Ninety Pamphlets and a Word They Did Not Choose Lightly

Between 1910 and 1915, two wealthy laymen funded the publication and free distribution of a series of twelve volumes, later collected as ninety essays, titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, written by a range of conservative Protestant scholars and pastors to defend what its editors judged the non-negotiable core of Christian belief against what they saw as the corrosive influence of theological liberalism and higher biblical criticism. Contributors defended doctrines including the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, Christ's substitutionary atonement, his bodily resurrection, and the historical reality of his miracles, framing each as a fundamental a genuine Christian could not discard without abandoning the faith itself.

The movement that took its name from these pamphlets was not, at the outset, primarily organized around opposing evolution; that fight came later and somewhat overshadowed the broader doctrinal project in public memory. What The Fundamentals actually represented was an attempt by conservative Protestants across denominational lines, Presbyterian, Baptist and others, to draw a clear line around what they considered essential Christian doctrine at a moment when they perceived seminaries, mainline pulpits and popular culture alike drifting toward a more historically and scientifically accommodating Christianity they believed had abandoned the faith's actual content while keeping its vocabulary.