The Making of a Battle Royal

American Baptists emerged from the Civil War as a divided group. Slavery, landmarkism, and other issues sundered Baptists into regional clusters who held more or less to the same larger doctrinal sentiments. As the century progressed, influences from Europe further altered the landscape. A new way to view the Bible--more human, less divine--began to shape Baptist thought. Moreover, Darwinian evolutionism altered the way religion was studied. Religion, like humanity itself, was progressing. Conservative Baptists--proto fundamentalists--objected to these alterations. Baptist bodies had a new enemy--theological liberalism. The schools were at the center of the story in the earliest days as professors, many of whom studied abroad, returned to the United States with progressive ideas that were passed on to their students. Soon these ideas were being presented at denominational gatherings or published in denomination papers and books. Baptists agitated over the new views, with some professors losing their jobs when they strayed too far from historic Baptists commitments. By 1920, the Northern Baptists, in particular, broke out into an all-out war over theology that came to be called ""The Fundamentalist-Modernist"" controversy. This is the fifty-year history behind that controversy.

""In the period between the Civil War and World War I, Northern Baptist theology drifted increasingly to the left. This transition provoked the fundamentalist-modernist controversies among Northern Baptists in the 1920s and 1930s and ultimately inspired the rise of Baptist fundamentalism. In this helpful study, Jeff Straub examines the trends, personalities, and rivalries that led to the ascendancy of theological liberalism in the Baptist North.""
--Nathan A. Finn, School of Theology and Missions, Union University

""The historiography of religious liberalism and that of American fundamentalism have until now been kept in separate compartments. Straub brings the two together, explaining how liberals gained control of a previously-orthodox Baptist denomination. This story sets the stage for understanding how and why fundamentalism burst onto the scene. Those who wish to understand fundamentalism must begin by understanding liberalism. Straub's book provides a significant contribution to this understanding.""
--Kevin T. Bauder, Central Baptist Seminary of Minneapolis

""In The Making of a Battle Royal, Jeff Straub addresses a serious gap in the study of North American Baptist history. Until now, with a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to focus on the rise of fundamentalism while our understanding of the emerging thought and theology of Northern Baptist liberal/progressive academics has remained fragmented and in relative obscurity. With deftness, depth, and diligence, Straub takes his reader on a journey through the events and exchanges that established a liberal Baptist identity and facilitated the emergence of liberal Baptist hegemony. We owe Professor Straub...