Liberal theology was exactly what it purported to be—a revision of Protestantism accommodating the spirit of the modern age. That spirit pushed individual religious experience of a natural yet romantic sort to the forefront of the Christian faith, while the old traditions of orthodoxy receded into the background. Fundamentalists, whether militant or moderate, were clearly out of sync with such a spirit. Fundamentalist Baptists in the North once again became cultural outsiders, like their forebears in the eighteenth century, while liberal Baptists retained their insider status by adjusting
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