t was an age of wonder. Young, free-spirited women in feathery dresses smoked in jazz clubs. Families gathered around big radio cabinets in their living rooms. The marvel of mass production enabled millions of automobiles to roll off assembly lines each year. In the nineteen-twenties, modernity was transforming America, ushering in prosperity, polyglot metropolises, and new norms around gender and sexuality. Perhaps most significantly, doubt was creeping into the citadel of religion. A crisis of belief, brought on by social and technological change, and by growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, threatened Protestant Christianity, the dominant American creed. Fierce fights over the authority of Scripture divided denominations. A backlash was inevitable. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a renaissance, expanding beyond the rural South and into Northern cities, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, under the banner of white Protestantism. A loose coalition of Protestant ministers began to style themselves as “fundamentalists”––defenders of Christian orthodoxy and foes of modernism.
On January 21, 1925, Representative John Washington Butler, a forty-nine-year-old farmer and clerk for a circle of churches whose members called themselves “primitive Baptists,” introduced a bill in the Tennessee legislature that he had written out by hand, in front of his fireplace. The Butler Act, as it came to be known, was less than two hundred words long. It forbade educators to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Butler believed evolutionary theory to be dangerous––a threat to the “Christian life of our homes.” The bill sailed through the legislature and was signed into law on March 21st, by Governor Austin Peay.
The international spectacle that followed is the subject of “Keeping the Faith” . . . In the preface to “Keeping the Faith,” Wineapple notes the modern-day parallels to the Scopes “monkey trial,” as it was famously dubbed. “Democracy was on trial in Dayton,” Wineapple writes. “As it would be again in our time: teachers being told what or how to teach; science regarded as an out-of-control, godless shibboleth; books tossed out of schools and libraries; loyalty oaths; and white supremacists promising that a revitalized white Protestant America would lead its citizens out of the slough of moral and spiritual decay to rise again, regardless of what or whose rights and freedoms might be trampled.”
In recent weeks, conflagrations over the place of religion in American civic life have spread. On June 19th, Louisiana enacted a law that mandated the display of the Ten Commandments in its schools. A week later, Oklahoma’s state school superintendent issued a memo requiring that the “Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments,” be incorporated into curricula, effective immediately.
The central protagonists of “Keeping the Faith” are Clarence Darrow, the legendary trial lawyer and self-described agnostic who helped defend Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, a golden-tongued, thrice-failed Democratic Presidential candidate who was fundamentalism’s flag-bearer. Bryan . . . was a fervent believer in Christianity’s ability to spur people to generosity and compassion. But he also demonstrated the racism that has long been embedded in the American church, once stating that social equality would “throw the white and the black races into greater antagonism and conflict.” He joined the prosecution because he felt that the crusade against “apeism” was vital to protecting young minds. “We cannot afford to have a system of education that destroys the religious faith of seventy-five per cent of our children,” he said.
The climactic moment of the trial arrived on a Monday afternoon, July 20th, when Scopes’s lawyers announced, “The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness.” It was an audacious maneuver. Darrow’s plan was to put the views of a “Bible expert,” as Bryan described himself, to the test under oath.
Darrow opened by asking Bryan about his credentials as a Bible scholar. Bryan said that he’d been studying the Bible for fifty years, and that the text “should be accepted as it is given.” He hastened to point out, however, that there were certain passages that were not meant to be taken literally. . . . With that, Bryan had walked into a trap. Darrow commenced a series of hypotheticals, first querying Bryan about the story of Jonah, who is swallowed by a big fish, in the Old Testament. “How do you literally interpret that?” Darrow asked.
Darrow bore down on Bryan about the Biblical stories of Noah and the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Finally, he turned to the creation account in Genesis and asked if Bryan believed that the earth was created in six literal days. Bryan interjected, “Not six days of twenty-four hours”––a response that prompted a few gasps from the lawn. Darrow was pleased now: “Doesn’t it say so?” Bryan said, “No.” . . . He was standing and screaming. “I want the papers to know I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst,” he continued. He explained that the six days of creation could refer to “periods,” rather than to literal twenty-four-hour days.
It was not until four decades later, in the spring of 1967, that state lawmakers finally repealed the Butler Act. The following year, the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated an anti-evolution statute in Arkansas that dated back to the Scopes era, ruling that the First Amendment “mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.”
The humiliation of the Scopes trial led to the implosion of the fundamentalist coalition. Moderate Protestant figures, even those who still held deeply conservative theological beliefs, were no longer willing to be associated with the movement. It seemed on its way to becoming a historical curiosity––a laughingstock born of a particular period of upheaval. The opposite turned out to be true.
[T]he story of fundamentalism’s near-demise, hibernation, and eventual rebirth as a revanchist, militant political force partly underpins the cultural conflict that threatens American democracy today.
By the nineteen-fifties, a “new evangelical” movement had emerged, led by Billy Graham and other prominent figures such as Harold Ockenga, the pastor of the Congregationalist Park Street Church, in Boston, and Carl F. H. Henry, a theologian at Fuller Theological Seminary, outside Los Angeles. These men wanted to forge a more intellectually respectable, culturally engaged movement than their fundamentalist forebears had, one that would allow them to regain a foothold in American life. They succeeded, attracting believers from a broad spectrum of theological and even political commitments––mainline Protestants, Pentecostals, Reformed, and others. The largest contingent, however, comprised those whose religious lineages could be traced directly back to fundamentalism.
In many ways, today’s America resembles the tumultuous one in which the Scopes trial unfolded. The religious landscape is, once again, undergoing precipitous change: according to the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who identify as Christian plunged from nine out of ten, in the early nineties, to less than two-thirds, in 2020. Once again, norms around gender and sexuality are rapidly evolving. A notable difference is that liberal mainline Protestant denominations have dwindled in number and influence.
In recent years, a raft of books have been published by authors decrying the evangelical movement’s alliance with right-wing politics, its vulnerability to racism, its unseemly blending of God and country, and particularly its obeisance to Donald Trump. . . . Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today . . . argues that the current exodus from American churches is different from the crisis of belief in the nineteen-twenties. “We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches,” he writes.
The authors of “The After Party” remind believers that “reconciliation to God inherently leads to reconciliation with others.” They encourage Christians to draw on the resources of their faith to model a more relational, less tribal approach to politics. It’s a stirring admonition, but Wineapple’s observation about the tragedy of the Scopes trial is that both sides failed to see the other. The “self-appointed arbiters of culture” can seem just as contemptuous of faith as they were a century ago, even as their own beliefs become an altar unto themselves. The divide may very well be unbridgeable . . . .
As in the 1920's, "Christian" fundamentalism must be defeated. Defeating Donald Trump in November would be a good first step.
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