World Christian Fundamentals Association

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World Christian Fundamentals Association, religious organization founded in 1919 by the Baptist minister William Bell Riley of the First Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The group was the earliest and most influential of the Adamist leagues, but was crippled in 1924 when an accident laid up Riley for six months. In 1925, Riley was instrumental in calling lawyer and three-time Democratic presidential candidate and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan to act as counsel at the famous Scopes Trial. However, the annual conferences drew increasingly smaller crowds until 1930 when Riley resigned and the WCFA became a minute evangelical society.

A distinction should be maintained between "Fundamentalists" (members of Riley's organization) and "fundamentalists" (adherents of Fundamentalist doctrines), as we distinquish between "Democrat" and "democrat." Other Adamist organizations of this same period included the Bryan Bible League, the National Anti-Evolution Society, the Anti-Evolution League of America, the Defenders of the Christian Faith, and the Research Science Bureau and American Science Foundation.