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(1877-1952)
Pistol-packing pastor

The son of a drunken sharecropper and a devout mother, Frank Norris became one of the most controversial clerics of the 1920s, and the basis for much of today's unflattering caricature of fundamentalists. His flamboyant preaching converted thousands, but the Atlanta Constitution charged, "The Rev. J. Frank Norris … is one, good, sound, reason why there are 50,000,000 Americans who do not belong to any church at all."

At 15 he was shot by horse thieves, and his mother tutored him in the faith during the difficult recovery. After completing Southern Baptist Theological Seminary training in two years, he pastored a church of 13 members, which grew to 1,000 in three years. In 1909 he moved to the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth. There he founded his own newspaper and pioneered radio preaching. Membership increased tenfold.

When Norris preached, he roamed the platform shouting and weeping, with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper the other. He brought monkeys into the pulpit to mock Darwinism, and he held a public funeral for "John Barleycorn" when Prohibition passed. In a sermon series against municipal corruption, he preached on "The Ten Biggest Devils in Fort Worth—Names Given." Enraged community leaders tried to run him out of town and his life was threatened. When his church was destroyed by a fire of undetermined origin, Norris was indicted for arson but eventually acquitted.

In his 1926 sermon series "Rum and Romanism," he attacked the Catholic mayor of Fort Worth, accusing him of misappropriating funds to Catholic causes. Norris received a threatening phone call from a friend of the mayor, who later showed up in his church office. Heated words were exchanged, Norris pulled out a pistol and shot the man four times, killing him. He was tried but found innocent on the grounds of self-defense.

Norris called himself "the Texas Cyclone" and was a whirlwind of activity. In 1935 he added the Temple Baptist Church of Detroit to his pastoral duties, and he commuted between his Texas and Michigan congregations for 16 years. He held revivals in 46 states. He was a founding member of the World Christian Fundamentals Association and a charter member of the Baptist Bible Union.

Norris was dictatorial and fiercely independent. Turnover in his congregations was high, with as many as 600 members leaving at one time. Norris was thrown out of the city, county, state, and denominational associations for such things as calling fellow Baptists, "little, modernistic, lick-the-skillet, two-by-four-aping, asinine preachers."

He founded his own loose association of churches named the Premillennial, Fundamental, Missionary Fellowship, but the group fractured in schisms and discord. Deserted by most of his friends, he died of a heart attack while attending a youth rally in Florida.

(1868-1946)
First "fundamentalist"

Curtis Lee Laws coined the term "fundamentalist" and made it part of the American lexicon.

Laws established himself as a strong leader of the denominational conservatives during 20 years of successful pastorate. In 1913 he left the pulpit to become editor of an independent and influential Baptist publication, the Watchman-Examiner. Laws declared from the beginning an editorial partisanship in favor of the conservatives and against the modernist camp.

In 1920 he joined with 22 Baptist leaders, including militants like William Bell Riley and J. Frank Norris, to plan and lead the Buffalo Conference on the "Fundamentals of the Baptist Faith." In an editorial after the conference Laws rejected popular labels for the increasingly organized protest movement, such as "landmarker", "conservative" and "premillennialist." He thought these were inaccurate or had negative connotations. Instead, he chose "fundamentalist" as a neutral and inclusive term for those "who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal for them."

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