What we know, now, is that the binary is its own kind of hegemony. First, the binary fails to account for any subject not acquiescent to its clarity. The biracial child, for instance, confounds talk of white versus black, just as the transgender person confuses stark differentiation between man and woman. Similarly, drawing a firm line between modernist and fundamentalist prohibits an understanding of persons such as Church of God co-founder A. J. Tomlinson (1865–1943) or denominations like the Assemblies of God, who were at various times accused by both modernists and fundamentalists of ignorance and heresy, and so, despite their espoused Christianity, did not fit within the primal differentiation modernists and fundamentalists wanted to make within Christendom between the right sorts and the wrong.Footnote ⁸ Nor does it make sense of evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899), theologian Cyrus Scofield (1843–1921), businessman Lyman Stewart (1840–1923), or educator Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928), each of whom have been profiled by either Timothy Gloege or Brendan Pietsch in their recent work as men wrongly boxed by the classification of “fundamentalist” since they were, in so many ways, tied to the bureaucratic tendencies, mercantile industries, and scholastic techniques of the modern era.Footnote ⁹

The second problem with binaries (besides their obscuring of human complexity, diversity, and ambiguity) is that they are presumptive of concepts they cannot interrogate. Talk of black and white presumes a concept of race; talk of women and men presumes a gender; talk of modernism and fundamentalism presumes a concept of modern religion (more specifically, of modern Christianity). Consider this passage, from a 1923 text by a self-described American Christian: “There is no more important question today for the Church than this: ‘What is fundamental or essential according to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?’”Footnote ¹⁰ Without attribution, it would be impossible to guess whether this quotation was from a fundamentalist or a modernist (as it happens, it is from someone usually lumped among the modernists). This is because both fundamentalists and modernists shared significant attributes, attributes of their particular religious system (Christianity) and their particular modernity as discourses. In this specific quotation, two immediate commonalities emerge: first, that both modernists and fundamentalists saw themselves as involved in overt projects of distillation, wherein they as authors, theologians, and evangelists would redact the entirety of Christian history and knowledge could to certain premises. Second, both parties held Christ as centrally determinative to their experiences of (to use their commonly-deployed word) faith. That we have, in the intervening one hundred years, plotted the modernists as more like aristocratic satirist H. L. Mencken than Congregational pastor Washington Gladden is not only anachronistic, but also a signal of the profound success of the fundamentalist argument.

This is not to say that fundamentalist theology of the early twentieth century has endured to the twenty-first (a claim which I would strongly resist), rather that the epithets hurled by fundamentalists at modernists were effectively taken up by the popular culture, and the popular American religious imagination, as apt summations of modernism. In such a cartoon rendering, fundamentalists were yokels, primitives clinging to an irrational orthodoxy, and modernists were snobbish cynics with a thin coating of Christianity. And so the opposition between expert counsel William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) and defense attorney Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) became a metonym for the modernist-fundamentalist controversies, rather than that between University of Chicago theologian Shailer Mathews (1863–1941) and Moody Bible Institute president James M. Gray (1851–1935). The differences between Mathews and Gray were both more theologically particular and less sensational than those conveyed in the epigrammatic rants in Dayton, Tennessee.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the Scopes trial story became the story, with a resultant genealogy of increasingly shrill difference: the modernists were scientists and the fundamentalists were creationists; the modernists were iconoclasts and the fundamentalists were the orthodox, the modernists were on the Left and the fundamentalists on the Right; on and on in amplifying caricature of otherness.Footnote ¹² One could tell a story of modern media that began with coverage of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes in 1925 and concluded with the starkly contrasting coverage of the vice presidential nomination of Sarah Palin offered by Fox News and MSNBC in 2008. The hallmark of this narrative would be the popularization of binary as a form of ruthless segregationist public: they believe this; we believe that, and the difference is the only subject of conversation.

What such a divisive mode misses is that the opposing subjects stand on an expanse of common ground. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, few leading American Christians were uninterested in the development of applied theology; in the formalizing of Biblical reading practices; in the relationship between Christianity and other religions; in the role the research university would take in the history of Christianity; in the missionary enterprise and its goals; or in the imperative presence of Christ in what was widely seen to be a troubled present world. Modernists and fundamentalists may have spilt a lot of ink on what distinguished them from the other, but they did so within a narrowed conceptual frame of common interest. It seems that studies which reiterate the dichotomy between modernists and fundamentalists may not only miss the historical boat (failing to capture the overlapping entanglements of Biblical criticism and the social life of congregations, or the biographies of individuals in all their multiplicity) but also obscure the broader theological and cultural situation that held them in dualistic conjunction. This is why novelist Tom Robbins writes, “Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.”Footnote ¹³ As historians, our job is to “know better” than the mediated world how many distinctions exist between any two people, how many contradictions exist within any one biography, and what kind of intellectual premises situate our relentless practices of differentiation.

How, then, do we speak of broad movements, like modernism and fundamentalism, which we know had consequence for the lives of many, when those very ascriptions are contorting in their consolidations? By reducing the dichotomy through a recognition of what is commonly held between them. In this vein, I would like to highlight three aspects of the modern which ought to be understood as premises for any description of either modernism or fundamentalism. I argue for these features of the modern in an effort to reclaim the shared ground among diverse actors and between sworn enemies; to, in other words, situate a particular binary (modernism v. fundamentalism) in the religious and cultural frame of its production.

First, the modern describes the effects of modernization. Modernization refers to the simultaneous emergence of multiple new forms of social organization: of government and citizenship; of economic life and consumer choice; of educational institutions and the democratization of knowledge; of technological innovation and the popularization of science. Let us call this the modern epitomized by car manufacturer Henry Ford, an innovator who sought to ennoble the value of labor through a studied regimentation of production. This Henry Ford modern offered “a new kind of machine, one dedicated to the mass production not only of saleable things but also, and equally importantly, of consumable imagery.”Footnote ¹⁴ Any description of modernism or fundamentalism must consider the culture of industrialism that produced their common investment in the conceivable simultaneity of the urbane and the pastoral, of the worker and the manager, the democratic and the free market. The Henry Ford modern is the modern of material revelation, in which machines and humankind collaborate to create new social experience.Footnote ¹⁵

Second, the modern describes a focus on method, “on the security of a repeatable means of achieving reliable results.”Footnote ¹⁶ Such a focus on method could lead us to think again of Henry Ford and his assembly line; indeed, that tactic of production is an ideal encapsulation of the material manifestations of methodical thinking. Yet I want to underline instead the metaphysical substance of methodological consciousness. To be conscious of method is to watch how oneself enacts something or imagines its fruition; in other words, methodological awareness is nothing more than another way of describing self-consciousness. To borrow from the language of Martin Heidegger, within modernity, we understand ourselves as “picturing” the world, and the world as whatever can be successfully pictured by us. And so the “fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture,” wrote Heidegger.Footnote ¹⁷ This “conquest” is accomplished by “method,” our ability to reflect upon how something comes to be and to make it repeatedly so. This is why the modern is often described as the widespread identification of human subjectivity, that is, the revelation of our own particularity and self-constitution as a particular being. When we speak of Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf as modern writers par excellence, we mean that they showed how they thought about writing, and how they thought about consciousness in writing through their fictional works. Likewise, a focus on consciousness in the definition of modernism and fundamentalism requires that we understand those social movements as both aware of themselves as movements, as combative discourses, and as constructions of right concept (of religion, of theology, of church).

Third and finally, the modern is a claim of coherency. When a group of Christians decided to write a series of pamphlets and call it The Fundamentals, they imagined that they were concocting a coherent summation of the entirety of Christian thought. To focus on coherency as a defining feature of the modern is not to suggest that modern produced actually coherent things, recognizable as such to all readers. Rather, that a central intention of modern thought was to make coherent the incoherent. The modern is the frame trying to hold together items identified as different: the psychologist listening to you talk about conflicting desires; the trade union that reconciles and equalizes individual labor; the hygiene commission that battles your bacterial body. Modernism is the coherency brought to incoherency. It is the seriousness of the cohering effort that denotes the modern, whether it is the furrowed brow of the Dada collage-maker or the technical obsessiveness of the Biblical critic, theological editorial board, and missionary statistician. These attributes of the modern (its machinery, its consciousness, and its coherency) may be seen in the operations of every modernist or fundamentalist utterance, as well as in the cultural contexts that produced them. Even more, these common features of the modern determined significant efforts to account for such operations, utterances, and contexts, most significantly in the academic worlds that gave rise to the study of religion that would, in decades to come, pay such close attention to their controversies. This is why it is so very difficult to parse the modern. Not because we have grown beyond it, or because it is so rarified relative to our daily life. No. The challenge of the modern is ours in the present. We cannot conceive of ourselves outside of its premises which determine our naming of its reason and its religions.