Religious “modernists,” too, had wanted to make their faith relevant to the changing times, but they rejected fundamentalists’ “plain reading” of the Bible. Accusing fundamentalists of substituting “propagandism” for a proper scholarly study of the Bible, they preferred to look to higher critical scholarship to parse the intricacies of the Scriptures. These liberal Protestants also tended to emphasize the social and environmental dimensions of Christianity, over against fundamentalists’ more individualistic focus on personal sin and conversion. Fundamentalists, in turn, accused modernists of
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