God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism

Christian Century, July 16, 1997

By Barry Hankins. University of Kentucky Press, 220 pp., $24.95.

* Years ago Ernest Sandeen showed that fundamentalism was born in the North, and that all but one of its founders and early articulators was Yankee. The exception was Fort Worth Baptist J. Frank Norris, one of the noisiest, more unlovable and most disturbing of the first generation. Herbert Hoover thought enough of him to invite him to his inauguration, but most Southern Baptists despised this independent, as he disdained them. Did he burn his own church down to get insurance money? Was his shooting of an enemy simple murder, as much evidence suggests, or was his "getting away with murder" an example of Texas-style justice? There were seldom dull moments in his shoot-em-up theological, preaching, writing and activist career. Hankins treats the still-controversial subject with dignity, but never lets his scholarly commitments get in the way of a good story. Antidrink, anti-Catholic, antiliberal (but, as a dispensationalist, not anti-Semitic), Norris seldom comes across as pro-anything.