Between the two world wars, white Protestant ministers built a movement they called fundamentalism. By historian Dr. Mary Beth Mathews’s account, they kept Black Christians at its edges without ever putting Black theology on trial. What did the work was a set of assumptions: that Black believers were easily led, useful as performers, and best guided from a distance. This guide uses that history as a mirror. You will put the events in order, separate what happened from how it is interpreted, read the Scripture that Black evangelicals turned back on their critics, and then look for the same pattern closer to home.
You can work through it alone with a notebook, or with a group over four sittings. Each sitting has one task, a few questions, and room to disagree. Bring paper. Several exercises ask you to write things down before you talk about them.
Sitting one: put the events in order
Start with the story of how Mathews found her subject. She did not set out to study race. She wanted to know why so many Southern white fundamentalists had moved north, and she found very little on that question. Reading their letters and sermons, she kept noticing something else. In her words, “they were very much conscious of leading what they thought was a revivalist movement, but it was a revivalist movement for white people.” Her question had changed, so her sources changed too. She went looking for Black newspapers.
The research history matters because it shows the order of discovery. The pattern came out of the documents. Nobody brought a thesis to them and then hunted for proof.
Now build a timeline. On a sheet of paper, draw a line and place these points on it, all drawn from Mathews’s account in the Jude 3 Project conversation:
- The Civil War: Eli George Biddle serves in a Massachusetts infantry unit. Decades later he is still preaching and writing for the AME Zion Church.
- World War I and the years after: white leaders read the horrors of the war, along with riots and strikes, as evidence that the world was getting worse.
- Between World War I and World War II: fundamentalism emerges as a formal, self-named movement. Curtis Lee Laws, a white Baptist minister from Virginia, coins the term.
- The same years: wealthy white donors pay to distribute The Fundamentals, the booklets that helped start the movement.
- The early 1920s: J. Gresham Machen, who refused the fundamentalist label, publishes Christianity and Liberalism.
- The same period: Black Baptist and Methodist papers such as the Star of Zion and the National Baptist Union Review follow the fundamentalist-modernist battles closely.
- January 20, 2017: Mathews’s book Doctrine and Race is published.
Next, draw a second column beside the timeline and label it interpretation. Go back through the points and write down what is being claimed about each event, apart from the date. For example, the date of the movement is one kind of claim. The statement that its leaders truly believed they were living at the end of time is another kind. Mathews holds that second view, and she says plainly that other scholars argue with her about it. She also reports pushback on the book itself, partly because scholars currently disagree about whether “fundamentalism” is a usable category at all.
This exercise trains a habit the rest of the guide depends on. A date tells you when. An interpretation tells you why, and it can be wrong even when the date is right.
Discussion question 1. Look at your two columns. Which interpretation on your sheet would you most want to test against more sources, and what kind of document would settle it?
Sitting two: what the movement saw, and what it missed
The most startling discovery, Mathews says, was a mismatch in knowledge. Reading the Black papers, she concluded that “the people who are writing in these papers know everything about fundamentalism, but the white fundamentalists who are running the movement know nothing about African Americans.”
She explains why the knowledge ran one way. Black ministers had to understand the white leaders, because those leaders held power over their lives. Mathews puts it as knowing yourself and also knowing “the people who other you, the people who oppress you.” She adds, with some candor, that the discovery said more about her own position as a white historian than about the ministers. Of course they knew. It mattered to them.
The white leaders, meanwhile, did not need to know. Asked whether they painted Black Christians as liberal to avoid engaging their ideas, Mathews answered: “They actually were trying to paint them as ignorant.” She describes their belief that “African Americans would easily go along with whatever the last thing they had heard was.” The fear was about the future. If modernists or social gospel preachers reached Black congregations, the leaders assumed, those congregations would follow.
Notice the shape of that argument. A doctrinal objection says: you believe the wrong thing. This objection says: you cannot be trusted to keep believing the right thing. It is a judgment about minds, made without reading what those minds had written. And it explains how the gap stayed open. Mathews describes the leaders as men who mostly talked to one another, and she draws the consequence: “these white fundamentalists assumed that the world that they were living in was the world around them.”
Here is a short practice for this sitting. Write down the names of three sources you rely on for understanding the faith: a preacher, an author, a podcast, a denomination’s paper. Beside each one, note whether it ever regularly brings you voices from a church tradition other than your own. Then reverse it. Name a tradition you have opinions about. Write down one thing you have actually read or heard from inside it, in its own words. If the second list is shorter than the first, you have found the same one-way flow Mathews found in print.
Discussion question 2. Mathews says the knowledge ran toward the people without power. In your church, family or workplace, who has to understand whom, and who never has to learn back?
Sitting three: three quieter moves
A reader expecting a slammed door will not find one here. Mathews is direct about it: “I didn’t see any overt oppression or exclusion.” No file records a Black minister being turned away from a meeting. That absence is part of the evidence. It shows how a separation can be real without anyone ever deciding it out loud.
She identifies three patterns instead. Read them slowly, because each has a modern form.
- Talking only to each other. The leaders knew one another from Baptist and Presbyterian meetings, wrote to one another, and raised money from affluent white supporters. Mathews compares it to people on social media speaking only to their own group.
- Welcome as performance. Black participants appeared mainly as performers. Mathews gives the kind of thinking involved: “Let’s have an African American singer come and sing at our meeting, because it brings everyone to tears.” She reads this as another way of othering, a message that says “your performance here is important to us, but not your other contributions.”
- Guidance at a distance. The leaders positioned themselves as experts who could commission others for Black communities. Mathews reports them saying “we need to get black ministers to preach to black congregations”. Her summary is that you segregate the moral and spiritual guidance.
Before you turn these into a verdict, add a complication to your timeline. The Black ministers were not a single voice. On divorce and courtship, Mathews says, their advice sounded much like that of white evangelicals. On evolution they split. Some said it could be taught in schools, and some called the Genesis creation account folklore while still urging belief in the rest of the Bible. Mathews ties this to their position as educated men who felt the pull of the old-time religion. “So they were really torn,” she says. Biddle tried dispensational premillennialism and dropped it, and read newer Bible translations fundamentalists likely would not have liked.
So the history is not a simple story of one group believing correctly and another wrongly. Real differences existed. The point is narrower and harder: the white leaders did not separate from Black Christians because they had studied those differences. They had not studied them. Mathews also reminds her students that there is “no one black church or no one black faith.” Any lesson you draw from this history should keep that in view.
Discussion question 3. Which of the three moves is easiest to practice without noticing? Describe what it might look like in a church today, without naming any real person.
Discussion question 4. Mathews admits that scholars “tend to follow our subjects, and sometimes that leads us into the same old ruts that they were in.” Where might your own reading of church history be following the same ruts as the people it describes?
Sitting four: the test the excluded wrote
The Black evangelicals in Mathews’s study did not answer exclusion by giving up on Scripture. They built their own account of what makes a church. As she summarizes it, the Bible requires belief in God and right treatment of others, and the white Christians excluding them from churches, lynching and discriminating were the ones failing the test. Her short version of their conclusion: “It’s how you treat your neighbor.”
Mathews does not say which verses those writers cited, so read the following passages as the biblical ground their reasoning fits, not as quotations from them. Read each one aloud and attend to its setting before applying it.
In Matthew 22, a Pharisee who is an expert in the law asks Jesus which commandment is greatest. Jesus answers with two: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40). Mark the phrase “like unto it.” Jesus does not rank neighbor-love as an optional extra. He says the whole law hangs on both together.
In Luke’s account of a similar exchange, the lawyer presses further: “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus replies with the parable of the Samaritan. Then, in Luke 10:36, he turns the question around and asks which of the three men proved to be a neighbor. The lawyer wanted a boundary. Jesus asked about conduct.
First John was written to a community where claims to know God were disputed. The letter offers a test: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20). The claim to love God can be checked against how a person treats the brother in front of him.
Responding to Mathews, Lisa Fields put the same logic in plain terms: “if you can’t treat me like a human being, you’re probably not gonna get a lot of your teaching to be effective in my life.” Mathews agreed that this was what the writers were thinking.
Be careful not to turn this into a contest between creed and conduct. Jude 3 teaches that we are saved by grace through faith, and that genuine faith bears fruit: grace is the root and obedience is the fruit. The interwar Black writers were not abandoning doctrine. They were observing that people who defended sound doctrine while treating their neighbors as less than capable believers had cut the root off from its fruit.
Discussion question 5. The lawyer in Luke 10 asked a question designed to limit his obligation. What versions of “who is my neighbor?” do Christians ask now, and what are those questions trying to protect?
Discussion question 6. Return to your sitting-two list. If someone measured your faith by the second commandment alone for one month, which entry on that list would change first?
For whoever is leading
This history invites two easy exits. One is to treat it as a verdict on people a century gone and leave the room feeling better than them. The other is sweeping confession on behalf of a whole group, which can feel serious while asking nothing of anyone. When either starts, return the group to the timeline and the lists people wrote. Specific answers are harder to hide behind.
Keep the evidence honest. These findings come from one historian’s reading of print sources from two Baptist and two Methodist denominations. Mathews did not study Black Pentecostals, and she notes the papers she read barely mentioned them. Say this out loud early, so no one feels the history is being oversold.
Some people in the room may carry real hurt from racial exclusion in church. Do not make anyone the illustration. Let sharing be optional, and let silence count as participation. If a conversation opens something that needs more care than a study group can give, a trusted pastor or a licensed counselor is a fitting next step.
A question to carry
Lisa Fields observed in the conversation that “history seems to repeat itself time and time again.” That may be true, but the pattern in this story did not repeat by accident. It ran on habits: listening only inside one circle, welcoming some people for what they performed, and arranging their care from a distance. Habits can be noticed and changed.
Before the week ends, choose one voice from a church tradition outside your own and read or listen to it in its own words, the way the Black ministers in these papers read the fundamentalists. Then answer one question in writing: what did I assume about these believers before I heard them, and where did that assumption come from?
Discussion question 7. If a historian a hundred years from now read your church’s newsletters, sermons and group chats, what would they conclude about who you thought the movement was for?