Religion: Presbyterians’ Moderator

Fundamentalism cropped up again last week when the Presbyterian General Assembly, meeting in St. Louis, voted down famed Modernist Henry Sloane Coffin for moderator, chose in his stead, by 461-to-404, Dr. Herbert Booth Smith, conservative pastor of America’s second-largest Presbyterian church, Immanuel in Los Angeles.

The word “fundamentalist” went unspoken, but Dr. Smith’s nominators stressed the “orthodoxy” and “genuineness” of his Presbyterianism. Dr. Coffin’s supporters praised him for making Manhattan’s Union Seminary (which left the Presbyterian fold in the ‘gos when the General Assembly suspended Professor Charles Augustus Briggs from the ministry for “liberal” interpretations of the Old Testament) a school of vital evangelical theism.