In his well-researched book on black conservative Christians in the United States, Daniel Bare expands fundamentalism to include black Protestant ministers who openly embraced the language and doctrines of fundamentalism. Focusing on the thirty-year period between the publication of the essays that became The Fundamentals and World War II, Bare uncovers and reinterprets the many black ministerial voices who claimed fundamentalism aligned with their understanding of the Bible and the doctrines of the church. As he notes in the introduction, the work does not aim to displace the historiography of fundamentalism: “However, this book does insist that there is a history of black fundamentalism, and that lifting new voices from the documentary record helps clarify a heretofore opaque chapter in the story of American fundamentalism” (14).
Indeed, Bare builds on the work of Mary Beth Mathews's exploration of black conservative theologies that should have made black Christians allies of white fundamentalists in Doctrine and Race. He, however, suggests that Mathew's use of “a general emphasis on racial justice”—often bringing black and white conservatives into tension—meant she too easily dismissed instances when black fundamentalists overtly used their fundamentalism as a way to address systemic racism (5–6). On the issue of how black divines saw themselves within the worldview of fundamentalism, Black Fundamentalists succeeds. From the numerous preachers who identify as fundamentalists cited in the book, Bare makes a compelling case for their inclusion in fundamentalism's history. On the issue of how black fundamentalism became part of the institutional forms of American fundamentalism, however, the book leaves more questions than answers.
To immerse readers in this way of thinking, Bare tells the story of black intellectuals who saw a threat made by “modernism” and reacted to defend the faith. The way he engages this story is to show the reader how newspaper editors and religious leaders picked up the language of fundamentalism (Chapters 1 and 2) but shaped it into their own image. This shift, not an adoption of white fundamentalism, took on a racial shape (Chapter 3) when black ministers began to note that modernism in a scientific form had begun to provide a scientific understanding to long-held racial assumptions of black inferiority. This critique is important for understanding that one of the reactions to modernity is about how modernist thinkers, including theologians and ministers, readily adopted racial tropes into political progressivism and the Social Gospel. Bare's observation about the usage of black fundamentalists’ ideas is important on this point. These ministers experienced American racism so they could shape judgment of that system and its political outcomes in antimodernist ways.
In Chapter 4, on the training of black ministers at American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), the reader gets both the thrust of the argument but also the limits of claiming how closely aligned to fundamentalism black religious leaders were. ABTS was a joint partnership among “progressive” Southern Baptists and the National Baptist Convention. Institutional battles over fundamentalism found full expression in higher education, particularly in the training of ministers. Given ABTS's founding as part of the Southern Baptist mission to African Americans, Bare correctly notes how much of the seminary's founding rested in the language of Southern Baptists’ understanding of the authority of scripture. The Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M 1925) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) outlined a critical approach to modernism, but it did so in such a way as to forestall the push by people like J. Frank Norris who wanted the SBC to be more fully aligned with his understanding of fundamentalism, particularly in seminaries. At the moment Bare centers black fundamentalists within the larger fundamentalist stream in response to modernism in education, he is using the SBC as a stand-in for fundamentalism, which in the larger fundamentalist movement was not fundamentalist. The centrality of defending the institutional structures of the SBC against fundamentalist influences found expression in BF&M, so it is a document that frames a nuanced response among Southern Baptists to defend the Bible against modernism but also reject the fundamentalist movement.
In the ways that racial uplift caused tensions between Southern Baptists and National Baptists at ABTS, it appears that white fundamentalists also resisted black fundamentalist claims of alliance over their overt political positions against systemic racism (Chapter 5). While African American religious leaders took varying approaches to Jim Crow, all were keenly aware of how much white supremacy benefited white Christians regardless of the fundamentalist/modernist debate. Bare's use of “progressive fundamentalists” in the final sentence of Chapter 5 suggests his findings are closer to Mathews. The racial boundary marking, a trademark of fundamentalism, was as important to white conservatives as protecting the fundamentals of the faith.
By including black conservative religious leaders in the movement of fundamentalism, Bare highlights the recurrent emphasis in American Christianity on American notions of whiteness and triumphant Christianity. Black Fundamentalists shows these ministers’ affinity with defending the authority of God and the Bible by taking on the mantle of fundamentalism. For some, their deep commitment to antimodern thinking makes them fundamentalists. Scholars of fundamentalism and evangelicalism can no longer dismiss Black American Protestants from the history of those movements because they vote differently, as they are often lumped together in American religious history. Scholars who take the modernists’ position that black Christians advocated a modernist position because of their understanding of systemic racism can also no longer ignore the many voices who pushed against modernist notions of progress using the Bible as their sole authority. Bare has revealed the complexity of African American Protestantism by highlighting the complicated nature of defending the Bible to argue against the racism of modernists who waged significant scientific battles to prove black inferiority. The investment in biblical certainty does not always lead to a narrow reading of scripture regarding politics, particularly in the hands of those who have experienced the full breadth of American oppression.
