If It Walks Like a Duck

by

Sometime in the early 1990s I began to realize that the word “evangelical” was being hijacked by the religious right. It took a while before I learned that this was a deliberate and carefully planned strategy that went back decades.

In April, 1942, Harold John Ockenga was instrumental in gathering a group of conservative leaders that included John R. Rice, Bob Jones, Sr., Carl McIntyre and some other notable veterans of the fundamentalist-modernist conflicts of the twenties. Nearly 150 of them, most of whom had been involved in the World Fundamentalist Association, met and established the National Association of Evangelicals. Ockenga was its first president (1942-1944). Addressing the gathering he advocated shunning the name “fundamentalists” in favor of “Neo-Evanglicals,” since “Fundamentalism” had fallen into disrepute (see the Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow and “Inherit the Wind”). Some of them had come to consider the term “fundamentalism” an embarrassment.

Soon shortened to “Evangelical,” Ockenga proposed a plan of aggressive political and social action clearly designed to displace the role of the mainline and far too liberal Protestant churches which had been known, heretofore, as the evangelical denominations.

Ockenga had grown up in the Olivet Methodist Church of the Austin neighborhood in Chicago where he felt a strong calling to the pastoral ministry as an Epworth Leaguer. He attended Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, originally a Methodist college with strong ties to the Holiness Movement, much like Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. After college he went to New Jersey, enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary, and served as a student pastor in two small Methodist Churches near Princeton University. Harold Paul Sloan was his District Superintendent. Sloan was the foremost conservative voice within northern Methodism during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Sloan and Harold John Ockenga became fast friends and compatriots. Ockenga was a frequent contributor to the youth section of Sloan’s publication during the controversy (first named The Call to the Colors, changed for a while to The Essentialist and later called The Christian Faith and Life).

When Princeton Seminary split over the fundamentalist controversy, Ockenga went with J. Gresham Machen and others who left Princeton to establish Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Ockenga finished his seminary education at Westminster and was hired by Clarence J. McCartney, the very conservative fundamentalist leader (and close friend of J. Gresham Machen) to be youth minister and assistant pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, thus precipitating Ockenga’s departure from the Methodist Church. From there and at a very early age Ockenga was invited to become the pastor of the prominent Park Street Congregational Church in Boston where he spent most of his career.

Ockenga served as the first president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California concurrent with his pastorate at Park Street Church. A few years later he was one of the founders of Gordon Conwell Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, which today houses the Harold John Ockenga Institute. He also served as president after Gordon-Conwell's revival and relocation while continuing as pastor at Park Street. Busy Man.

Fundamentalists in America during this era were almost incestuous in the way allies and friends hung together across denominational lines like an extended family. They still do. The overlapping genesis of these “Evangelical ne Fundamentalist” groups is voluminous. The above is but a sample. I could go on at length, but, unless you have an eccentric interest in the fundamentalist movement (as do I), it would probably only bore you more.

If it walks like a duck, we say in the vernacular of Southern Illinois, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, tastes like a duck; it’s a duck. You can call it “Evangelical” but it is still what it is. When Harold John Ockenga renamed the fundamentalist association, he was reaching for power and respectability. His effort has been an enormous success but the movement he renamed and led remains essentially a “fundamentalist” enterprise.

Retired Bishop William B. Lewis served the Dakotas Area of The United Methodist Church from 1988-1996.