3This essay challenges the longstanding binary of “traditional” fundamentalists and “modern” liberals by situating fundamentalist Bible reading within the longer history of the written word. Historians have used the hermeneutics of early fundamentalists as key evidence of their traditionalism (Marsden, 1980; Noll, 1991). But placing these practices in a broader context reveals they too were a product of modernity. Indeed, it reveals a broader bifurcation in modern approaches to texts and the modern project writ large. Fundamentalism focused on textual stability, factuality, and precision—views that still dominate American boardrooms and business schools. The modernist opponents of fundamentalism historicized texts, focusing on the complexity of reading, the variability of meaning over time, and the uncertainty that resulted—ideas that still undergird most academic discourse. Each method was fundamentally at odds with the other, but both were equally novel.

The History of Textual Stability

5Although the utility of writing was evident, full literacy remained a niche specialization, rarely held by more than 10% of a population. This was because ancient reading and writing was hard, specialized work, taking years to master, and because written works were expensive, handcrafted, one-of-a-kind artifacts (Koller, 2024). Literacy was a luxury for the few since most people had neither the time nor money to bother with it.

6For modern readers who see the written word as an unmitigated good, it is easy to forget that early critics were not shy about noting the technology’s shortcomings. Plato famously complained that writing never fully captured human thought. Far better than words on paper, he mused, was “an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner…[a] living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image” (Plato, 1892 [ca. 370 BCE]: 485). Jewish and then Christian writers expressed similar critiques when contrasting the “dead letter” of written words to living words on the heart.

7Texts were better than nothing, to be sure, but ancient societies clearly held a different understanding of authorship and textual authenticity than we do today. Most texts were not stable, and only rarely were creations of a single author. Depending on time and place, dictation was taken as summary notes on a wax board, then shaped into the written text (possibly by yet another scribe) that was memorialized in ink (Illich, 1996: 88–90). Similarly, ancient copyists regularly modified the texts they were reproducing, presumably to better fit imperfect words to the living ideas behind them (Aejmelaeus, Longacre, Mirotadze, 2020; Harris, Taub, 2024).

12Vested with such authority in the age of the modern fact, many American Protestants ratcheted their faith in scripture even further, concluding that their Bible was verbally inspired—every word superintended by God—and inerrant—every fact on every subject was without error too. Written by humans, perhaps, but God was the ultimate editor, the divine print-master approving the final draft. Words that ancient critics considered the imperfect envelope for living ideas, now became the entirety of the message.

13But Americans’ unwavering faith in the power of texts were short-lived, as the first third of the nineteenth century produced moral chaos instead of the promised flowering of Christian civilization. A multiplicity of socially disruptive sects, then heated debates over slavery, decisively demonstrated the flexibility of Biblical interpretation. By 1840 most leading Protestant denominations had either reversed their stance on a self-interpreting Bible outright or adopted a hybrid stance that used the rhetoric of biblicism with theological traditions and ecclesial institutions as the silent enforcers of social norms and religious practices (Bratt, 1998; Perry, 2018).

14The short tumultuous career of the self-interpreting Bible was the high-water mark for scriptural authority in the United States, but it is a stretch to call this a longstanding tradition. It relied on views about texts that did not exist before mass printing and methods borrowed from contemporary scientific theories unknown before the modern era. It was driven primarily by a set of current social and political needs within the American context, not by universally held convictions of Christians across space and time. Like all theologies, methods of Biblical interpretation only emerge within particular cultural contexts.

15Meanwhile, a far different view of texts, and the “facts” they contained, was developing in Europe. Though slow in making its way across the Atlantic, by the last third of the nineteenth century, it would offer Americans another modern approach to interpreting texts.

The History of History

18History emerged out of the modern obsession with textual exactness, but it ultimately undermined it, revealing that all texts were “sources” requiring analysis. Doubt was central to historical methods. Texts were not neutral repositories of unchanging facts; rather facts, when they existed, were often found between conflicting accounts. And because language and culture were constantly evolving, the textual meaning inevitably changed too (Wineburg, 2001: 63–88).

21Historical approaches to the Bible and the natural world spurred controversy in Europe, but they were simply incompatible with the bedrock textual ideals of antebellum America. No wonder, then, that historical consciousness did not make serious inroads in the US until the 1870s (Ross, 1984), when the Civil War had demolished any remaining hope of a self-interpreting Bible (Noll, 2006). Amidst the major social and economic changes in the decades after, American Protestants were eager to find a new scientific approach to biblical interpretation that would underwrite new efforts in social reform (Abell, 1943; Boyer, 1978; Foster, 2002).

22Charles A. Briggs was one of the first Americans to address the implications of historical consciousness on biblical interpretation for a broad audience (Briggs, 1881). A Presbyterian minister and co-editor of the Presbyterian Review, he maintained a high view of scripture: it contained the “infallible Divine Word.” But in terms resonant with ancient views of the written word, Briggs also saw “the external word [the written text] as the instrument” that was “applied by the Divine Spirit” to the soul of the reader (p. 565). Thus freed from the need to defend the words on paper, he could approach the Bible as a historian and simply note the many issues with theories of inerrancy: that Hebrew vowel points were not in the original text but rather “the product of a long historical development” (p. 656), that the New Testament quoted the error-prone Greek Septuagint instead of the original Hebrew (p. 570), and that both Testaments regularly made intentional changes to other scripture that they quoted (p. 571). Inerrancy was also incompatible with translation, since “the translator does not translate the letters and syllables,” but “ascertains the sense, the idea, and then gives expression to the idea” (p. 572). By his account, it was the purveyors of verbal inspiration who deviated from past norms, and Biblical criticism that maintained the “principles of the Reformation” (p. 556). The reformers, he noted, had not been afraid to challenge the canonical status of Biblical texts, to note factual errors in the Bible, or to question traditional dogmas (pp. 562-563). Conservatives would have none of this, and he was eventually tried for heresy and had his ministerial credentials revoked (Dorrien, 2001: 337–370).

23In addition to higher criticism, historical thinking, refracted through Darwin, doubled back into the study of humanity in the development of modern social science (Haskell, 1977; Trautmann, 1987). Protestants who moved within these networks began envisioning a unified “scientific” approach to the study of self, society, and religion, rooted fundamentally in historical methods (Sklansky, 2002). History allowed scripture to be mined for ethical principles, enabling social reformers to bypass the imperfect words that created fruitless theological quarrels and capture its lasting meaning. Thus it was in the twofold application of historical methods—to scriptural interpretation by professional Biblical scholars and to social reform by advocates of the “Social Gospel”—that Protestant Modernism was born (Hopkins, 1940; Hutchison, 1976; Cashdollar, 1989; Dorrien, 2001; Hollinger, 2011; 2017).

24In the immediate context of Baconian science, historical methods seemed only to encourage radical innovations, but a longer view suggests that they too had continuities with the past. In addition to echoing an ancient skepticism of texts, history also moderated modern biases toward experiential verification and empirical observations: primarily because the thing studied, the past, provided nothing to experience or observe, and studying a process meant losing precision and stability. The modern mechanistic model of jigsaw facts was countered by an older vision of an organically united society (Kloppenberg, 1988; Croce, 1995; Ruse, 1999).

25This story—of science and history and liberal Christianity—was the historiographical context from which Marsden’s assertions about fundamentalism’s traditionalism first arose. But in the years following 1980, historians of business, labor, and culture would discover a second revolution starting after the Civil War. It was a story of how business became modern, not by embracing historical consciousness, but by redoubling its commitment to the analytic-technical approach to knowledge and texts—a view of the world with remarkable resonances with fundamentalist thought. To this story we finally turn.

The Birth of Modern Fundamentalism

26Between 1860 and 1910, American business was transformed in ways too complex and wide-reaching to fully recount here. But it began with a shift from enslaved labor and small producers to wage labor as the driving force of the American economy (Rodgers, 1979; Foner, 1995; Foley, 1997). Manufacturing processes, once holistic, complex, high-expertise endeavors, were divided into simpler piecework facilitated by machines and later assembly lines (Montgomery, 1987; Cohen, 2008).

27Such production practices required commodification: the development of standardized, precisely-measured parts (Hounshell, 1985) as well as a parallel process in which nearly everything grown, gathered, mined, pumped, processed, and slaughtered was wrestled into standardized forms as well. Commodification led to a Cambrian explosion of new taxonomies that transformed a farmer’s bag of grain into a “golden stream” graded by weight, size, and cleanliness. Thus de-particularized, it, along with everything from pork bellies to iron ore, could be traded on exchanges or sold as futures (Cronon, 1992). Chemists created other commodities by purifying and combining molecules. Of special interest was squeezing every last ounce of value out of the black crude that would power the modern world (Dochuk, 2019). These commodity streams moved across the continent on long ribbons of steel track of standardized gauge, requiring time itself to be corralled into four uniform time zones. Telegraph lines followed, transmitting language in an entirely new written form—dots and dashes—foreshadowing the modern digital economy (Cronon, 1992; White, 2012).

28As commodities were sorted and categorized, so were people. Public opinion surveys were invented and deployed to create an “Averaged American” to whom products could be marketed (Igo, 2007). They were also deployed by politicos to better buy elections (Gidlow, 2007). Labor became a commodity too. Workers were now abstractions, cost inputs, to be controlled as precisely as any machine (Chandler, 1993; Glickman, 1999). New professions were devoted to those ends—management, political science, polling, public relations, and empirically-oriented sociology and psychology (Bledstein, 1976; Sklansky, 2002; Igo, 2007).

29For this system to work, words on paper needed to be meaningful, stable, and authoritative. Whether a specification providing precise measurements or a grain elevator receipt that doubled as ownership of the physical product, there was no room for interpretations that undermined the essential stability and coherence of the text. So too with written contracts that mediated nearly every business arrangement, and the patents, copyrights, and trademarks that created a new asset class called intellectual property. And then there was that most magical of documents: the corporate charter, which conjured a legal person out of thin air, who could enter into contracts and own property (Lamoreaux, 1988; Sklar, 1988; Stanley, 1998; Strasser, 2004).

31Early fundamentalism developed within the modern business networks that presumed these views of texts. No one better represents this overlap than the shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist and global celebrity Dwight L. Moody. On the revival stage, he took on the persona of a businessman and proceeded to interpret the Bible using the same business instrumentalism deployed by the Gilded Age elites that he literally seated behind him. The Bible, he believed, should be read plainly for fact, as you would read a business report, also personally like a memo from God to you, and practically, as you would read a how-to manual (Gloege, 2015).

32While Moody set the stage for fundamentalism, his close associate Reuben A. Torrey helped bring it to fruition. Torrey attended Yale University and Divinity School in the 1870s. Later, studying theology in Germany, he forged a modern form of Christianity that side-stepped historical consciousness. His primary concern was the problem of religious certainty in the modern age. Torrey’s approach began with a simple premise: that the Bible should be interpreted, not as a historical artifact, but primarily as a validated contract between God and the individual Christian. Promises of God were paired with requirements to claim them; fulfill the requirements and the promises were yours to claim. Whether met through the natural order or by miraculous intervention, their fulfillment, he claimed, was certain. In this way, Torrey argued that God’s existence and the reliability of scripture was proven through personal experience, by making an existential choice to act as if they were true. It was evidence immune to historical critique. He spread these ideas as a leading author, educator, preacher, and editor in emerging fundamentalist networks around the globe (Gloege, 2007).

33Moody and Torrey’s approaches were popular, but they were striking departures from antebellum methods. Those closest to the older ways—conservative Presbyterians at Princeton Seminary who also cheered Briggs’s heresy conviction—roundly criticized both men for their views. They could not abide Moody and Torrey’s individualization of scripture, reliance on experience over innate biblical authority, and especially Torrey’s embrace of modern miracles. These approaches disregarded Baconian empiricism and created new risks of social instability (ibid.).

35The most important popularizer of the Dispensational interpretive frame was Cyrus I. Scofield. Despite his checkered past, including a stint in the Confederate army, alcoholism, and divorce, he made a name for himself within Moody’s networks as a Bible teacher. A lawyer by training, he was attracted to dispensationalism primarily as an interpretive system. At the encouragement of friends, and through support from wealthy donors, he engaged in a four-year project to systematize the dispensational framework in the form of his eponymous Scofield Reference Bible. It was published in 1909 and sold a million copies in the first decade. His introduction, textual notes, and subject headings literally integrated the system into the biblical text. Published by the venerable Oxford University Press, it gave dispensationalism a patina of serious scholarship (Hummel, 2023: 132–135). Readers “discovered” dispensationalism through their own study, and became convinced that it was intrinsically “biblical.”

36Dispensationalism enforced an ahistorical interpretation of the Bible through containment. Scofield taught that God divided time into “dispensations,” each with different standards of conduct. This made everything in the Bible “true” in an abstract sense, but not necessarily “true for us.” In the present dispensation, the “church age,” Christians were exempt, not only from Jewish law, but also, shockingly, Jesus’ teachings, which only applied to the future millennial kingdom. This effectively muzzled the texts that inspired both the social gospel and Pentecostal practices like faith healings and tongue-speaking—all while claiming that the Bible was verbally inspired and inerrant. The Epistles fell under the present dispensation, but they too required careful handling. Presuming that the Bible spoke univocally, Scofield’s carefully selected cross references created a single homogenized view on any subject. But this was legal contextualization, not historical. Just as it took several two-dimensional schematics to represent an engineer’s three-dimensional vision, so too with God’s revelation. It was a modern interpretive approach that depended on modern textual tools: topical indexes, concordances, and other products of the print revolution. It presumed methods of reading favored by industrial minds (Gloege, 2015).

37Contract, memo, manual, schematic: all conceptualized the Bible as a document that lived in an eternal present; all were something other than a historical source. All presumed ideas and practices born in modernity and unrecognizable to past Christian traditions. When it came to Bible use at least, fundamentalism was thoroughly modern.

Conclusion

38Placing fundamentalism within the longer story of literacy and the birth of modern history provides two essential insights that should change the way scholars approach fundamentalism. First, it shows that “traditional” is too variable a term for serious historical analysis. It raises the question “traditional relative to what?” Is fundamentalism traditional simply because its methods drew from “older” ideas, even if they were utterly novel two generations earlier and were never universally accepted? What about the Jewish and Christological hermeneutics used by biblical authors (Longenecker, 1975) or the dozens of other past methods? What makes a belief, a method, a reading, “traditional?” It also begs the question “traditional compared to what?” Every Christian group has continuities, whether self-described liberals or conservatives, and whether they embrace those continuities or ignore them. The current use of “traditional” obfuscates this fact by treating conservative continuities seriously and dismissing liberal continuities as nominal vestiges. Since there is no objective measure to determine the relative significance of these continuities, such discussions inevitably slide into normative debates about which group is more aligned with “True Christianity.” These are fine, perhaps essential, discussions for ecclesial communities (Congdon, 2024: 22–23), but they distract from the analytic work of professional historians.

39A second insight revealed by this longer view is the deep irony that fundamentalism’s traditionalism has become the de facto assumption for, of all things, the historical study of fundamentalism. To describe fundamentalism as “traditional belief” presumes that a religious system can remain unchanged, when history teaches that everything changes over time. It assumes fundamentalists lived outside of their cultural and temporal context, when history teaches that this context makes us who we are. It assumes a monolithic past—a uniform Christian “tradition” that fundamentalists could preserve—when history teaches that there have always been competing orthodoxies. In short, it contradicts the basic axioms of modern history.

40Treating fundamentalists as traditional reflects their self-identity, to be sure. But this merely points to the real target of their animus: not modernity writ large, but historical consciousness in particular. They, and their evangelical progeny today, do not oppose historical methods because those methods change Christianity; they too alter older theologies without apology. Rather they oppose history because it challenges their underlying vision of what the world is and how it works, including the nature of texts. And these ideas owe their existence far more to modern business practice than to any Christian tradition.