Mary Beth Swetnam Matthews in Doctrine and Race acknowledges the gaping racial divide that separated African American and white Christians into different religious spheres. The prevailing anti-black prejudices, vigilante violence, and enforced segregation that defined the racial nadir in American society in the early decades of the twentieth century drew the collusive sanction and participation of white Christian churches. Matthews documents in exhaustive detail the racial attitudes of white clergy that mirrored mostly southern white politicians and their supporters who emphasized black inferiority and supported structures and policies that mandated black subordination.

Notwithstanding the yawning racial divide between black and white Christians, intense controversies surrounding fundamentalism produced an uneasy congruence across these faith communities about the authority of the Bible, distress over scientific assaults against scriptural truths, and opposition to dancing, drinking, and other examples of morally lax lifestyles. Nonetheless, white and black religious sensibilities about fundamentalist and modernist controversies were strikingly distinct. Matthews correctly observes that whites defined fundamentalism as exclusively white while blacks perceived modernism as completely white. Black churches, while they shared with white churches similar attitudes about traditional theology, doctrine, and practice, espoused these positions for their own reasons. Black churches, evangelical in origin and with impressive institutional histories, viewed their orthodoxy as a source of religious authenticity. Moreover, championing marriage, morality, and sobriety strengthened black respectability claims that racist demagogues tried hard to undermine. African American Christians, Matthews argues, while doctrinally similar to whites, differed dramatically because of their determined denunciations of racism. Black preachers and their parishioners supported policies and objectives aimed at African American advancement and were aligned with progressive efforts to fight racism. She concedes that black religious leaders recognized that African American survival depended more on the attainment of equal rights than on the tangential fundamentalist/modernist debate.

Matthews describes black Baptist and Methodist denominations as redefining evangelicalism to have within it both traditional and progressive tendencies. Despite similar skepticism about modernist claims that challenged biblical authority and that advanced evolution, black religious thinking and white evangelical discourse happened in different intellectual spheres. But Matthews understates the breadth and richness of black religious discussion in which the fundamentalist/modernist controversy occurred. During this same period, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, whose book Matthews lists in her bibliography, discusses in Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Harvard University Press, 1993) how African American women developed a distinctive black womanist theology derived from biblical texts that accentuated the foundational role of women in the making of Christianity. From these heroines, African American women envisaged broadened roles for themselves in the same black Baptist denomination that Matthews highlights in her study. Matthews also hints at modernist influences in black Baptist and Methodist organizations, but she hardly mentions such large figures as Theophilus G. Steward, whose autobiography and two scholarly biographies are easily accessible. His wide-ranging views on subjects pertaining to Matthews's study would add to her examination. Moreover, there is Reverdy C. Ransom, prolific in his writings in the A.M.E. Church Review, which he edited between 1912 and 1924. Matthews scarcely cited this influential journal, and she consulted neither Ransom's autobiography nor the ample roster of biographies on him. The scholarship about these two towering figures are relevant to considerations about the richness of black religious discourse during the period that Matthews chronicles. Inclusion of the Baptist women about whom Higginbotham writes and the A.M.E. intellectuals, Steward and Ransom, when juxtaposed to fundamentalist/modernist commentators in these same denominations, allows for a better measure of the latter's importance.

Matthews discusses the alignments and occasional interactions between blacks and whites who espoused fundamentalist views. Missing from Matthews's analysis is an acknowledgement of the broad ecumenical affiliations of these evangelical black religious bodies. Their fundamentalist associations were only a part of a wide range of ecclesiastical relationships. Deserving of mention is Bishop George C. Clement of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. From 1904 to 1916, Clement served as editor of The Star of Zion, a newspaper that Matthews cites throughout her study. In 1916, he was elected a bishop. Between 1916 and 1934, Clement chaired the Committee of Church and Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches, a Protestant ecumenical body that white fundamentalists eschewed. These ecumenical involvements of black Baptist and especially the three large African American Methodist denominations, at least, dated back to 1881. These associations complicate the evangelical, fundamentalist, and modernist categories that Matthews explores. These affiliations require scholars to revisit how consequential was the fundamentalist/modernist debate in black Baptist and Methodist religious bodies.

Matthews already acknowledges that African American advancement was a higher priority for black religious leaders than debating the nuances of doctrinal beliefs and their relationship to science. In making this poignant point, Matthews could also note that this examination is best pursued in the context of the rich religious discourse occurring within black evangelical churches. Though evangelical and fundamentalist perspectives converged between black and white Christians, they were never sources of intellectual identity that primarily defined black Baptists and Methodists. This sacred history, a view emphasized in Laurie Maffly-Kipp's Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories (Harvard University Press, 2010), mentions how black religion was grounded in Afrocentric scriptural interpretations. Additionally, the three African American Methodist bodies, whose founders still were celebrated on special commemorative events, transcended any occasional congruence with fundamentalist or modernist proponents. Matthews correctly observes that black evangelicals devoted significant intellectual energies to fundamentalist and modernist matters and reinforced the perspectives of their white counterparts. These engagements, however, were secondary factors in shaping the essence of the African American religious experience. In the end, however, Matthews accurately argues that black religious leaders and their progressive tendencies about race took precedence over the doctrinal discussions that so preoccupied white fundamentalists and their modernist opponents.