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Without any higher organizational control such as denominational boards or conventions, fundamentalist schools struggled to figure out how to make difficult decisions. This chapter examines three cases from the 1930s in which different schools solved the dilemma of authority in very different ways. Some schools insisted on a rigid top-down autocratic system; others spread authority around. The chapter also looks at the contentious debate among fundamentalist intellectuals over the proper meaning of creationism between 1920 and 1940. A few endorsed the notion of a young earth, but many more argued that the “days” of Genesis actually represented long ages, or that a long gap stretched between early creation and the creation of humanity in Eden.

In the mid-twentieth century leading scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr or David Riesman wrote off conservative evangelical education as fading. William McLoughlin also saw the new revival movements as ephemeral. Billy Graham and Carl Henry had ambitions to start a major university around 1960 but did not have the resources. Wheaton College in Illinois, the leading ex-fundamentalist college, began to rise academically despite the anti-intellectualism of its tradition. Calvin College had been an ideologically isolated Reformed school but by the 1960s had produced leading Christian philosophers. Intervarsity Christian Fellowship helped raise consciousness regarding strong scholarship, and by 2000 the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities had grown to over one hundred schools with well-trained faculties. Like-minded Christian scholars founded their own academic societies. Baylor University became an intentionally Christian research university. Evangelical Protestant and Catholic scholars often cooperated. Despite many challenges, distinctly Christian scholars could hold their own in twenty-first-century academia.

This chapter explores the history of the American Scientific Affiliation from its founding in the 1940s until 1965. Attention is given to the organization’s gradual transition from its fundamentalist beginnings to its alignment with the ‘new evangelicalism.’ Its founders were suspicious of evolution and anything that appeared to contradict the Bible, but they had grown wary of the uncritical scientific claims preached from the pulpit and envisioned a group that could defend Christian doctrines, while improving the churches’ scientific credibility. With unexpected foresight, they refused to establish the ASA as an antievolutionary organization or to join forces with such groups. In doing so, they helped set a new course for the relationship between science and religion and, in turn, earned considerable criticism from their more conservative coreligionists.

The white middle-class “Victorian” Americans of the decades beginning with the Civil War in the 1860s faced a series of cultural crises, including war, reconstruction, industrialization, urbanization, and rapid intellectual changes. The diverging paths in Protestant responses are here represented by the contrast between Henry Ward Beecher and the Blanchards, Jonathan and his son Charles. Beecher exemplified the progressive spirit of emerging liberal theology. God was revealed in the Bible but also in the Christian moral improvements of the modern age, such as in the defeat of slavery. Beecher presented a “Progressive Orthodoxy” that was part of a “New Theology.” Jonathan Blanchard, founder of Wheaton College (IL), was a biblicist evangelical abolitionist. He was also a postmillennialist. His son Charles, who succeeded him at Wheaton, was influenced by Dwight L. Moody, became a premillennialist, and promoted anti-modernist militancy of fundamentalism.

During the 1920s, fundamentalists founded their own network of dissenting institutions. No longer able to control public or denominational colleges, activists opened new schools such as Bryan University, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Des Moines University. At the time, it was not clear exactly what those new schools hoped to accomplish, since the meanings of fundamentalism itself were hotly debated. Fundamentalism was often considered a loose, vague conservative impulse rather than any specific evangelical movement. Many self-identified fundamentalists themselves disagreed about the proper boundaries of their new religious and cultural identity. These uncertainties established the pattern of debate and disagreement that defined fundamentalist higher education throughout the twentieth century.

This chapter explores the tension and competition between various missionaries and missions agencies in Ecuador as each group tried to position itself to contact the Waorani. Rachel Saint and Elisabeth Elliot reconciled for the first of many times before Rachel and Dayomæ traveled to the US for This Is Your Life and speaking engagements, a trip that lasted a year. Dayomæ converted to Christianity and was baptized by V. Raymond Edman, president of Wheaton College, where three of the missionaries killed by the Waorani had attended. In Ecuador the missions first involved in the Waorani project continued efforts to make contact. Mission Aviation Fellowship resumed flights over Wao clearings. Brethren missionary Wilfred Tidmarsh ventured near Waorani territory. In November 1957 two Waorani women, Mintaca and Mæncamo, came out of the rainforest. Elisabeth Elliot befriended them, brought them to live with her, and sought to learn the Wao language.