Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity* in the Segregation Era (New York University Press, 2021). 260 pp. $30.00 USD
Ever since George Marsden published his landmark work, Fundamentalism and American Culture, in 1980, a steady stream of books on the movement has flowed from the American press. However, virtually all of these books have focused on the movement’s most prominent institutions and leaders, which were white, leaving a generation of readers with the impression that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. It was with great interest, then, that I took up Daniel Bare’s new book, Black Fundamentalists, which chronicles the African American contribution to fundamentalism during the crucial years 1920 to 1940.