Members and friends of the American Society of Church History: We gather here in Atlanta for our annual meeting only a few months after President Ford inaugurated a Bicentennial Era of unspecified duration. My address tonight, however, will not treat of the Republic's founding but with the Romantic Revolution and some of its implications for the scholarly tasks of this society.1

When physical affections are destroyed and tyrannical desire extinguished, then no hindrance will any longer stand in the way of men and women being together, because all evil suspicion will be cleared away and all who have entered the kingdom of heaven can maintain the way of life of the angels and spiritual powers, through the grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be glory, honor, and dominion from age to age. Amen.1

In the contemporary intellectual and institutional world, a distinction between theology and the study of religion is taken for granted. Those labels designate two quite separate disciplines or perspectives, even though their data overlap. Obviously, this distinction did not always exist within Christendom. Until about the middle of the seventeenth century, discussion of religion was almost always in the context of theology. But then, a new field of inquiry began to appear, and one may trace the first outlines of the study of religion or, to use a slightly too-specialized label, the scientfic study of religion.

Shortly after the formation of the United Church of Canada, Charles Clayton Morrison told readers of the Christian Century to “put down a new monumental date in ecclesiastical history—Wednesday, June 10, 1925.” “On that day,” he continued, “took place the first large scale achievement of organic union of separate denominational families since the Protestant Reformation.” Aware that the full significance of this venture would not be evident for some time, he predicted it would be “the object of continued study and exposition for months and perhaps years to come.”1 Since Morrison's enthusiastic pronouncement, a considerable body of literature has accumulated on the church union movement and the United Church of Canada. No critical evaluation, however, has been made of it and little is known about its authors or their understanding of the formation and development of this Canadian institution.

“Fundamentalism” is used in so many ways that a definition is the only place to begin. As I here use the term, “fundamentalism” refers to a twentieth-century movement closely tied to the revivalist tradition of mainstream evangelical Protestantism that militantly opposed modernist theology and the cultural change associated with it. Fundamentalism shares traits with many other movements to which it has been related (such as pietism, evangelicalism, revivalism, conservatism, confessionalism, millenarianism, and the holiness and pentecostal movements), but it has been distinguished most clearly from these by its militancy in opposition to modernism. This militancy has typically been expressed in terms of certain characteristic theological or intellectual emphases: whereas modernism or liberal theology tended to explain life and much of religion in terms of natural developments, fundamentalists stressed the supernatural.