Toward Liberalism.

Since the Civil War the mainline Protestant denominations proved surprisingly capable of adapting intellectual challenges such as Darwinian evolution, biblical research, artistic modernism, and philosophical naturalism into their theologies and practices. There was a general trend toward liberalism, which meant that mainline Protestantism attempted to remain broadly and optimistically humanistic and began treating the Bible less as a book of literal truth than as a book of symbolic and metaphoric wisdom. Not all Protestants followed the trend, however. One important group of Protestants rejected almost all of the philosophical innovations of the modern era and attempted a return to the "fundamentals" of Protestantism. At the Niagara Bible Conference of 1895 fundamentalists set forth five essential articles of faith: the inerrancy of Scripture, the divinity and virgin birth of Christ, the idea of "substitutionary atonement" (Christ taking the place of sinners on...