From Social Reform to Fundamentalism: The Career of Arthur T. Pierson

Arthur T. Pierson (1837–1911) was a noted Presbyterian pastor, writer, and advocate of world missions. His career spanned a turbulent era in American Presbyterianism which was reflective of the growing challenges faced by Protestant denominations and illustrates one path some Presbyterians took over the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Born into the antebellum northern evangelical world of the Second Great Awakening and its support of social reform, Pierson, by his death, had become a prominent voice for various doctrines that would coalesce into fundamentalism of the 1920s.