II. A “Fundamental” Question

During his time as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, the red sandstone Gothic structure built in 1883 on West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, John Roach Straton was regarded as the most theologically conservative minister in the city. His sermons and other public activities received unparalleled press coverage. “Church news” was a common feature of mainstream papers during the early twentieth century, but the space devoted to the stanchly anti-modernist, anti-evolutionist, and nativist preacher was exceptional, at least until Fosdick's rise to prominence. Between 1918 and 1929, the New York Times, a major source for information on the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, printed hundreds of stories about Straton—mostly without commentary or explicit bias—detailing his attacks on the Museum of Natural History and its “Hall of Man” exhibit, the theater, the movies, and other ministers, as well as his support for Prohibition.Footnote ⁸ Straton was born in 1875 in Evansville, Indiana, where his father was a Baptist minister. His family moved to Georgia when he was young, and he spent the majority of his childhood and young adult life there. He attended Mercer College (now Mercer University) in Macon, Georgia, and Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied oratory before his ordination in 1900. After pastorates in Chicago, Baltimore, and Norfolk, he arrived in New York in 1918, where his conservative theological and social views were sharpened by his confrontation with the city. In his first sermon at Calvary, he declared that “mere reform apart from Christ cannot permanently heal the sores of our society.”Footnote ⁹ Soon, however, he was promoting moral reform in the name of the Christian faith.

Straton quickly became known for his campaign against “the dance craze” of the 1920s, presenting it as a serious threat to the sexual purity of the city's young women. “Social dancing” and “dance marathons” had captivated many Americans across the color line, and young people made dances like the “Jitterbug,” “Lindy Hop,” “Charleston,” “Foxtrot,” and “Swing” nearly irrepressible parts of popular culture. In the eyes of social conservatives, dance halls where strangers could meet and come into physical contact raised the specter of premarital sex, prostitution, and racial “intermingling,” and their campaigns against dancing generated a “moral panic.”Footnote ¹⁰ Straton took it upon himself to become “the chief spokesmen for the fundamentalist Baptist point of view” on the matter.Footnote ¹¹

While dancing epitomized the “evils” taking over New York City and the country, it stood atop a long list of social sins, including Sunday baseball, speakeasys, gambling, and loose divorce laws, which he believed to be detrimental to society at large. Indeed, for him, dancing was a visible representation of larger concerns such as secularism and immigration. His facile contrast of Americanism and Christianity with Europeanism and “Paganism” was rooted in his anxiety about the city's growing immigrant and largely Catholic population. Straton warned on numerous occasions that “one thing is everlastingly true: we must either Americanize and Christianize New York, or New York will speedily Europeanize and paganize us!” As George Marsden has written, “Straton's impetus for his fierce attacks on the dance, theaters, and other worldly amusements seems to have been a sense that Christian America was losing touch with its foundations in Biblical teaching,” which would inevitably “lead to lawlessness and ultimately to the total demise of civilization.”Footnote ¹² Throughout the 1920s, John Roach Straton was on a mission to save America—mostly from itself.

Even more than the dangers of dancing and secularism, Straton was concerned about what he regarded as the destructive encroachment of theological modernists. For Straton, the differences between fundamentalism and modernism were striking, and the stakes were high. In an early 1920s sermon entitled “The Miracle and Meaning of Twice-Born Men,” he contended that the social gospel or “applied Christianity” was an attempt to transform the essential nature of the Christian religion:

By targeting the social gospel's emphasis on social service, which Straton realized had become a prominent feature in the religious culture of New York, he sought to combat the theological threat it posed. In his view, saving the city through social service was a serious distraction from spiritual redemption, which remained for him the core of the Christian faith.

In many of his sermons and countless newspaper editorials, Straton presented what he called the “orthodox side” of this controversy among Protestant clergymen. Unlike many others in New York who shared his conservative theological views, Straton did not reject the term “fundamentalist,” which was popularized by Curtis Lee Laws, a Baptist leader and editor of the Watchman-Examiner in 1920. Rather than considering the term pejorative and condescending, Straton embraced it, insisting that fundamentalists were “simply old-fashioned believers in the Bible, the great truths that it teaches and the divine Christ that it enshrines.” The term “fundamentalist” aptly indicated that a number of American Christians were heeding Laws's call to “do a battle royal for the fundamentals.”Footnote ¹⁴

In The Famous New York Fundamentalist-Modernist Debates, which was published in 1924, Straton provided one of the clearest examples of his approach to fundamentalism. The book was his account of a series of dramatic debates held in the fall and winter of 1923–1924 between himself and a theological liberal, Charles Francis Potter of the West Side Unitarian Church. Potter suggested the debates after he became concerned about the “fanatic fervor” with which Straton preached his fundamentalist doctrines. In his view, Straton had gone far too long “unanswered and unchecked” in his attacks on modernists, particularly Harry Emerson Fosdick, whom he greatly admired and emulated.Footnote ¹⁵ Straton readily accepted Potter's challenge, given his penchant for the debate format and its potential for garnering publicity and income. The debates were moderated by New York Supreme Court Justice William Harman Black, whose well-known views in opposition to evolution and friendship with William Jennings Bryan exposed his bias.

The first debate, held at Straton's church before a packed house and thirty newspaper reporters, considered “The Infallibility of the Bible.” The panel of three judges declared Potter the winner on Straton's home turf—a humiliating defeat. The second was moved to Carnegie Hall, directly across 57th Street, and considered this proposition: “Resolved that the Earth and Man came by Evolution.” Drawing on his training in oratory and debate, Straton handily won the debate 3 to 0, asserting convincingly to the audience of 3000 that evolution was a type of “animalism” and that the story of creation found in the book of Genesis is the only way to account for “the beginning of the earth.” Two more debates followed, on “The Virgin Birth” and “The Deity of Christ,” which were won by Potter and Straton respectively, but by narrow margins.Footnote ¹⁶ Straton only presented “the orthodox side” of the debates in his book, contending that Potter's views were “sufficiently indicated” in his own rebuttals. He also suggested that, despite the split decisions on the last two debates, the results “vindicated the great fundamentals of the Christian faith in open and widely noted ways.” Depicting the debates as “famous” certainly played to Straton's ego, but it has proven to be a fair assessment of his stature as the preeminent evangelical fundamentalist in New York City during the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁷

Charles Francis Potter showed himself to be a formidable debate partner.Footnote ¹⁸ But Straton's real objective was to debate Harry Emerson Fosdick, who was at the forefront of social engagement in New York City's white churches. Fosdick had been dubbed “Modernism's Moses,” and Straton viewed him as his true rival and theological foe in the city.Footnote ¹⁹ Fosdick, however, had refused to debate Straton, stating in response to Straton's invitation that “of all ways which to discover truth and propagate it, a joint debate is the worst.” Born in 1878 in Buffalo, Fosdick had been trained in the liberal tradition at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and at Union Theological Seminary, a nondenominational institution in New York City.Footnote ²⁰ Although he was ordained at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in 1903 and served a Baptist congregation in Montclair, New Jersey, for over a decade, his first pastoral charge in New York City was at First Presbyterian Church. Located on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, First Presbyterian merged with two other congregations in 1918 and bolstered its ministerial staff with several new hires, including Fosdick. Initially he declined the invitation, as he was reluctant to leave the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, where he had become the Morris K. Jessup Professor of Practical Theology in 1915. But he finally agreed to join a “ministerial group” as associate minister and “guest preacher” in hopes, as he told his brother Raymond, that it would be a “step toward church unity” among the city's Protestant denominations. Some fellow liberals applauded the move, however, precisely because it greatly fortified their ranks in the struggle against fundamentalist evangelicals. Upon hearing the news, William H. P. Faunce, who had been a prominent Baptist pastor in New York and was serving as president of Brown University, wrote Fosdick expressing his “jubilation” that “a new fortress is to be planted and a new herald is to stand upon the ramparts and direct the battle.” First Presbyterian impressed Fosdick with its social outreach to New Yorkers and its long history of commitment to domestic and foreign missions, as well as its theological liberalism. He remembered years later: “I had a free pulpit and was conscious of no restraint.”Footnote ²¹

Fosdick loved First Presbyterian Church and served there contentedly and without opposition until May 21, 1922, when he preached his most famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Everything changed after that, as the sermon drew clear battle lines between the two evangelical factions within New York City and around the nation. Indeed, the impact of “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” becomes clearer when it is viewed in the context of the struggle between Fosdick and John Roach Straton. The sermon still stands as one of the most significant orations in American history. As Matthew Bowman claims, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was “a spark that lit a conflagration” and “inadvertently provoked a war.” George Marsden maintains that it was “no mere spark” but a “bombshell” that had given the Presbyterian Church its “clearest case of open heresy” in a hundred years.Footnote ²²

The direct inspiration for “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was a trip Fosdick took in the summer of 1921 to China and Japan where he saw “fundamentalism for the first time in its full intensity” and the Christian community “split wide open” over doctrinal differences. The theologically conservative missionaries were “unintelligent” and “backward looking,” preaching not the Gospel of Christ but “special opinions which are incredible to the modern mind.”Footnote ²³ An editorial he wrote for the New York Times in March 1922 on what would become one of the key issues of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in 1925 probably also compelled him to give the sermon. An editor at the Times invited him to respond to an editorial on “God and Evolution” that William Jennings Bryan had written the previous month. Seeming to mock evolutionary biology and calling Darwin's hypothesis no more than a “guess,” Bryan declared that there was no support for evolution in the Bible, “not one syllable,” and that evolutionists—whom he regarded as indistinguishable from theological modernists—were primarily materialistic atheists or agnostics. “As religion is the only basis of morals,” he argued, “it is time for Christians to protect religion from its most insidious enemy.” Fosdick's response was impassioned and unsparing. Bryan's attack on Darwinian theory amounted to “sincere but appalling obscurantism” and “sophistry.” It was based on a profound misunderstanding of the scientific method and denied indisputable facts about the physical world in the belief that accepting them would entail discarding the Bible. Fosdick argued that the basic issue was Bryan's attack on critical thinking and affirmation of an approach that “imprisons God in an impenetrable past,” not allowing God to work in the present. That stance, not evolution, posed the real threat to the church. He ended by declaring that if Bryan succeeded in “arousing a real battle over the issue,” not only would scientists “fight against him in the name of . . . freedom of investigation” but he and “multitudes of Christians” would “fight against him in the name of their religion and their God.”Footnote ²⁴

Two months later, Fosdick took the same defiant tone in “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” He began by distinguishing between “Conservatives” and “Fundamentalists,” who should not be conflated or confused: “All fundamentalists are conservative, but not all conservatives are fundamentalists.” Presenting the liberal position on such doctrinal tenets as the Virgin Birth, the divine inspiration of the Bible, the Atonement, and the Second Coming of Christ, he argued that everyone has the right to believe as they wish. Moreover, he insisted that evangelical churches included “loyal and reverent people” who did not accept these ideas as “historical fact.” Not only did some evangelical Christians reject the view that the Bible was dictated by God and therefore “infallible” but “such a static and mechanical theory of inspiration seems to them a positive peril to the spiritual life.” He set the controversy in the context of a much longer history. Theological differences have always existed among “good and reverent Christians”; indeed, every generation throughout Christian history had faced similar moments of tension and division. Reconciling “new knowledge” with ancient Christianity was necessary if Christianity were to survive.

The most controversial points in Fosdick's sermon were his depiction of fundamentalists’ aims and his plea for “tolerance” within the Christian church. He viewed fundamentalists as “illiberal and intolerant,” keen on denying “the Christian name” to those who held dissimilar views and exiling them from “Christian fellowship.” They would not succeed in doing so, he declared, because “intolerance” had no power to solve the problems of the world or to meet its needs. Recalling the recent “Great War” that had convulsed the globe, he asked rhetorically:

The Christian church should not become preoccupied with disputes “over little matters when the world is dying of great needs.” He ended with words of praise for his own church and a prayer for Christian unity, implying strongly that evangelical liberals, unlike evangelical fundamentalists, were “intellectually hospitable, open-minded, liberty-loving, fair, tolerant,” representing a unified and inclusive expression of Christianity in New York City.Footnote ²⁵

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” received an enthusiastic and favorable response from the congregation of First Presbyterian, but it immediately sent shock waves throughout the New York Presbytery and the General Assembly. The reaction from many of the city's Baptist and Presbyterian fundamentalist ministers was equally sharp. John Roach Straton responded like a man obsessed. His first line of defense involved a series of carefully constructed, pejorative characterizations of Fosdick as “the Jesse James of the theological world,” “a Baptist bootlegger,” and a religious “outlaw.”Footnote ²⁶ In a sermon preached at Calvary Baptist entitled “An Answer to Dr. Fosdick's Sermon Against the Fundamentalists, with a Challenge to Dr. Fosdick to Public Debate: Shall the Fundamentalists or the Funnymonkyists Win?,” Straton rebutted Fosdick's “revolutionary sermon” point by point. First, he contended that it was not the fundamentalists who were sowing discord but the “religious revolutionists and rationalists within the ranks who are really disturbing and distressing the Christian brotherhood and dividing the church into warring camps.” Then, dismissing the claim that “new learning” had called the old bases of faith into question, he declared: “The supreme religious issue of today is: Do we believe God?” Fosdick's problem, in his view, was that he and his fellow modernists no longer believed and accepted the Bible as the revealed Word of God, a point Straton developed by juxtaposing Fosdick's words with scripture text in parallel columns, and concluded that it was unethical for Fosdick to preach the message of modernism as a Baptist minister in a Presbyterian church. He ended with a rallying cry that echoed his opponent's: calling all “good soldiers of Jesus” to put on the “whole armor of God” and “do battle” against Fosdick and all the forces of theological modernism.

Straton's next move was organizational rather than rhetorical. In late January 1923, he gathered hundreds of Baptist clergy and laity at Calvary to counter the “increasing boldness of radicals and religious rationalists” and find ways to “crush this rejection of the old faith.” He formed “The Baptist Fundamentalist Association of the Metropolitan Area” and launched a “drive” against “heresy,” targeting liberal churches and seminaries. A year later, the group staged a mass rally at Calvary Baptist, ostensibly to express sympathy and support for their “Presbyterian brethren” who were trying to counter Fosdick's views. They and a few other Presbyterian scholars had begun to publish their own responses to Fosdick. J. Gresham Machen, a professor at Princeton Seminary and a conservative Presbyterian, for example, argued in his 1922 book, Christianity and Liberalism, that true Christians were “battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief” and that religious liberalism was not Christianity but its “chief modern rival.”Footnote ²⁷ But the main reason for the gathering was to adopt a resolution condemning Fosdick and his modernism. After a token acknowledgement that any preacher has the right to hold differing theological views, it accused Fosdick of “tearing down the faith of the Church” while still “eat[ing] the bread of the Church.” As Dr. Percy Stickney Grant of the Church of the Ascension reported, it expressed “the savage anger of the Fundamentalists” against liberal modernists. Charles F. McKoy of Greene Avenue Baptist Church of Brooklyn declared that Christians could “make no terms with this Satanic thing; we must fight it to the death.” The resolution passed unanimously and without debate.Footnote ²⁸

Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a member of First Presbyterian Church, a business associate of the Rockefeller family, and the “father of modern public relations,” printed “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” in pamphlet form and had it widely distributed, allegedly without Fosdick's consent. Lee shared Fosdick's convictions about the vital role the church could play in addressing social problems. In 1925, for example, he told an audience at the Brooklyn Jewish Center: “I believe that one of the greatest tragedies of modern society is the loss of the influence of the church, not that I mean the dogmas of the church, but the church as an organization for the education of the spirits of human beings.”Footnote ²⁹ As the pamphlet made the sermon more widely known, Fosdick's views found many supporters. An astute commentator writing in The Nation pointed out that conflicts over doctrine within Protestant denominations were as serious a problem as those between them. While the Presbyterians have a “rigid creed,” the Baptists have none, and the fundamentalist wing of the city's Baptists, led “in characteristic fashion by New York's one and only John Roach Straton,” was attempting to impose one. Straton's efforts were evidence of “misdirected energy and zeal,” the editorial claimed, in light of Fosdick's popularity and his ultimate aim of establishing “an inclusive church.” John Grier Hibben, a Presbyterian minister and president of Princeton University, struck a similar note in his commencement address that year, calling an unnamed religious leader who, it was obvious to all, was Fosdick, a “prophet of righteousness in New York City” who was being “stampeded” by a group that took issue with expressing truth “not in the cold forms of a desiccated dogma, but in living words that strike to the heart of human doubts, human needs and human aspirations.”Footnote ³⁰ A writer for the YMCA's Railroad Men strongly concurred: Fosdick's “place in his church, and in [the] esteem of the metropolis is absolutely secure.”Footnote ³¹

Fosdick himself did not welcome efforts to defend him that seemed to downplay his principled disagreement with fundamentalism. “Why Not Be Fair With Fosdick?,” an editorial in The Continent, a Christian journal published in Chicago and New York, charged Straton with an “inexcusable perversion” of Fosdick's views, endorsed Fosdick's aim to foster a “spirit of tolerance” in the church, and asserted that fundamentalists and modernists have the right to disagree on points of doctrine because both groups “are consonant with loyalty to Christ and reverence towards him.” Fosdick wrote the editor, Nolan R. Best, expressing both his appreciation and his “slight apprehension” about being depicted in “evangelical” terms at the expense of his modernism. “I am an evangelical Christian,” Fosdick wrote. “I do believe in the deity and lordship of Jesus and I believe in the evangelical church,” a significant feature of the “quadrilateral of priorities” of evangelicalism formulated by British historian David Bebbington and agreed upon by most scholars of American religion.Footnote ³² But he was concerned that affirming this agreement would concede too much. “The difference between Dr. [Straton's] theology and mine is perfectly enormous. . . . I am a liberal, progressive Christian, holding the new theology, root and branch, and I do not want to be defended as though I were not.”Footnote ³³ In other words, he was an “evangelical liberal.” Whenever Fosdick's supporters urged him to mitigate his modernist stance, soften his language, or disavow “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” in some way, he refused. For example, when Rev. Edgar Whittaker Work, a Presbyterian official and Fosdick supporter who nevertheless questioned Fosdick's judgment in expressing his views publicly in the sermon, asked him to write a statement modifying some of its claims, Fosdick refused. In a letter marked “private,” Fosdick responded: “I am profoundly sorry that the sermon has been misinterpreted; I am profoundly sorry that it has caused disturbance; but I cannot honestly be sorry at all that I preached the sermon. When I get to heaven I expect it to be one of the stars in my crown.”Footnote ³⁴

The Park Avenue Baptist Church, located at 64th Street on the Upper East Side, set its sights on this religious “outlaw” as a worthy successor to Dr. Cornelius Woelfkin in 1925. Woelfkin, a former sign painter and a self-educated theologian, was retiring from the pastorate he had assumed in 1912. When prominent member John D. Rockefeller Jr. first approached Fosdick to take the post, Fosdick declined, even though he had recently resigned from First Presbyterian. The resignation came in the long aftermath of the General Assembly's response to “Shall the Fundamentalist's Win?” Six months after Fosdick delivered the sermon, much to Straton's delight, the Presbytery of Philadelphia decided to advance a resolution requiring “the preaching and teaching in the First Presbyterian Church in New York City to conform to . . . the confessions of the faith.” Guided by Clarence E. Macartney, pastor of Arch Street Presbyterian Church, the measure was called the “Philadelphia Overture.” One of many Philadelphia fundamentalist Presbyterians outraged by Fosdick's sermon, Macartney had refuted Fosdick in a sermon of his own called, “Shall Unbelief Win?” Fosdick's views were “subversive to the Christian faith,” he contended, and “the greatest need of the Church today is a few men of ability and faith who are not afraid of being called ‘bigots,’ ‘narrow,’ ‘medieval’ in their religious thought.” This condemnation of deviations from the church's formal creed was adopted unanimously by over a thousand ministers and elders after a bravura oratorical performance by William Jennings Bryan. When the General Assembly met in May 1923, the resolution passed by a vote of 439 to 259 after intense debate. As Cornelius Woelfkin intoned in a letter to a friend, the fundamentalist wing of the Presbyterian Church was “putting on the war paint” for Fosdick.Footnote ³⁵

Knowing that he was the main target of the amendment, Fosdick resigned from First Presbyterian Church, but a special committee of the New York Presbytery led by Edgar Whittaker Work refused to accept his resignation. While the committee acknowledged that they did not share all of Fosdick's theological views, his congregation stood by him and his preaching was not out of line with traditional Presbyterian homiletics. Indeed, preaching that engaged the mind was much needed: “Few such challenging voices have ever been heard in this city in defense of religion. . . . The arrest of thought that has been produced on religious subjects in this great and careless city is a fact that cannot be gainsaid.” The report included a carefully worded statement by Fosdick that aimed to explain his position while not compromising his principles. Acknowledging that he was at the center of the current controversy within the Presbyterian Church, he expressed regret that he had caused such division while a “guest” of the denomination. At the same time, he declared that he, too, was an evangelical and had a right to his “liberal” theological views:

The General Assembly rebuked the special committee for not accepting Fosdick's resignation. Presbyterian commentators viewed its favorable report on Fosdick's pastorate as “a violent attack from within” and a “dagger” thrust “into the very heart of our church.” With memories of World War I fresh on their minds, some suggested Germany and German philosophy were responsible for the rise of theological modernism in their ranks.Footnote ³⁷ Straton, too, associated the liberal opposition with the nation's primary enemy during the war, telling the Baptist Bible Union Convention that “modernism ought to be labeled ‘Made in Germany.’” The assembly, in an apparent attempt to compromise or force his hand, suggested that Fosdick could maintain his pastorate only if he agreed to become a Presbyterian “and become subject to the jurisdiction and authority of the Church.”Footnote ³⁸ Even some of Fosdick's liberal supporters regarded this offer as a worthy resolution to the conflict. “The door for you is wide open,” Henry Sloan Coffin, pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian, wrote Fosdick in May 1924. “I think the feeling [is] that inasmuch as the church is responsible for you, you ought to become responsible for the church.”Footnote ³⁹

Fosdick declined the invitation to become a Presbyterian, citing his “longstanding and assured conviction that creedal subscription to ancient confessions of the faith is a practice dangerous to the welfare of the church and to the integrity of the individual conscience.” This time the church accepted his resignation, which went into effect on March 1, 1925. In his farewell sermon at First Presbyterian Church, Fosdick did not apologize for asking what he considered to be a “fundamental” question. And although he knew the claims of his heresy were baseless in both a theological and an ecclesial sense, he declared, “they call me a heretic,” but “I am proud of it. I wouldn't live in a generation like this and be anything but a heretic.”Footnote ⁴⁰

III. Modern Religion Up By the Riverside

Fosdick's modernism seemingly became more trenchant after his move to Park Avenue Baptist Church, deepening the divisions between him and Straton. The position initially did not appeal to Fosdick, however, especially the church's location in “one of the swankiest areas of the city.” In a ploy to dissuade Rockefeller Jr., the church's wealthiest patron, from pursuing him, Fosdick named five conditions that must be met, including dropping the requirement of “full immersion” baptism for membership, becoming nondenominational and open to anyone who sought membership, irrespective of religious background or prior affiliation, and relocating to Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Barnard College, and St. Luke's Hospital. According to James Hudnut-Beumler, Rockefeller saw Fosdick as “an ecumenical compatriot . . . who could represent his theological worldview to the American people.” The scion of the great “Titan” John D. Rockefeller Sr. had inherited his father's business acumen but developed his own priorities and convictions, dedicating himself to the promotion of liberal Protestantism in New York City and the social gospel's vision of “the Kingdom of God on earth.”Footnote ⁴¹ He convinced the church's boards to meet all of Fosdick's demands and affirm that membership would be based on the “principle of individual freedom and responsibility.” Cornelius Woelfkin endorsed the decision to give up the requirement of immersion Baptism, declaring it “in harmony with our best Baptist traditions.” Fosdick's letter accepting the call to Park Avenue Baptist arrived on May 26, 1925, simply pledging his “devoted and loyal service.”Footnote ⁴²

Two months before, faced with the prospect that Fosdick would gain a pulpit within his own denomination, Straton wrote to the New York Baptist Ministers Conference condemning Fosdick's alleged repudiation of baptism and the acquiescence of forty-one members of the conference to Fosdick's position. He also introduced a motion to renounce its endorsement of Fosdick, but it was defeated by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-nine. Seeing this conflict as integral to the ongoing controversy, the New York Times said that this issue had “Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick on the one hand and the Rev. John Roach Straton on the other” but this time was more about “rites” than about doctrine. Straton was still addressing the issue at the end of the year when he wrote an editorial for his church's periodical, The Faith Fundamentalist, contending that Fosdick had “sneered at Baptism.”Footnote ⁴³

With Fosdick's accession to the pulpit at Park Avenue Baptist, Rockefeller would also obtain the “great Protestant cathedral” he had long desired and Woelfin the worthy successor he felt he deserved. Plans for a “Fosdick Church” were actually drawn up a year before in anticipation that Fosdick would accept their offer. A document written anonymously in the fall of 1924 describes the church's objectives, edifice, activities, and membership. “In the largest city of the world, in the midst of the greatest banking institutions and business offices, surrounded by churches of practically all denominations in the country,” the church “would, by its daring and bigness of program, strike the imagination in a way that it is entirely impossible for any one church in any one of the denominations at the present time.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Plans for the new building were drawn up in 1926 after two dozen “Stratonites” left the church, presumably for Calvary Baptist. In a letter addressed to the congregation six months before his death, Woelfkin beseeched them to follow Fosdick, whom he called a “prophet who shall receive a prophet's reward.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Such encouragement was vital, as the move took them fifty-eight blocks northwest across Central Park to what was essentially a whole new world.

The church's new home was nearly completed when the first service was held there on October 5, 1930. The neo-Gothic structure designed by the architectural team of Charles Collens and Henry C. Pelton was nothing short of spectacular. Modeled after the thirteenth-century Cathedral of Chartres and constructed entirely in Indiana limestone, the building featured massive columns, gargoyles, arches, and turrets. The main portal on the west side of the building displayed a conventional sculpture of Christ surrounded by symbols of the four evangelists. The four sets of figures depicted in the arch above the door included not only angels and religious leaders but also secular figures, leaders of nonreligious traditions, philosophers, and scientists: Mohammed, Confucius, Dante, Hegel, Albert Einstein, and even Charles Darwin, the first time he was so honored by an American church. Darwin's inclusion on the portal was, as The Literary Digest reported, “anathema to the Fundamentalists,” but to many others it implied a “truce” between science and religion.Footnote ⁴⁶ The huge nave contained 744 seats, and along with the south galleries the sanctuary's capacity was close to 1,500. A carillon tower rose almost 400 feet over the main structure, containing the chapel, meeting rooms, classrooms, and administrative offices, including Fosdick's, on the seventeenth floor. The New York Times proclaimed that “an air of modernity . . . pervades the very church itself.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Because it was commonly thought that Rockefeller Jr. financed the entire cost of constructing the building, Riverside was quickly dubbed “Rockefeller's Church.” In a sermon he preached in June 1925 before construction began, Straton suggested that since big business and the Rockefeller family would “own” the church, an oil painting of them should adorn the altar and the church be called “SOCNY,” the Standard Oil Church of New York, mirroring the name of the Rockefellers’ primary business. “Modernism and money are twin sisters,” he declared.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although Rockefeller Jr. only bought the land and supplied the money to build the tower, which he named in honor of his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, Straton's critique was not entirely off base. The coalescence of money and power made Riverside Church possible. Indeed, wealthy and powerful people, many of whom were theological modernists, built many of New York City's churches during this period. The rest of its financing, however, came from the sale of the Park Avenue property and subscriptions from the congregation. The new church was named “Riverside Baptist Church” because its west entrance faced Riverside Drive and the Hudson river. The “Baptist” affiliation was never fully embraced and was officially dropped in 1929.

Under Fosdick's leadership, Riverside became what Peter Paris has called “the world's most prominent institutionalization of Protestant liberalism.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In his first sermon at the new church, “What Matters in Religion,” Fosdick praised the grandeur of the new building: “Beauty does something to you. Here in this mechanized city how much we need what beauty can do to us.” But he dedicated the church to fostering “man's abundant life” and insisted that “nothing matters in Christianity, not even things with long traditions and accumulated sanctity—not creedal forms, not ritual observances, nor institutional regularities—nothing matters except those things that bring abundant life to personality,” by which he meant not individual ego but that part of human persons that is fully engaged in connection to others. “Contemporary Protestantism is all cluttered up with things that make no deep difference to life,” he maintained. Casting off the “old clothes of religion” for what matters most was not irreligious, as some would claim; rather, it was a necessary step toward an authentic religious engagement with the contemporary world.Footnote ⁵⁰

Much to the dismay of New York's fundamentalist evangelicals, Riverside gave Fosdick an even larger platform for his views, which he articulated in sermons, interviews, speeches, and books throughout his sixteen-year tenure. Even though the church had become nondenominational, Straton viewed Fosdick's work at Riverside as a sign of the moral and spiritual decline of the city's Baptists under the influence of modernists. Fosdick countered that the aim of theological modernism was to reform American Christianity and to expand its influence in society.Footnote ⁵¹ In a highly regarded address, Fosdick proclaimed that the future Christian church would declare that rituals, ordinances, and creeds were all “non-essential for admission into the Kingdom of God, or His Church. . . . A life, not a creed, would be the test.”Footnote ⁵² In addition to his scholarly rejection of Christian creeds based on their vast changes over time, Fosdick objected to them for moral and political reasons. In “What the Liberals are Driving At,” he stated that one of “the major objects of Christianity” was “the creation of personal character and social righteousness.”Footnote ⁵³ But most important to Fosdick was his sense that creeds and doctrines were oppressive, antithetical to free inquiry, and inherently antidemocratic. Insisting on adherence to one creed over all others trampled on individual conscience. Just as democracy had transcended “mere government,” he preached in 1931, religion had transcended creeds, ennobling and freeing everyone to think for themselves.Footnote ⁵⁴

Fosdick's approach to religious liberalism left a deep imprint on Riverside Church's social action programs. During the Great Depression, it offered employment services, a nursery, a food dispensary, charitable assistance, and a department of social service. Established in 1931 under the direction of Miss Mary Downs, it received 514 applications for a total of 1,145 people seeking aid. As Judith Weisenfeld has shown, Riverside Church “became important to shaping the development and direction of social service work in New York City” throughout the 1930s. Social service and worship were necessarily conjoined in a “city where the largest opportunities to influence the world abound.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Membership grew rapidly during the first years in the new sanctuary, drawn primarily from residents of Morningside Heights. The majority of the new members were white, although students from dozens of nations gathered yearly at Riverside's International House. As early as 1931, however, African Americans joined the congregation and became active participants in its programs. The celebrated tenor Merrill R. Dames was a member of the choir and often performed there in concert. So did the Tuskegee Choir under the direction of William L. Dawson. Riverside hosted numerous events designed to foster goodwill and interracial cooperation, such as visits from Carter G. Woodson, James Weldon Johnson, and other members of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. There was “no color line at this church,” Fosdick assured the group. Fosdick became known for his political activism in the cause of civil rights and was particularly gripped by the Scottsboro case. He was instrumental in persuading Ruby Bates, whose false testimony alleging rape had led to guilty verdicts and death sentences for nine innocent Black men and boys, to recant her testimony when he agreed to hear her confession in March 1933. “Prejudice is poison,” he had long maintained, and was “the worst sin in the world.”Footnote ⁵⁶

By the mid-1930s, Riverside Church had become a beacon of modern religion in New York City and “a haven of order in a tumultuous city life.”Footnote ⁵⁷ At the same time, events that occurred after the Scopes trial in 1925 made the contrast between the forces of modernism and those of fundamentalism less clear, even though the controversy left significant marks on New York City's Protestant evangelical religious culture.

IV. Death and the End of War

The death of William Jennings Bryan days after the conclusion of the Scopes trial raised the question of who would succeed him. In Straton's eulogy for his friend, whose face he said reminded him of Christ and who had become known as “a true prophet of God,” he told his congregation that several “prominent New York men” had “implored him to accept the mantle of William Jennings Bryan and become the leader of the Fundamentalists.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Although Bryan had won the legal battle, as the court upheld the Butler Act and convicted John Scopes, Clarence Darrow's unrelenting questioning made Bryan appear to be an ignorant and stupid backwoods Bible thumper, which he certainly was not. His ill-advised decision to take the stand to answer Darrow's questions led not only to his personal humiliation but also to depictions of fundamentalist evangelicals as a unified group of intransigent anti-intellectuals blinded by their own ignorance. Charles Francis Potter, who attended the trial as “librarian and Bible expert for the defense,” prompted Darrow to ask the question that ultimately cracked Bryan, which pointed to gaps and contradictions in the account of the Fall given in Genesis. Since the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly as punishment after the temptation of Eve, Darrow asked, “Have you any idea how the snake went before that time? . . . Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not”? The courtroom erupted in laughter. Bryan had no answer and only then, under advisement, ceased his testimony. But the damage had been done. According to Potter, this moment likely “broke Bryan's heart” and subjected all fundamentalist evangelicals to ridicule.Footnote ⁵⁹

The irascible H. L. Mencken, who attended the trial as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, led the assault. Mencken described the trial as a “religious orgy” that defied all the rules of legal decorum and jurisprudence. It was held in a quaint town populated by “Christians of the sort who accept the Bible as their sole guide.” Bryan, “the Great Commoner,” had come among them not to defend God but himself. In Mencken's view, Bryan, at the end of a career of failures, not least of which was his loss to William McKinley in the 1896 presidential election, was angry at the “men of the cities who had destroyed him” and was keen to stir up the rural “yokels” against urbanites. Mencken concluded that “if he was pathetic, he was also disgusting,” and pronounced him “one of the most tragic asses of American history.” Mencken described the fundamentalists of Dayton, Tennessee, as backward half-wits who found knowledge confusing, even painful. They were “Homo Neandertalensis.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These pejorative depictions stuck.

Historians have suggested that fundamentalist evangelicals went “underground” in defeat only to reemerge later in various institutional, mainly educational, forms, a “rise, fall, rebirth narrative.”Footnote ⁶¹ These analysts are correct to argue that fundamentalists did not disappear entirely from the scene after the Scopes trial. Indeed, there was a flurry of activity among fundamentalists nationally to organize and fortify their ranks. Considering the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York City, however, yields a different narrative. The controversy came to a pronounced end in 1935, leaving both fundamentalists and modernists radically transformed. Straton and Fosdick helped to facilitate and embodied this transformation. Indeed, Fosdick's question—“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”—had emphasized the fate of fundamentalists without prompting equal consideration for what happened to modernists. When the fates of both are considered, the picture that emerges is very different.

Among New York City's fundamentalist evangelicals, Straton's transformation after the death of Bryan was the most dramatic. He became a fairly significant religious and political force, with all the attending complications and paradoxes. He immediately intensified his efforts to expand Baptist fundamentalism in New York City into a national movement. For example, he folded the “Baptist Bible Union” into his own “Baptist Fundamentalist League of Greater New York and Vicinity.”Footnote ⁶² Similar organizational initiatives began elsewhere around the country, and Straton became a key figure in some of them.Footnote ⁶³ When George F. Washburn established the “Bible Crusaders of America” in 1925, he enlisted Straton as its “Director of General Discussions” and absorbed Straton's church paper, The Faith Fundamentalist, into the group's more widely circulated Crusader's Champion. Straton shared Washburn's aim to stop “the invasion of modernists” and “stamp out” the teaching of evolution.Footnote ⁶⁴ Straton later became president of “The American Anti-False Science League and Home-Church-State Protective Association,” which promised “to become . . . a truly adequate Fundamentalist organization that will have teeth in it and will be organized on such practical lines that it can run the unbelief out of the schools, combat the evils of worldliness, modernism.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Straton's association with the group called “Supreme Kingdom” proved to be the most vexing. It was the brainchild of Edgar Young Clarke, a former Ku Klux Klan member who founded the group in Georgia in 1926. It appealed to Southern fundamentalist evangelicals who felt under siege after the Scopes trial, and Clarke wooed them by promising to “protest modernism and the theory of evolution.”Footnote ⁶⁶ These aims clearly resonated with Straton, and when Young invited him to come to Georgia to give a series of lectures in January 1927, Straton accepted the invitation as well as the extraordinary fee of $30,000 Young had allegedly promised. The controversy surrounding this exorbitant sum exposed the Supreme Kingdom's Klan affiliations. Over the course of the year that Straton spent attempting to distance himself from that association, his paradoxical ideas about race and relationships with African Americans were revealed.

Straton considered himself a product of the South, and throughout his time in New York City his “southernness” was central to his identity. In the early 1920s, for example, he ended a letter to Southern Baptists by warning them about the attempt of “Northern Modernists” to isolate them with a reference to “our beloved Southland.”Footnote ⁶⁷ At times, his southernness aligned him closely with vehemently racist notions. An undated and untitled speech he gave in the early 1920s revealed the racist paternalism that had become characteristic of many places in the South. The speech began: “As a race, the Negroes are peculiarly loveable. They are naturally industrious, good natured, obliging, warm-hearted, hospitable, friendly and loyal.” He praised African Americans’ gifts of humor, music, and oratory. Enslaving these “simply [sic] minded children of the human race” had been a tragedy, so any further terror brought upon them by white people would certainly bring about God's vengeance. In his view, African Americans were “law-abiding people who only ask to be [left] alone and to be given a chance to demonstrate what they can do individually and as a race.” After an appeal to “revive the true spirit of Jesus in our relations with our colored neighbors,” he made a note to himself to “tell [the] story of my old Negro mammy, Aunt Millie.”Footnote ⁶⁸

A more polished address delivered at Calvary Baptist in 1920 sounded just as magnanimous toward Black people but carried a very different message—“Africa for the Africans.” Having heard about Marcus Garvey's proclamation at the first convention of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at Madison Square Garden that year, Straton lauded its potential to solve the problem of race in America. In language that is chilling in light of later events in Nazi Germany, he declared: “Despite the obvious limitations of such a program, nevertheless it does stand true that any reduction in the number of American Negroes tends just to that extent to a final solution of the race problem.” Two sermons he preached in 1925, “Saving America that the World May be Saved” and “Is the South the Only Sinner in Anti-Negro Riots?,” explained how he saw the connection between race and immigration. Concerned about the steady flow of European immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics, he suggested that the millions of new arrivals should first be shipped to some “inland (rural) destination” before they were allowed to enter American cities where they would both produce and fall victim to “vice and corruption.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He reiterated his point that whites had a moral responsibility to American Blacks because of slavery but emphasized: “This does not mean that there should be any breaking down of those barriers between the two races which were erected by God Almighty for the protection of both”; “any blending of the two races by marriage is a monstrous thing.” Straton's views on racial intermingling account for his reaction to Francis G. Gaffey, a local New York City lawyer, who in 1928 contacted Straton to inquire whether Calvary Baptist allowed Black visitors, as he had recently seen a photograph of the congregation that included “several negroes seated.” Straton balked and demanded to know the source of the story, implying that it was fabricated.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, Calvary Baptist had no Black members and likely very few Black attendees during Straton's tenure. In Straton's view, separation of the races at all levels of society was best.

Straton's move to disassociate himself from Edward Clarke and the Supreme Kingdom exposed his longstanding ambivalence toward the Ku Klux Klan, which resurged in the 1920s, and his contradictory attitudes on race more generally. His speaking trip to Georgia in his new role as “Religious Director” of the Supreme Kingdom was enmeshed in controversy from the start and ended with his resignation in January 1927. He and Clarke had formulated an ambitious plan to increase the group's membership to four million nationwide, targeting “wicked Gotham” in particular. Straton had even invited Clarke to speak at Calvary Baptist. But reports of the $30,000 fee and the group's Klan affiliations put him on the defensive. His fee had only been $500 per lecture, he contended, and he asserted that the Supreme Kingdom was not a Klan organization: it stood for “Old-Fashioned Americanism” (which is exactly what the KKK claimed) and its senate was “as fine a group . . . as could be gotten together.” Most likely bowing to pressure from his church to resign, Straton insisted that the group merely wanted “to draw together God's people of all faiths and make them one body.”Footnote ⁷¹

Only a few years earlier, Straton had faced the charge that his church had become a “Ku Klux nest.” At issue was Rev. Oscar Haywood, Calvary's “general evangelist,” a southerner who had for many years served as pastor of the Collegiate Baptist Church of the Covenant on West 33rd Street before the two churches merged in 1918. By 1922, Haywood was openly associated with the Klan and trying to promote it in New York City. In response to these accusations, he wrote to Straton: “It is true that I am interested and actively engaged in the work of propagating the Ku Klux Klan,” which “will be the loyal ally of every Protestant church, every patriotic society, every home in New York City.” Straton, with the backing of his highest-ranking church officials, succeeded in ousting Haywood, but he took pains to explain that his disagreement with the Klan had more to do with its “methods” than its “motives.” Asserting that there were “good men in the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan,” Straton insisted that the real problem was that they worked against the American ideal of social unity. He claimed that there was no room for masked men or secret societies in America, a major legal point of contention about the KKK at the time. Race and color prejudice of all kinds—against Blacks, Jews, and Catholics—must yield to “the Red, White, and Blue” of the American flag.Footnote ⁷²

Statements that seemingly decried all forms of prejudice and Straton's resignation from the Supreme Kingdom were enough to win him praise from some Blacks in New York City and elsewhere. The African American newspaper Chicago Broad Axe reported, “Negroes of the country learn of Dr. Straton's resignation from the Supreme Kingdom with delight, feeling that the race has been relieved of a most forceful factor, who innocently, would be fostering an institution that nurtures and foments race hatred and suppression.” An editorial in the UNIA's Negro World six months later praised Straton's decision as an example of his disdain for “lawlessness” and “mob rule.” This statement corroborated an assertion made in 1923 by New York's first African American female podiatrist, Dr. Alma Mary Haskins, who wrote in editorials published in the Chicago Defender and the New York Age that comments she heard Straton make at Calvary and at a meeting in Harlem, where he denounced the Klan and declared his allegiance to the “visible empire” of the United States, convinced her that he was a “staunch and powerful friend of the Negro race.”Footnote ⁷³

After two years of intense work to build the fundamentalist movement nationally, Straton's association with and resignation from the Supreme Kingdom effectively ended those efforts. When he resigned from the Supreme Kingdom, he also stepped down from the presidency of the New York Fundamentalist League, the New York State Baptist Bible Union, and several other organizations. Perhaps recognizing that all of these initiatives were failing because they lacked support and funds and were surrounded by controversy, Straton turned his attention to interests as varied and uncharacteristic for him personally and professionally as “divine healing,” support for the “child evangelist” Uldine Utley, defeating Alfred K. Smith's bid for the presidency in 1928, and constructing a “skyscraper church.”

Straton introduced “divine healing” to Calvary Baptist within six months of meeting Uldine Utley, then only fourteen years old but already one of the most famous preachers in America. Some Baptist churches in the United States had begun to embrace the Pentecostal practice of divine healing by the late 1920s, but it was basically unknown among white Baptists in New York City at the time. Although Utley was not the only child preacher of her day, she did appear to be exceptional. Born in Durant, Oklahoma, in 1912, Utley moved with her working-class parents to Fresno, California, where at the age of nine she was converted at an evangelistic campaign held by Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal founder of the Foursquare Church. Within two years she had received the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and a call to preach. Utley's rise to fame, which was modeled on McPherson's, was as meteoric as it was unlikely. By the time she was twelve, she was attracting thousands of people to her evangelistic meetings across the county. Straton met Utley at a Bible conference in Green Cove Springs, Florida, in January 1926 and was immediately taken by her. Calling her “The Joan of Arc of the Religious World,” an allusion to the fifteenth-century virgin warrior who led a small French army to victory against England, he invited her to Calvary. In five visits over the next two years, she held massive revivals at Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium, as well as a famed lunchtime service on Wall Street.Footnote ⁷⁴

Straton's faith in Utley as a conduit of divine healing began during the summer of 1926 when his wife claimed to have been healed of pleurisy by Utley's touch. Straton planned a five-month revival campaign for Utley beginning that fall. As the time approached, Straton made it known that some Baptists had “taken him to task” for the invitation because they were opposed to having a woman preach in the church. To counter this objection, which had been debated by American Protestants for over a century, Straton offered the usual defense brought by such women and their male supporters: he had “searched the scriptures” and determined that “it is neither unbiblical or unbaptistic” to let a woman preach if she is a “true prophet.” He asked the congregation to be “open-minded” about the issue instead of quoting “one or two isolated verses” from the Bible (such as the injunction in 1 Corinthians 14:34 that women should remain silent in the churches) “that are usually quoted without their context.” In December 1926, when he wrote an essay about Utley that Curtis Lee Laws published in the Watchman-Observer, his enthusiasm for her had reached a fever pitch.Footnote ⁷⁵

By the next June, Straton's weekly healing services were accompanied by other Pentecostal practices. Five deacons resigned, stating that they were “wholly at variance with our pastor upon certain fundamental points of doctrine and church conduct” and that the congregation had been in a state of “suppressed agitation” as Straton was holding services that were accompanied by rolling on the floor, “mysterious sounds,” and people practicing the “Gift of Tongues,” all “of a nature commonly associated with Pentecostalism.” They attributed these new practices to Straton's association with Uldine Utley, “the girl evangelist, who so profoundly affected him.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Their resignation prompted Straton to defend Utley and divine healing, curiously arguing that there was nothing “Pentecostal” about her or her practices. Rather, he asserted that there was a danger in Pentecostalism's overemphasis on “fleshly manifestations.” In a sermon entitled “Why I am Opposed to Pentecostalism,” he turned the whole matter into a rebuke of modernists. “It is simply not true that such wild and frenzied events as have been charged against us by enemies actually occurred in this church and that I encouraged religious frenzy,” he declared. Modernists were spreading “lies” that he had become “a holy roller.” By this time, however, he was hailing his new relationship with the Glad Tidings Pentecostal Church, one of only a few white Pentecostal congregations in New York during the 1920s. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Straton had embraced Pentecostalism and had taken Calvary Baptist in that direction.Footnote ⁷⁷

His support of Uldine Utley was the last gasp of Straton's fight against modernism. He saw her advent as a sign that the battle still raged and could perhaps be won with her, rather than him, at the helm. She had come to save the city. Announcing her evangelistic campaign in September 1927, he claimed that “God will come to hardboiled New York this winter” and people will be able to see at Calvary Baptist “the same sort of miracles recounted in the Bible.” “I am praying that through this church, God will so manifest His power that modernism in the churches will finally be answered.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Although members of the congregation began to leave in great numbers, Straton condemned those who objected to the healing services as “obstructionists.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The Bible was the source of authority on healing services, just as it was the source of all cures. Straton espoused the approach taken by Utley's associate, Winifred Mosely, who told those gathered at a healing service that the Bible worked like a “pill,” melting away all physical maladies, even cancer. At this service, Straton disavowed medical science and doctors. “Natural healing (by physicians) is for those of little faith,” he said, “and supernatural healing (by God's ministers) is for our own people. It is a shameful thing for a child of God to call in a scoffing, God-denying unbeliever to minister to his body.” He informed the congregation that he had thrown away all his medicines and now had “faith in God for all cures.” Blending Pentecostal practice with Mary Baker Eddy's “science and health” philosophy, he contended that the Bible provided rules for health that would eradicate all illness. “Everything that modern science is so proud of is right here,” he proclaimed with an uplifted Bible. When Straton's son Warren stood before the church to proclaim that he had been “baptized in the Holy Spirit” and spoke in tongues and his wife testified that she had been healed by Uldine Utley, Calvary Baptist's short-lived conversion to Pentecostalism had been completed.Footnote ⁸⁰

By the summer of 1928, however, just as Uldine Utley was at the height of her popularity, Straton abruptly turned his attention away from her and divine healing; he never publicly mentioned them again. (The church ceased all Pentecostal practices shortly after Straton's death.) His new obsession was the presidential candidacy of Governor Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for the nation's highest office. His opposition to Smith thrust him for the first time into national politics. In an August 1928 sermon entitled “The Moral and Religious Stakes in the Present Political Situation,” he depicted Smith as “the deadliest foe in America today of the forces of moral progress and a true political wisdom.”Footnote ⁸¹ Straton maintained that his campaign against Al Smith had nothing to do with Smith's Catholicism but everything to do with his connection to Tammany Hall. The Democratic political machine had been a corrupt and corrupting force in New York City politics since the 1870s when it was under the notorious direction of “Boss” Tweed. Smith was every bit a “Tammany Man,” Straton contended, and throughout his career he had enabled vice and worked against “righteous reform.”Footnote ⁸²

Taken at face value, it did appear that anti-Catholicism was not the core issue with Straton. “I have no ignoble prejudices against other sects,” he stated in a letter to Smith, “and I have steadfastly held to the hope that prejudice, bitterness and bigotry would be kept out of this contest, on both sides.”Footnote ⁸³ But one detects more than a hint of disingenuousness in this claim, given the pervasiveness of anti-Catholicism among Republicans and Democrats during the 1920s, and the rhetoric of “both sides” normally attempts to shield bias rather than reveal openness. At the same time, his opposition to Smith seemed less to do with religion than with his own anti-immigrant and anti-urban views. Straton often noted Smith's second-generation immigrant background, which happened to be Irish and Italian Catholic, two of the largest ethnic groups in New York at the time, but his aim was to underscore Smith's upbringing on the lower East Side of New York City. Smith, he contended, had been reared on “the sidewalks of New York's foreign section, surrounded by vice and saloons, and such an environment is not one from which to get a President.”Footnote ⁸⁴ It was this message, contrasting the “dry” evangelical South with the “wet” immigrant, urban North that Straton took with him on his tour of the South sponsored by the Women's Temperance Christian Union (WTCU) and the Anti-Saloon League to campaign against Smith. He attracted large crowds in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Texas. When Smith lost the election to Hoover in a landslide, some observers attributed the loss in part to Straton's campaign against him. For Straton, Hoover's victory was a God-ordained rebuke to the “drinking classes.” Most importantly, it was a triumph of Southern religious values over an urban-based, corrupt political machine and modernism. In a sermon entitled “The Religious and Patriotic Lessons of the Recent Presidential Campaign,” he told his congregation that the results showed that “the mass of the American people will follow their consecrated moral and religious leaders even in preference to their loose modernistic leaders.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Straton's rigorous campaign against Al Smith, long fight against modernism, heavy preaching schedule, and radio program—the first in New York to be broadcast from a pulpit—took a toll on his health. Moreover, controversies over new issues arose between Straton and others in Calvary Baptist Church. As the New York Tribune asserted, the combination of these difficulties “caused the life of the pastor to become one long emotional crisis.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In the late 1920s, his effort to build a “skyscraper church” took center stage. Proposed by Straton in 1925, the building would include an apartment hotel with floors devoted to commercial and residential purposes rising above the sacred space, generating income for the church and additional space for its programs. As Jon Butler observes, “only the Gothic Tudor entrance signaled that there was a place of worship inside.” It provoked such discord among church leadership that Straton scaled it back from thirty-five floors to sixteen.Footnote ⁸⁷ But he never saw it come to fruition. In the spring of 1928, his already frail heath worsened after he suffered a paralytic stroke. A trip to his beloved Georgia improved it for a short while, but in September he had a nervous breakdown and checked into the Clifton Springs Sanitarium in upstate New York, where he died of a heart attack at 5:30 AM on October 29, 1929. Four hours later, the stock market crashed.

Perhaps fittingly, Straton's death shared the headlines with the crash for the next several days, as both events signaled significant changes for New York City. Many tributes praised him as a towering figure in the city and a preacher of singular distinction. Harry Emerson Fosdick sent a message of “profound regret” to the family.Footnote ⁸⁸ Dr. W. W. Brown, pastor of Harlem's Metropolitan Baptist Church, described Straton as “a man of great courage and ready to do and to dare what he believed to be for the glory of God and the exaltation of Christ. His motives were absolutely sincere.” Stanley Walker, an acclaimed author and editor of the New York Herald Tribune, said Straton had waged a gallant fight between “black and white, evil and good, modernism and fundamentalism.” To Walker, whose later book The Night Club Era featured Straton, his “fierce crusading spirit” made him of “far more importance than the cynics of Manhattan ever gave him credit for being.”Footnote ⁸⁹ At the same time, Straton's detractors continued to speak their minds. Journalist Heywood Broun acknowledged in his New York City Telegraph column that “in life he was a fighter” but confessed that he “hated the things for which Dr. Straton stood.” His “bleak and wintry faith” meant that he was not “a helpful force to humanity.” A writer for the Trenton New Jersey Gazette made a similar assessment. Although Straton's energy and courage were admirable, “it is, nonetheless, unfortunate that his attacks were not directed against the potent forces of evil which exist in New York, but against good citizens, who differed from him in his views.”Footnote ⁹⁰

In the end, it was clear that in many ways Straton was a product and exemplar of the “modernism” he so despised; although not a modernist, he was “modern.” His genius for publicity, constant engagement with the media, and plans for a “skyscraper church” were proof enough of that, according to The New Republic. Ironically, Straton had “used all the technical resources of modern life to oppose the modern spirit.” Despite being “a Baptist of the old school,” he was also “a New Yorker of the 20th century.” A memorial piece published in The Baltimore Evening Sun struck a similar note: Straton was “the first to prove” that evangelical fundamentalism “may be made to prosper more wonderfully in New York.” There was no more powerful sounding board, no matter what your message, than “a New York pulpit.” For that reason, historian Ferenc Szasz claims that the death of John Roach Straton “marked the end of an era for a certain type of preacher in New York City.”Footnote ⁹¹

Although neither Bryan's nor Straton's death ended the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York City, it did end. Just as a sermon effectively opened the controversy, another sermon effectively brought it to a close. In the fall of 1935, in the depths of the depression, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon entitled “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism,” which took the theological world by storm and launched a new era in New York Protestantism. Theologian William Hordern was said to have claimed that “Fosdick dropped an unexpected depth charge into the sea of theology,” making this sermon “the most decisive moment in the changing course of liberalism.”Footnote ⁹² The venerable Seventh Day Adventist scholar and educator W. W. Prescott understood it to be a confession of the failure of modernism as a mere accommodation of Christianity “to the spirit of the age” and a “betrayal of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.”Footnote ⁹³

“The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism” departed significantly from Fosdick's previous views and practices, signaling that Fosdick, too, had undergone a transformation. Although less dramatic than Straton's transformation, Fosdick's was much more theological. In the early 1930s, along with his calls for the “abundant life” and greater social service, Fosdick began to preach sermons that endorsed the socially conservative values more often attributed to fundamentalist evangelicals, calling one sermon “A Fundamentalist Sermon by a Modernist Preacher.” Thematically, “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism” seemingly aligned with this new, more socially conservative emphasis in his sermons. Regular themes included excessive drinking, premarital sex, adultery, and “loose morals.” A staunch supporter of Prohibition, which had proven neither a political success nor a curb to alcohol consumption, Fosdick claimed that the country was plagued by a “renaissance of drinking so insane that one gets past calling it wicked.” In “The Old Religion in the New World,” Fosdick bemoaned that excessive drinking had led to a sex craze, observed on the stage, in movies, and in everyday life. Even within the Christian church, well-crafted “justifications” for sexual promiscuity had emerged, he claimed. Popular culture was the root of the problem, promoting irreligious theories, “sex and cynicism” in a country that had become morally loose, atheistic, and “heathen.”Footnote ⁹⁴

These moral failings of society led Fosdick to conclude that the Christian church in America needed reform. If the 1930s had become “the dirty decade,” the fault lay at the doorstep of the churches—all of them. The “undisciplined paganism” in the country was due in part to the lack of unity among denominations on the issue of social and moral reform. Only a “rediscovery of Christ” could bring that about. Perhaps that must begin with those who claimed to be modernists; perhaps they, and not the fundamentalist evangelicals, had lost their way. In January 1933, he told his congregation at Riverside that “the consequences of this is already on us for at least we do get Christianity reduced to the lowest possible terms, so that it amounts to little more than a few ethical principles, and with this minimum we go out into a terrific generation like this—distracted and chaotic.” Modernists had been looking to science to answer the world's problems, but there were limits to science as well.Footnote ⁹⁵ The answer, he suggested, was a return to religion as a powerful spiritual force:

Fosdick may well have had Straton in mind as he said this, since it reflected sentiments that Straton had often expressed over the course of their theological battle.

In “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism,” Fosdick suggested that religious liberals had become preoccupied with intellectualism, which was spiritually limiting. “A man is vastly greater than his logic, and the sweep and ambit of his spiritual experience and need are incalculably wider than his rational processes,” he asserted. Dismissing the notion of “progress,” he contended that modernists had been haplessly optimistic about the world and overly “sentimental,” creating the illusion that “this is a lovely world with nothing here to dread at all.” Finally, modernists had lost moral ground and ethical standing by submerging their religious identity in the world rather than remaining distinct from it.Footnote ⁹⁷

Fosdick's sermon alarmed his fellow modernists, who saw it as evidence that he was doctrinally unstable and was “deserting the liberal cause.” While it did not concede to the claim of fundamentalists such as Straton that modernism was not actually “Christianity,” the admission that it was spiritually inadequate resonated with it nonetheless. Prescott considered the sermon a “confession,” and Halford R. Ryan later called it “Fosdick's mea culpa.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In response, Fosdick suggested that this sermon, like “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” had been misunderstood. He had remained a liberal “through and through” but had become concerned about disturbing trends in the religious culture of New York. Robert Moats Miller, Fosdick's principal biographer, has corroborated this view, stating that “the sermon was a warning critique of the inadequacy of modernism and implicitly a call for the deepening of liberalism, but it did not represent a desertion of the liberal cause.” Modernism had served a useful purpose by adjusting the “Christian truth” to civilization, Fosdick maintained, and now modernism itself stood in need of readjustment:

Fundamentalism was no longer a concern, he contended. The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was over. Now it was time to move on.

The philosophical means to move on were already embedded in modernism. By its own logic, it could not become a dogma or a creed, a tendency that Fosdick had observed with concern; it had to transform itself continually to address contemporary conditions. Fosdick understood that, as Miller puts it, “theologies are culturally conditioned.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As the world changed, theological liberals were called upon to change as well, or else they would become “rigid and hidebound,” the precise complaint lodged against the fundamentalist evangelicals in the early 1920s. Modernists must “welcome new insights, revise old judgments and acknowledge deplorable omissions in our understanding of the gospel.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thinking one's Christian life “clear through in modern terms” was still a high aim and social value for the city's religious liberals, but it was now necessary to be mindful of the pitfalls as well as the potential of that approach. A transformed Fosdick would again lead the way.