Mostly, they did not split over the creed. On the core evangelical commitments, many Black Baptist and Methodist writers of the 1920s and 1930s sounded much like the white fundamentalists who were building a movement in those years. Historian Dr. Mary Beth Mathews read the period’s letters, sermons and newspapers. She found that what kept the two apart was a set of white assumptions about Black people: that they were childlike, easily led, and best guided from a distance. Much of the belief was shared. The movement was not.
That is a strong claim, and it deserves to be tested rather than simply repeated. If the division really ran along race instead of doctrine, the documents should show it in specific ways. If it ran along doctrine, they should show something else.
What would a doctrinal split look like on paper?
Start with what you would expect if belief were the real dividing line. White fundamentalist leaders would have read what Black ministers were teaching, found it wanting, and said so. You would expect arguments about specific Black writers and specific errors. You would expect a record of debate.
If race were the real dividing line, the record would look different. White leaders would say little about Black theology, because they never examined it. Their comments about Black Christians would concern capacity and character. And Black Christians would describe the quarrel as somebody else’s fight.
Mathews came to this question sideways, while reading the correspondence and sermons of Southern white fundamentalists for a different project. What stood out was how those men talked about race. 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.”
Who built the movement, and what did they require?
Fundamentalism took shape as a self-named movement between World War I and World War II. Mathews credits Curtis Lee Laws, a white Baptist minister from Virginia, with coining the term. The leaders were men who knew each other from Baptist and Presbyterian meetings, wrote to one another, and asked affluent white donors to fund projects such as distributing The Fundamentals, the booklets that helped launch the movement.
Mathews treats fundamentalism as a subset of evangelicalism. Evangelicals held the Bible as revelation, believed in converting others, and called for a holy life. Fundamentalists made those convictions a test. They insisted that every tenet be believed and added a particular end-times scheme called dispensational premillennialism. According to Mathews, white fundamentalists wrote that anyone who rejected the virgin birth or that end-times view was not a Christian. She notes that some scholars dispute her claim that these leaders truly believed they were living at the end of time.
So the movement did have a doctrinal gate. The question is whether that gate is what kept Black Protestants outside.
Did the white leaders ever examine Black theology?
The evidence points in one direction. Mathews describes these organizations as men “really just talking to each other”, much like people on social media speaking only to their own circle. The consequence she draws is specific: “these white fundamentalists assumed that the world that they were living in was the world around them.”
That finding cuts against a doctrinal explanation. You cannot rule a group’s theology out of bounds on the merits if you have not read it. And when white leaders did speak about Black Christians, they did not discuss their sermons or teaching. Asked whether the fundamentalists painted Black Christians as liberal, Mathews answered: “They actually were trying to paint them as ignorant.”
White fundamentalists argued that African Americans were impressionable and would follow whatever they had heard last. The warning was that if modernists or social gospel preachers reached Black communities, Black Christians would simply follow them. Mathews names John Roach Straton, who moved from Georgia to New York and presented himself there as an expert on Southern African Americans, and she says Riley and others shared the view. That argument concerned capacity, so it never reached belief. It treated Black Christians as a population to be protected from error, without asking whether they already held the faith the movement claimed to defend.
Were Black Christians even part of the conversation?
They were, and here the trail becomes most striking. Mathews searched Black denominational and secular papers, including the Star of Zion and the National Baptist Union Review, which she says were hard to locate. What she read reversed her expectations: “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.”
The papers bear that out in detail. Black ministers knew the players, the ideas and the battles of the controversy, and they framed the fight in racial terms themselves. Mathews summarizes their message: the people arguing about fundamentalism were white, and “This is not something we are arguing about.” That sentence is important evidence. Black writers did not experience the conflict as a dispute over whether they believed the Bible. They saw an internal white quarrel conducted as if they did not exist.
How do you exclude people without turning them away?
A careful investigator should report what the record does not contain. Mathews did not find a paper trail of formal rejection. “I didn’t see any overt oppression or exclusion.” No file recorded a Black minister coming to a meeting and being sent home.
What she did find was quieter. Black participants appeared mostly in roles of performance, such as a singer invited because the music moved the audience to tears. Mathews reads that as a form of othering, a way of telling someone that “your performance here is important to us, but not your other contributions.”
The other pattern was distance by design. White fundamentalists positioned themselves as experts who could commission others to work in Black communities, and they pressed the idea that “we need to get black ministers to preach to black congregations”. Mathews describes the effect this way: “you segregate the kind of moral and spiritual guidance here.”
Here the investigation has to slow down. No record shows white leaders weighing Black doctrine and rejecting it. That silence, joined to the pattern in their remarks about Black capacity, supports the inference that an assumption about Black people did the work a doctrinal test would otherwise have done. It remains an inference. Silence can also reflect lost records or matters left unwritten. But the inference rests on more than absence: what white leaders did say about Black Christians was consistently about their supposed impressionability, never about their theology.
Didn’t they actually disagree on some things?
They did, and an honest account cannot skip this. Black and white Protestants did not believe identical things. The question is whether their differences were what separated them.
On several social questions, Mathews found close agreement. Ministers wrote to other ministers with sermon ideas about divorce, noting that Jesus allowed fewer grounds for it than Moses did. They urged parental supervision when young people courted. In her assessment, “in many ways, the things that they’re saying sound exactly like what the white evangelicals are talking about.”
Evolution was different. Some Black ministers said evolution could be taught in schools, and some described the Genesis creation account as folklore while still urging belief in the rest of Scripture. Mathews observes that in doing so they were starting to do what white fundamentalists had accused them of. She connects the strain to their social position: these were educated men with degrees, aware of changing science, who also felt the pull of the old-time religion. “So they were really torn”, she says.
The end-times question shows a similar gap. Eli George Biddle, a Civil War veteran from a Massachusetts infantry unit who was still preaching and writing for the AME Zion Church in this period, experimented with dispensational premillennialism and, by Mathews’s account, dropped it fairly quickly. He also read newer Bible translations that fundamentalists probably would not have liked.
A defender of the white fundamentalists could point to these differences as the real cause. The objection runs into the evidence already gathered. The white leaders were not reading Biddle or the Black denominational papers. Their stated worry was that Black Christians might be led astray in the future, not that they had already departed. The differences existed, but the record does not show them doing the dividing.
What does this evidence establish, and what does it not?
This account rests on one historian’s reading of a specific body of print sources. Mathews studied two Baptist and two Methodist denominations. She did not study Black Pentecostals, partly because their sources were harder to find, and the Baptist and Methodist papers barely mentioned them. The writers were mostly in the South, yet the Great Migration hardly appears in their pages. The conversation existed largely in print.
Scholars also disagree about whether “fundamentalism” is even a workable category, and Mathews says that debate shaped the pushback her study received. She adds that the history of fundamentalism has mostly been written as a history of white fundamentalism, driven by white actors.
What the evidence supports is this. White fundamentalist leaders organized among themselves, did not engage Black theology, described Black Christians as impressionable, used Black participants for performance, and preferred to arrange Black spiritual guidance from a distance. Black ministers followed the controversy closely and shared many of its convictions. What the evidence does not show is that a doctrinal judgment about Black Christians drove the separation. These are Mathews’s findings and interpretations, and other historians may weigh them differently.
How did Black Christians answer the exclusion?
Black evangelicals did not respond by abandoning Scripture. They built their own account of what makes a church a church. The Bible, they argued, requires belief in God and right treatment of others. Mathews gives their conclusion: “because white people are excluding us from churches are lynching us, are discriminating against us, they’re the ones who aren’t Christian.” The test, as she summarizes it, was not agreement with five tenets. “It’s how you treat your neighbor.”
That argument has deep roots in the biblical text. Jesus, asked for the greatest commandment, joined love of God to a second: “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39). The first letter of John makes the link a test of truthfulness in a community whose claims to know God were in dispute: “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). Mathews does not say the Black writers cited these particular verses. But their reasoning follows the line John draws: a claim to know God can be falsified by how one treats a brother.
Lisa Fields put the same point in practical 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.”
Neither Jesus nor John sets love of neighbor against right belief about God. In both passages the two stand together, and the second exposes whether the first is real. That is the charge the Black evangelicals of the interwar years brought. They kept the creed and asked why its loudest defenders failed the neighbor test written into the same Bible. The fundamentalists had made correct belief the gate. They never noticed that the people they kept outside held the same belief, and that the gate had been built around something else.
Quick answers
Did white fundamentalists formally bar Black Christians?
Mathews found no records of overt exclusion. The separation worked through organizing only among themselves, describing Black Christians as easily led, inviting Black participants mainly to perform, and arranging Black spiritual guidance at a distance.
Did Black and white Protestants believe exactly the same things?
No. They overlapped heavily on core convictions and on issues like divorce. Some Black ministers differed on evolution and end-times teaching, but the record does not show those differences driving the split.
What is the main limit of this evidence?
It comes from one historian’s study of print sources from four Baptist and Methodist denominations. Black Pentecostals are largely absent, and the conclusion about motive is an inference from what white leaders wrote and did not write.