Women, Public Ministry, and American Fundamentalism, 1920-1950

In 1976, a young theologian named Donald Dayton wrote an influential book that sought to put asunder what he saw as an unholy marriage between evangelical religion and conservative politics in America. In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Dayton showed how revivalistic Protestantism had, in the nineteenth century, been wedded firmly to progressive political causes. Dayton began his book by frankly admitting that his own political views had been heavily influenced by the student movements—antiwar, civil rights, equal rights— of the 1960's. Separate chapters linked evangelical religion to nineteenth-century movements for racial equality, economic justice, and feminism. In his final chapter, Dayton argued that twentieth-century evangelicalism had abandoned its heritage of radical social reform under the dual influence of premillennialism imported from England and ideas about biblical inerrancy formulated at Princeton Seminary.