William Bell Riley
May 14, 2025
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The following is excerpted from The History and Heritage of Fundamentalism and Fundamental Baptists, www.wayoflife.org -
William Bell (W.B.) Riley (1861-1947) was the most prominent leader of fundamental Baptists in the North.
His ministry was called “the citadel of Fundamentalism”; he was called “The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism.” He was a founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919 (see “Interdenominational Fundamentalism”), the Fundamentalist Fellowship in 1920, and the Baptist Bible Union in 1923.
Riley grew up in Kentucky and was saved at age 17. His aspiration to be a lawyer conflicted with his sense that God was calling him to preach. Finally, at age 20, he knelt down on the family farm and said to God, “I will! I will preach!” He graduated from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1888.
Two years later, Riley adopted premillennialism through his own study of the Bible and the influence of the Bible conference movement. He said, “The plain language of Holy Writ ought to be the end of controversy for a Christian, and I declare it is my profoundest conviction, in the face of a theological training to the contrary, that if that rule was adopted by scripture students today, post-millennialism would have its grave dug today, and the promise of [Christ’s premillennial return] would become immediately a permanent factor in our faith” (The Promised Return, 1897, p. 5).
In 1893, he became pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Chicago, where he had much fruit. The membership of 60 increased to 500 by 1897. Even as a young preacher (31 when he started this pastorate), Riley was a warrior for the truth. He refused to be silent in the face of the liberalism of the University of Chicago, a Baptist school funded by John D. Rockefeller. He refused to be cowed by their august educational credentials. “With other orthodox ministers he spent the weekly meetings of the city’s Baptist Association debating the University of Chicago representatives” (Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism).
Pastor of First Baptist Church of Minneapolis
In 1897, Riley accepted the call to pastor First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he held that office for 45 years until his retirement in 1942. From then until his death in 1947, he was Pastor Emeritus.
When Riley arrived, the church was 48 years old, and its members included many of the elite of Minneapolis society. They were accustomed to controlling the pastors and not being offended by straight-forward preaching, but the young pastor had other plans. He took the rule of the church out of the hands of the five trustees. He stopped the Ladies’ Aid Society’s policy of raising funds by holding bazaars, etc. He changed the form of the services to make more time for preaching. He preached against drinking, dancing, card-playing, and theater attendance.
His goal was to “make First Baptist a center of evangelism.” “On Sunday nights Riley established what he termed permanent revivals, with ‘attractive’ sermon topics, musical specials, and youth participation in the services. Throughout the year there were weeks of revival meetings and Bible conferences, conducted by visiting evangelical leaders. In the Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and special services there was one primary goal--soul-winning” (Trollinger). Riley had summer evangelistic Vacation Bible Schools.
A wealthy clique resisted him, but they left in 1903 and started another church.
Under his leadership, the membership of First Baptist grew from 500 to 3,500. As is typical for churches that are focused on being preaching stations and evangelistic centers, and are geared to building the largest possible membership, a large percentage of the “members” were not faithful or active.
During some years of his pastorate, Riley traveled four months on evangelistic crusades. “Riley’s addresses across the country were not only on defending the faith, but he also excelled as an evangelist, holding many city-wide campaigns with thousands being converted. In February, 1912, a great crusade was held in Duluth, Minnesota, with between 500 to 1,000 converts. In Peoria, Illinois, a three-week crusade was held in the City Armory and in Seattle, Washington, a tabernacle was built for a month’s campaign, with many saved. In Dayton, Ohio, 66 churches constructed a tabernacle seating 5,000 and after a four-week meeting, some 1,200 were added to their memberships. In 1933, at Worcester, Massachusetts, some 25 churches participated with 400 professions of faith. He also held individual church campaigns, a notable one being at First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas. Three hundred and fifty two people were converted in the twelve-day crusade. Nor was he confined to America--his overseas ministries started in 1911 when he went to England in response to the invitation of A.C. Dixon, pastor of Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle. One Sunday there he saw some 60 people accept Christ. He spent four weeks there and another four weeks in other cities in England and Scotland. In 1929, in response to a call from the Bible League of England, Riley brought his wife and ministered in England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, and France. In 1936, he returned, this time sponsored by the Advent and Preparation Movement. He preached one week in Wales, one in Scotland, two in Ireland, a month in England, and a week in Belgium and France” (William Bell Riley, Pastor, Educator).
Riley held the Bible to be the infallible Word of God in every part. In 1943, he said, “The Holy Scriptures are supernatural in the circumstance that they leave no vital subject untouched. By implication, illustration, type symbol, or direct discussion they compass the entire experience of man and shed light upon every worthwhile subject” (“Divinely-Ordered Divisions,” Conservative Baptist Regional meeting, Chicago, October 1943).
Riley preached through the whole Bible on Sunday mornings for ten years beginning in 1923. The messages were published in 40 volumes entitled The Bible of the Expositor and the Evangelist. It wasn’t expository preaching; it was topical preaching that took its topics from the chapters he was expounding. For the most part, Riley didn’t exegete the passages and he didn’t teach the people how to understand the Bible for themselves. His preaching was full of good Bible truth. It was evangelistic. It was devotional, with lots of poems and hymns and little stories that challenged and warmed the heart, but it lacked biblical depth. For example, in his sermon on Hebrews 11, he did no exegesis on the passage itself. He didn’t set the context. He didn’t define the words. He didn’t pull his lessons directly from the text. Instead, he used the subject of Hebrews 11, which is faith, to preach a topical message on faith. He read only one verse from Hebrews 11 (verse 1) and didn’t exegete even that verse. His main points were Faith is Assurance vs. Sight, Faith Is Confidence vs. Feeling, Faith Is Credence vs. Evidence. Typical of his illustrations is the following: “A little Portuguese girl who had been converted was questioned as to how she knew that God would bring her home to Heaven since she could neither see Him nor Heaven. She answered, ‘God says, “Maria, Me do it.” Me quite sure! No want to see. God says, and that is enough for Maria.’”
A Fighting Fundamentalist
W.B. Riley was a warrior. He fought against theological liberalism, evolution, unitarianism, humanism, spiritualism, Catholicism, socialism, the liquor trade, and worldliness.
In 1909, Riley published his first book exposing liberalism. It was The Finality of the Higher Criticism. He showed that the liberal view of the Bible’s inspiration naturally leads to apostasy. He berated the University of Chicago for allowing men “to stand in its walls, and deny, in the presence of its theological students, every fundamental of our holy faith.”
In 1917, Riley published The Menace of Modernism, which had a large influence. It was the first book-length exposé on liberalism. It warned that America was in great danger because of the liberal theology that was permeating the churches and theological schools, and the liberal philosophies such as Darwinism that were permeating the secular colleges and universities. One chapter was titled “Has the State University Become a Hot-bed of Heterodoxy?” He showed that America had flourished because its foundations “were laid in biblical teaching,” but “unbelief has never helped anything, and skepticism has never resulted in righteousness or fruited in strength.” He said the infiltration of liberal philosophy into America’s educational system was “an outrage” that would destroy America’s morality. A century later, it is clear that his warnings were 100% true.
The Battle against Evolution in Public Schools
Beginning in 1909, Riley conducted a national campaign against evolution. He understood that if evolution became the accepted philosophy, the moral foundations of the nation would be “swept out of their places, gnarled, twisted, torn, and finally flung on the banks of time’s tide” (“The Evolution Controversy,” Christian Fundamentals, Apr.-Jun. 1922).
This, of course, is exactly what has happened.
Riley campaigned for pastors and parents to pressure state legislatures to cleanse the public schools of evolutionary teachers and textbooks. “There are hundreds of teachers whose hands ought to be stayed from this broad-casting, and hundreds of text-books that ought to be excluded before their teachings take root in the garden of the Lord, the Home, or in the greater fields, the Church and the World” (“Shall We Tolerate Longer the Teaching of Evolution,” Christian Fundamentals, Jan.-Mar. 1923).
Riley debated evolutionists so successfully that he had difficulty finding opponents. He conducted anti-evolutionary campaigns in Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee.
It was in Tennessee where the most significant battle took place. This was THE SCOPES TRIAL of 1925. Earlier that year, the Tennessee legislature had passed a statute forbidding the teaching of evolution in the schools. The trial was to determine whether John Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution contrary to the new law. The trial was arranged as a showcase by the American Civil Liberties Union in their agenda to dethrone the Bible from a position of authority in American society. The ACLU chose Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. He was an atheist and a profane man who was willing to use any trick to defend the guilty. (A year before the Scopes Trial he had defended the wealthy teenage killers Leopold and Leob who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks just for “a sort of pure love of excitement.” Darrow saved them from the death penalty with psychological mumbo-jumbo about their not being accountable for their actions.)
W.B. Riley urged his friend William Jennings Bryan to assist with the prosecution. Riley and J. Frank Norris were supposed to be at the trial, but they attended the annual meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention instead. The trial was a great media event. It was covered by more than 200 reporters who wrote about two million words. Sixty-five telegraph operators “sent out more words to Europe and Australia than had ever before been cabled about any American event” (R.M. Cornelius, Scopes: Creation on Trial, p. 10). It was the first trial to be broadcast nationally on radio (by station WGN in Chicago).
Though the prosecution won the case against Scopes, the overall result was a win for evolution in America. In Tennessee, there was no further effort to stop evolution from being taught in the schools. Nationally, the media coverage was overwhelmingly geared toward allowing evolution to be taught. Anti-evolutionists were disdained as ignoramuses. (See “Evolutionary Myth-making: The Scopes Trial,” Nov. 30, 2013, www.wayoflife.org.)
Even in his home state of Minnesota, Riley had no success in cleansing the schools of evolutionary philosophy. When a bill came before the state legislature in 1927 prohibiting tax-supported schools from teaching “that mankind either descended or ascended from a lower order of animals,” it was defeated by a margin of 55 to 7. That pretty much marked the end of the anti-evolution crusade in the public schools.
This was a great changing of the times in America. Humanism was sweeping into the public school system. The battle was lost because so few professing Christians, including pastors, cared enough to take a stand. In churches, apathy was rampant.
And the battle was lost because it was fought with carnal weapons instead of spiritual. It was fought by pragmatic thinking rather than by the Word of God. It was fought by political action campaigns with the search for political unity, which requires compromise of biblical convictions and the forming of unholy alliances.
There should have been a call for Bible-believing Christians to leave the corrupt public school system and take the biblical training of the children and youth seriously. This is done by private schools, church-operated schools, and home schools. God instructs His people to educate their children vigorously with the Scriptures (e.g., Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Psalm 1:2-3; 119:9; Proverbs 2:1-22; Ephesians 6:4; 2 Timothy 3:15-17; Titus 2:4-5; 1 Peter 2:1-2). And God commands His people to separate from unholy alliances and the unfruitful works of darkness (Psalm 1:1; 2 Corinthians 6:14-19; Ephesians 5:11).
The public school system in Riley’s day wasn’t as corrupt as it was later, but it was plenty corrupt when measured by Scripture. Though there were still Bible reading and prayer in the public schools in Riley’s day, many courses were already being leavened with humanistic philosophy: the world evolved, man is basically good, science is a saviour, there is no eternal judgment, morality is relative, there are multiple paths to God, man is driven by unconscious elements and is not responsible for his actions (Freudianism). And the schools in the 1920s were influenced by the jazz era, the immodest flapper dress style, the sensual modern dancing, the dating with all of its attendant evils. Public school was the most ruinous influence in my early life. It introduced me to every variety of evil. It took my heart totally away from the things of Christ. The peer pressure was nearly irresistible for a young person. And yet when I was kid, there was still almost no concern in Baptist churches for the proper education of the children according to God’s clear precepts, and that was the 1950s and 1960s.
Even fundamentalists like W.B. Riley didn’t call for separation from the public school system, and it puzzles us. God’s people are pilgrims. They shouldn’t flow along with society like lemmings. Then, again, as we will see, Riley wasn’t a separatist. He believed in trying to change things from within, though it didn’t work for him, and it never works, because it is contrary to God’s Word.
The bottom line is that the churches weren’t taking discipleship seriously enough, which means they weren’t taking the Word of God seriously enough. If Bible-believing churches had obeyed God’s Word in these fundamental things in the 1920s, they would have abandoned the public schools and provided proper education of the children. That, in turn, would have strengthened the homes and the churches, and it could have made a great difference in the nation as a whole.
W.B. Riley did a lot of good, but in many cases he fought spiritual battles with carnal weapons, and the ultimate result was defeat.
Riley’s Last Days
W.B. Riley remained in the Northern Baptist Convention until the last months of his life, when he finally removed his name. (His church remained.) Prior to this, not only did Riley not separate, he fought against separation.
“When some members of the [Baptist Bible] Union’s first Executive Committee printed a pamphlet (Pamphlet Number One) that described the NB [Northern Baptists] as beyond salvaging and promised a truly separatist fellowship, W.B. Riley ordered the immediate destruction of all thirty thousand copies” (David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity, p. 211).
Riley pressured his graduates to keep their churches in the Convention. “When they became pastors of their own churches, the Northwesterners were naturally inclined to lead their congregations out of the denomination. Riley assiduously worked to convince his graduates and other fundamentalists, as one alumnus put it, to ‘stay in and clean it up.’ To those who felt compelled to ignore his pleadings and bolt the denomination, Riley could be merciless” (Trollinger, p. 139).
Riley had a spiritual warrior side, but he also had a “stay in the mixed multitude and save it” side, and both sides of the man were represented in the split that followed his death. Had he been more consistent and had he obeyed the Bible’s clear command to separate from error, perhaps a larger percentage of Midwest churches would have followed the stronger biblical path. Riley should have paid closer attention to 1 Corinthians 15:33, “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners,” and Galatians 5:9, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.”
Like J. Frank Norris, Riley had the “my way or the highway” method of leadership. He wanted to control everything. “While Riley claimed that running the WCFA was a cooperative effort, there was little doubt that he held the reins of power, tightly” (Trollinger). When a variety of independent organizations were formed in various states to stand for Fundamentalism (e.g., Fundamentalist League of the Pacific Coast, American Bible League, Anti-evolution League), instead of being pleased, he complained that they “ought to be simply a state organization of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.” When it became clear by 1926 that the WFCA would not be the behemoth organization that he had envisioned, he resigned the leadership.
Riley was also a self-promoter and one of the fathers of the “Big-manism” syndrome that has been such a terrible blight among fundamental Baptists and others. An advertisement for a Riley meeting in Owensboro, Kentucky, in April 1940, was emblazoned with the words, “Hear America’s Great Pulpit Statesman - 14 Great Days with Dr. W.B. Riley!” Riley had his photo taken standing beneath the banner.
In contrast, when Gypsy Smith saw that a church had put up a sign advertising him as “the Greatest Evangelist in the World,” he made them take it down. D.L. Moody lived in fear of being tempted to think highly of himself. After refusing to meet a group of prominent women who supported his work, he told a fellow evangelist, “If I had shaken hands with those women, I wouldn’t have been half through before the devil would have made me believe that I was some great man, and from that time I would have to do as he bid” (Chapman, The Life and Work of Dwight Lyman Moody). Robert Ketcham said of his association of churches, “[We are] sold out to the one proposition that Jesus Christ is the only One worthy of prominent mention, and that there are no ‘great men among us.’ We are all little men with a great God” (“Important Changes at Waterloo,” Baptist Bulletin, July 1938). Influential author and Bible conference speaker William Blackstone concluded his letters with “I am but an errand boy for Jesus.” Amen!
_________
The study of William Bell Riley and the Northwestern Bible Conferences and Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School can be found in The History and Heritage of Fundamentalists and Fundamental Baptists, www.wayoflife.org.
His ministry was called “the citadel of Fundamentalism”; he was called “The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism.” He was a founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919 (see “Interdenominational Fundamentalism”), the Fundamentalist Fellowship in 1920, and the Baptist Bible Union in 1923.
Riley grew up in Kentucky and was saved at age 17. His aspiration to be a lawyer conflicted with his sense that God was calling him to preach. Finally, at age 20, he knelt down on the family farm and said to God, “I will! I will preach!” He graduated from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1888.
Two years later, Riley adopted premillennialism through his own study of the Bible and the influence of the Bible conference movement. He said, “The plain language of Holy Writ ought to be the end of controversy for a Christian, and I declare it is my profoundest conviction, in the face of a theological training to the contrary, that if that rule was adopted by scripture students today, post-millennialism would have its grave dug today, and the promise of [Christ’s premillennial return] would become immediately a permanent factor in our faith” (The Promised Return, 1897, p. 5).
In 1893, he became pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Chicago, where he had much fruit. The membership of 60 increased to 500 by 1897. Even as a young preacher (31 when he started this pastorate), Riley was a warrior for the truth. He refused to be silent in the face of the liberalism of the University of Chicago, a Baptist school funded by John D. Rockefeller. He refused to be cowed by their august educational credentials. “With other orthodox ministers he spent the weekly meetings of the city’s Baptist Association debating the University of Chicago representatives” (Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism).
Pastor of First Baptist Church of Minneapolis
In 1897, Riley accepted the call to pastor First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he held that office for 45 years until his retirement in 1942. From then until his death in 1947, he was Pastor Emeritus.
When Riley arrived, the church was 48 years old, and its members included many of the elite of Minneapolis society. They were accustomed to controlling the pastors and not being offended by straight-forward preaching, but the young pastor had other plans. He took the rule of the church out of the hands of the five trustees. He stopped the Ladies’ Aid Society’s policy of raising funds by holding bazaars, etc. He changed the form of the services to make more time for preaching. He preached against drinking, dancing, card-playing, and theater attendance.
His goal was to “make First Baptist a center of evangelism.” “On Sunday nights Riley established what he termed permanent revivals, with ‘attractive’ sermon topics, musical specials, and youth participation in the services. Throughout the year there were weeks of revival meetings and Bible conferences, conducted by visiting evangelical leaders. In the Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and special services there was one primary goal--soul-winning” (Trollinger). Riley had summer evangelistic Vacation Bible Schools.
A wealthy clique resisted him, but they left in 1903 and started another church.
Under his leadership, the membership of First Baptist grew from 500 to 3,500. As is typical for churches that are focused on being preaching stations and evangelistic centers, and are geared to building the largest possible membership, a large percentage of the “members” were not faithful or active.
During some years of his pastorate, Riley traveled four months on evangelistic crusades. “Riley’s addresses across the country were not only on defending the faith, but he also excelled as an evangelist, holding many city-wide campaigns with thousands being converted. In February, 1912, a great crusade was held in Duluth, Minnesota, with between 500 to 1,000 converts. In Peoria, Illinois, a three-week crusade was held in the City Armory and in Seattle, Washington, a tabernacle was built for a month’s campaign, with many saved. In Dayton, Ohio, 66 churches constructed a tabernacle seating 5,000 and after a four-week meeting, some 1,200 were added to their memberships. In 1933, at Worcester, Massachusetts, some 25 churches participated with 400 professions of faith. He also held individual church campaigns, a notable one being at First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas. Three hundred and fifty two people were converted in the twelve-day crusade. Nor was he confined to America--his overseas ministries started in 1911 when he went to England in response to the invitation of A.C. Dixon, pastor of Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle. One Sunday there he saw some 60 people accept Christ. He spent four weeks there and another four weeks in other cities in England and Scotland. In 1929, in response to a call from the Bible League of England, Riley brought his wife and ministered in England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, and France. In 1936, he returned, this time sponsored by the Advent and Preparation Movement. He preached one week in Wales, one in Scotland, two in Ireland, a month in England, and a week in Belgium and France” (William Bell Riley, Pastor, Educator).
Riley held the Bible to be the infallible Word of God in every part. In 1943, he said, “The Holy Scriptures are supernatural in the circumstance that they leave no vital subject untouched. By implication, illustration, type symbol, or direct discussion they compass the entire experience of man and shed light upon every worthwhile subject” (“Divinely-Ordered Divisions,” Conservative Baptist Regional meeting, Chicago, October 1943).
Riley preached through the whole Bible on Sunday mornings for ten years beginning in 1923. The messages were published in 40 volumes entitled The Bible of the Expositor and the Evangelist. It wasn’t expository preaching; it was topical preaching that took its topics from the chapters he was expounding. For the most part, Riley didn’t exegete the passages and he didn’t teach the people how to understand the Bible for themselves. His preaching was full of good Bible truth. It was evangelistic. It was devotional, with lots of poems and hymns and little stories that challenged and warmed the heart, but it lacked biblical depth. For example, in his sermon on Hebrews 11, he did no exegesis on the passage itself. He didn’t set the context. He didn’t define the words. He didn’t pull his lessons directly from the text. Instead, he used the subject of Hebrews 11, which is faith, to preach a topical message on faith. He read only one verse from Hebrews 11 (verse 1) and didn’t exegete even that verse. His main points were Faith is Assurance vs. Sight, Faith Is Confidence vs. Feeling, Faith Is Credence vs. Evidence. Typical of his illustrations is the following: “A little Portuguese girl who had been converted was questioned as to how she knew that God would bring her home to Heaven since she could neither see Him nor Heaven. She answered, ‘God says, “Maria, Me do it.” Me quite sure! No want to see. God says, and that is enough for Maria.’”
A Fighting Fundamentalist
W.B. Riley was a warrior. He fought against theological liberalism, evolution, unitarianism, humanism, spiritualism, Catholicism, socialism, the liquor trade, and worldliness.
In 1909, Riley published his first book exposing liberalism. It was The Finality of the Higher Criticism. He showed that the liberal view of the Bible’s inspiration naturally leads to apostasy. He berated the University of Chicago for allowing men “to stand in its walls, and deny, in the presence of its theological students, every fundamental of our holy faith.”
In 1917, Riley published The Menace of Modernism, which had a large influence. It was the first book-length exposé on liberalism. It warned that America was in great danger because of the liberal theology that was permeating the churches and theological schools, and the liberal philosophies such as Darwinism that were permeating the secular colleges and universities. One chapter was titled “Has the State University Become a Hot-bed of Heterodoxy?” He showed that America had flourished because its foundations “were laid in biblical teaching,” but “unbelief has never helped anything, and skepticism has never resulted in righteousness or fruited in strength.” He said the infiltration of liberal philosophy into America’s educational system was “an outrage” that would destroy America’s morality. A century later, it is clear that his warnings were 100% true.
The Battle against Evolution in Public Schools
Beginning in 1909, Riley conducted a national campaign against evolution. He understood that if evolution became the accepted philosophy, the moral foundations of the nation would be “swept out of their places, gnarled, twisted, torn, and finally flung on the banks of time’s tide” (“The Evolution Controversy,” Christian Fundamentals, Apr.-Jun. 1922).
This, of course, is exactly what has happened.
Riley campaigned for pastors and parents to pressure state legislatures to cleanse the public schools of evolutionary teachers and textbooks. “There are hundreds of teachers whose hands ought to be stayed from this broad-casting, and hundreds of text-books that ought to be excluded before their teachings take root in the garden of the Lord, the Home, or in the greater fields, the Church and the World” (“Shall We Tolerate Longer the Teaching of Evolution,” Christian Fundamentals, Jan.-Mar. 1923).
Riley debated evolutionists so successfully that he had difficulty finding opponents. He conducted anti-evolutionary campaigns in Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee.
It was in Tennessee where the most significant battle took place. This was THE SCOPES TRIAL of 1925. Earlier that year, the Tennessee legislature had passed a statute forbidding the teaching of evolution in the schools. The trial was to determine whether John Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution contrary to the new law. The trial was arranged as a showcase by the American Civil Liberties Union in their agenda to dethrone the Bible from a position of authority in American society. The ACLU chose Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. He was an atheist and a profane man who was willing to use any trick to defend the guilty. (A year before the Scopes Trial he had defended the wealthy teenage killers Leopold and Leob who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks just for “a sort of pure love of excitement.” Darrow saved them from the death penalty with psychological mumbo-jumbo about their not being accountable for their actions.)
W.B. Riley urged his friend William Jennings Bryan to assist with the prosecution. Riley and J. Frank Norris were supposed to be at the trial, but they attended the annual meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention instead. The trial was a great media event. It was covered by more than 200 reporters who wrote about two million words. Sixty-five telegraph operators “sent out more words to Europe and Australia than had ever before been cabled about any American event” (R.M. Cornelius, Scopes: Creation on Trial, p. 10). It was the first trial to be broadcast nationally on radio (by station WGN in Chicago).
Though the prosecution won the case against Scopes, the overall result was a win for evolution in America. In Tennessee, there was no further effort to stop evolution from being taught in the schools. Nationally, the media coverage was overwhelmingly geared toward allowing evolution to be taught. Anti-evolutionists were disdained as ignoramuses. (See “Evolutionary Myth-making: The Scopes Trial,” Nov. 30, 2013, www.wayoflife.org.)
Even in his home state of Minnesota, Riley had no success in cleansing the schools of evolutionary philosophy. When a bill came before the state legislature in 1927 prohibiting tax-supported schools from teaching “that mankind either descended or ascended from a lower order of animals,” it was defeated by a margin of 55 to 7. That pretty much marked the end of the anti-evolution crusade in the public schools.
This was a great changing of the times in America. Humanism was sweeping into the public school system. The battle was lost because so few professing Christians, including pastors, cared enough to take a stand. In churches, apathy was rampant.
And the battle was lost because it was fought with carnal weapons instead of spiritual. It was fought by pragmatic thinking rather than by the Word of God. It was fought by political action campaigns with the search for political unity, which requires compromise of biblical convictions and the forming of unholy alliances.
There should have been a call for Bible-believing Christians to leave the corrupt public school system and take the biblical training of the children and youth seriously. This is done by private schools, church-operated schools, and home schools. God instructs His people to educate their children vigorously with the Scriptures (e.g., Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Psalm 1:2-3; 119:9; Proverbs 2:1-22; Ephesians 6:4; 2 Timothy 3:15-17; Titus 2:4-5; 1 Peter 2:1-2). And God commands His people to separate from unholy alliances and the unfruitful works of darkness (Psalm 1:1; 2 Corinthians 6:14-19; Ephesians 5:11).
The public school system in Riley’s day wasn’t as corrupt as it was later, but it was plenty corrupt when measured by Scripture. Though there were still Bible reading and prayer in the public schools in Riley’s day, many courses were already being leavened with humanistic philosophy: the world evolved, man is basically good, science is a saviour, there is no eternal judgment, morality is relative, there are multiple paths to God, man is driven by unconscious elements and is not responsible for his actions (Freudianism). And the schools in the 1920s were influenced by the jazz era, the immodest flapper dress style, the sensual modern dancing, the dating with all of its attendant evils. Public school was the most ruinous influence in my early life. It introduced me to every variety of evil. It took my heart totally away from the things of Christ. The peer pressure was nearly irresistible for a young person. And yet when I was kid, there was still almost no concern in Baptist churches for the proper education of the children according to God’s clear precepts, and that was the 1950s and 1960s.
Even fundamentalists like W.B. Riley didn’t call for separation from the public school system, and it puzzles us. God’s people are pilgrims. They shouldn’t flow along with society like lemmings. Then, again, as we will see, Riley wasn’t a separatist. He believed in trying to change things from within, though it didn’t work for him, and it never works, because it is contrary to God’s Word.
The bottom line is that the churches weren’t taking discipleship seriously enough, which means they weren’t taking the Word of God seriously enough. If Bible-believing churches had obeyed God’s Word in these fundamental things in the 1920s, they would have abandoned the public schools and provided proper education of the children. That, in turn, would have strengthened the homes and the churches, and it could have made a great difference in the nation as a whole.
W.B. Riley did a lot of good, but in many cases he fought spiritual battles with carnal weapons, and the ultimate result was defeat.
Riley’s Last Days
W.B. Riley remained in the Northern Baptist Convention until the last months of his life, when he finally removed his name. (His church remained.) Prior to this, not only did Riley not separate, he fought against separation.
“When some members of the [Baptist Bible] Union’s first Executive Committee printed a pamphlet (Pamphlet Number One) that described the NB [Northern Baptists] as beyond salvaging and promised a truly separatist fellowship, W.B. Riley ordered the immediate destruction of all thirty thousand copies” (David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity, p. 211).
Riley pressured his graduates to keep their churches in the Convention. “When they became pastors of their own churches, the Northwesterners were naturally inclined to lead their congregations out of the denomination. Riley assiduously worked to convince his graduates and other fundamentalists, as one alumnus put it, to ‘stay in and clean it up.’ To those who felt compelled to ignore his pleadings and bolt the denomination, Riley could be merciless” (Trollinger, p. 139).
Riley had a spiritual warrior side, but he also had a “stay in the mixed multitude and save it” side, and both sides of the man were represented in the split that followed his death. Had he been more consistent and had he obeyed the Bible’s clear command to separate from error, perhaps a larger percentage of Midwest churches would have followed the stronger biblical path. Riley should have paid closer attention to 1 Corinthians 15:33, “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners,” and Galatians 5:9, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.”
Like J. Frank Norris, Riley had the “my way or the highway” method of leadership. He wanted to control everything. “While Riley claimed that running the WCFA was a cooperative effort, there was little doubt that he held the reins of power, tightly” (Trollinger). When a variety of independent organizations were formed in various states to stand for Fundamentalism (e.g., Fundamentalist League of the Pacific Coast, American Bible League, Anti-evolution League), instead of being pleased, he complained that they “ought to be simply a state organization of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.” When it became clear by 1926 that the WFCA would not be the behemoth organization that he had envisioned, he resigned the leadership.
Riley was also a self-promoter and one of the fathers of the “Big-manism” syndrome that has been such a terrible blight among fundamental Baptists and others. An advertisement for a Riley meeting in Owensboro, Kentucky, in April 1940, was emblazoned with the words, “Hear America’s Great Pulpit Statesman - 14 Great Days with Dr. W.B. Riley!” Riley had his photo taken standing beneath the banner.
In contrast, when Gypsy Smith saw that a church had put up a sign advertising him as “the Greatest Evangelist in the World,” he made them take it down. D.L. Moody lived in fear of being tempted to think highly of himself. After refusing to meet a group of prominent women who supported his work, he told a fellow evangelist, “If I had shaken hands with those women, I wouldn’t have been half through before the devil would have made me believe that I was some great man, and from that time I would have to do as he bid” (Chapman, The Life and Work of Dwight Lyman Moody). Robert Ketcham said of his association of churches, “[We are] sold out to the one proposition that Jesus Christ is the only One worthy of prominent mention, and that there are no ‘great men among us.’ We are all little men with a great God” (“Important Changes at Waterloo,” Baptist Bulletin, July 1938). Influential author and Bible conference speaker William Blackstone concluded his letters with “I am but an errand boy for Jesus.” Amen!
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The study of William Bell Riley and the Northwestern Bible Conferences and Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School can be found in The History and Heritage of Fundamentalists and Fundamental Baptists, www.wayoflife.org.
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