Formulating the Faith

This chapter focuses on the most common and pervasive fundamentalist doctrines—the so-called five fundamentals of biblical inspiration, Christ’s divinity, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, and the literal resurrection and second coming of Christ—and compares how white fundamentalists and conservative black clergymen engaged these topics. Using The Fundamentals (completed in 1915) as a baseline for comparing theological formulations and drawing on newspaper articles, personal correspondence, pastors’ notes, sermons, and other sources, the chapter shows that black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on these central doctrinal issues, and that at times their exposition and argumentation were formulated almost identically to the arguments used in the pages of The Fundamentals.