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returned.
The gross differences are unmistakable. Yet especially because theological conservatives are so often misunderstood, we must appreciate some of the shadings. For example, theological liberals were not necessarily political liberals. An unsympathetic Henry Ward Beecher told striking railroad workers in 1877 that they could support their families on one dollar per day, a sum sufficient to buy bread and water. On the other hand, as the career of William Jennings Bryan demonstrates, theological conservatives were not necessarily political conservatives. Theological liberals differed among themselves in matters of doctrine as well as social policy, with many continuing to accept some biblical miracles and Jesus' divinity. Theological conservatives, were more diverse than their liberal rivals in background and belief. Their ranks included urbane Calvinists, traveling evangelists, and grassroots participants who believed that conversion brought a "second blessing," including the power to heal and the gift of glos-

 

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solalia. Veterans of this turn-of-the-century holiness revival, usually poor and demonstrative, formed Pentecostal churches, generally shunned by more polished theological conservatives.
Some theological conservatives accepted an interpretation of Scripture called premillennial dispensationalism. According to this framework, which is anything but simple literalism, history was divided into erasdispensationsin which mankind made and then broke covenants with God. Humanity now lived in the penultimate period to be marked by another broken covenant, the rise of Satan's helper, the Antichrist, a great Tribulation testing all Christians, and finally Jesus' return. Dispensationalists found in Scripture prophecies of current events and they studied world affairs for evidence of the impending Second Coming; before his ignominious departure from Paris, Napoleon III looked like the most promising candidate for Antichrist. Scholars still disagree about the prevalence of dispensationalism among theological conservatives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet its long-term significance cannot be denied. In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Hal Lindsey proffered dispensationalist interpretations of contemporary events to millions of Americans.
By 1900, theological liberals had captured most of the major seminaries, pulpits, and publications. As controversies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City show, this institutional dominance was not easily achieved. Founded by Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Union became fully independent and interdenominational after liberal Professor Charles Briggs was charged with heresy and barred from the ministry by Presbyterian conservatives. The two camps continued to jockey for position within Protestantism during the Progressive era. Conservatives found new leaders, including the staid Baptist, William Bell Riley of Minneapolis; issued the Schofield Reference Bible, which brought dispensationalist exegesis to a mass audience; and effectively argued their case in The Fundamentals, a series of booklets that reached at least three million readers. Both sides increasingly considered denominational differences less significant than the cross-denominational split between theological liberals and conservatives. During the Progressive era, however, the split was not yet a chasm. Liberals and conservatives sometimes

 

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cooperated on a day-to-day basis, both sides usually supported Prohibition and other purity crusades, and neither was immune to nativism. Indeed, Congregationalist social gospeler Josiah Strong wrote Our Country, the best-selling nativist tract at the turn of the century.
More than any other single event, World War I turned the Protestant intramural split into a chasm. Wartime fears nurtured by the Wilson administration made tolerance a rarity. With notable exceptionsQuakers, Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, and radical