We recently passed the 100-year anniversary of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s famous sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Delivered on May 21, 1922, the sermon was a call to arms for progressives among northern Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. The fundamentalist movement had taken off with the publication of the twelve-volume
The Fundamentals
between 1910 and 1915. Fosdick saw the skirmishes beginning between fundamentalists and modernists and decided it was time to rouse the troops. Castigating fundamentalists for their illiberalism, Fosdick pleaded for “an intellectually hospitable, tolerant, and liberty-loving church.” He wanted a church that fused together modern science with biblical witness in the service of social problems. If the fundamentalists won, then Christians would be driven from Baptist and Presbyterian churches in the name of a literalist approach to Scripture that only tolerated one view on the Second Coming and the virgin birth.