The Gospel According to Frank Wood: Biography and the American Evangelical Laity

When scholars talk about evangelicalism and socialism, it is often to note how much evangelicals do not like socialists. As the vanguard of the Religious Right, evangelicals supposedly espouse political causes as conservative as their theology. From fundamentalist spokesmen J. Frank Norris’ endorsement of free-market Republican Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election to James Dobson’s support for George W. Bush, historians of American evangelicalism and the modern conservative movement have claimed that the former has always been a constituency of the latter.

But what happens if we invert this historiography? If we consider the history of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism not from the perspective of presidential coalitions but from the viewpoint of a single, ordinary evangelical? This paper will draw upon my current book project, which is a microhistory of a single Bible class teacher named Frank Wood, to argue that a biography of the American evangelical laity profoundly destabilizes this tidy historiography. Though a Chicago newspaper editor he never rose above the title of Sunday school teacher, Wood’s self-identification as a fundamentalist in 1927 becomes the window through which I reinterpret fundamentalism’s emergence. In contrast to historians who equate fundamentalism’s emergence with the origins of the Religious Right, my research uncovers a diversity of fundamentalist electoral activity among the laity. Wood himself ran for office as a Socialist, equating Christ’s dictum that laborers were worthy of their hire as a parable favoring the collective regulation of the industrial economy. Other lay Bible class activists like Wood similarly supported a number of Progressive reforms typically associated with more “liberal” Protestants.

Employing a biographical methodology has been crucial to this endeavor, and the paper will conclude how Wood’s life challenges historians to move beyond attempting to write typological histories of fundamentalism, and begin to write compelling histories of fundamentalists.