Charles Wishart and William Jennings Bryan

The Philadelphia Overture addressing Fosdick came to the 1923 General Assembly meeting in Indianapolis. The two leading contenders for the office of moderator at this Assembly were Charles Wishart, president of the College of Wooster in Ohio, and William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential contender, Presbyterian elder, and crusader against the theory of biological evolution. Bryan was convinced that the theory of biological evolution not only undercut biblical authority and Christian doctrine, but also cut the nerve of moral reform and destroyed the foundation of Christian civilization. His entry into the moderatorial race brought the issue of biological evolution front and center on the Presbyterian agenda. Moreover, inasmuch as the College of Wooster taught biological evolution in its curriculum, the issue provided a clear choice for the Assembly.³³ In the words of one reporter for the New York Times, the Presbyterian Church was "being divided into evolutionists and anti-evolutionists."³⁴

Though Bryan was considered the clear frontrunner early on, he lost the election by a narrow margin, signaling the church's unease with Bryan's strident opposition to evolutionary thought. Indeed, the Assembly later defeated a hotly contested motion to oppose the teaching of biological evolution in Presbyterian schools and adopted a much milder resolution that instructed church judicatories to "withhold their official approval from such academies, colleges, and training schools where any teaching or instruction is given which seeks to establish a materialistic evolutionary philosophy of life or which disregards or attempts to discredit the Christian faith."³⁵ Most Presbyterians, even many theologically conservative Presbyterians like Machen, were willing to accept biological evolution to some degree.


The Committee on Bills and Overtures, which handled the Fosdick controversy, recommended no action pending the results of the investigation of the New York Presbytery. But militant conservatives were in no mood to leave Fosdick's fate in the hands of the liberal New York Presbytery. After long and acrimonious debate, the Assembly reaffirmed the five fundamentals of the faith first declared in 1910 and instructed the Presbytery of New York to bring the preaching of First Presbyterian Church, New York, into conformity with the Westminster Confession.³⁶

Hard upon this decision, however, liberals mobilized a public counteroffensive to this conservative victory. Henry Sloane Coffin, for example, a prominent liberal and pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, issued a statement claiming that he agreed completely with Fosdick and if Fosdick were disciplined he should be also.³⁷ Liberals like Coffin were convinced that if Christianity was going to appeal to thinking men and women and transform the world into God's Kingdom then it had to present a united front based on doctrinal liberty. As proponents of the Social Gospel, liberals believed that true evangelism had to bring all of life -- industry, education, and government -- under the gospel in order to "make the world the kingdom of God."³⁸ The liberal battle against fundamentalism was, therefore, not simply a fight for the tolerance of liberal theology but also a crusade to advance the Kingdom of God on earth.³⁹

--"For Church and Country: The Fundamentalist-Modernist Conflict in the Presbyterian Church" by Bradley J. Longfield