Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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—CHAPTER TWO—
GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE
FOSSIL DISCOVERIES provided persuasive new evidence for human evolution and as such provoked a response from antievolutionists. Henry Fairfield Osborn threw down the gauntlet in his reply to Bryan’s 1922 plea in the New York Times for restrictions on teaching evolution. Bryan had argued that “neither Darwin nor his supporters have been able to find a fact in the universe to support their hypothesis,”1 prompting Osborn to cite “the Piltdown man” and other recent hominid fossil finds. “All this evidence is today within reach of every schoolboy,” Osborn wrote. “It will, we are convinced, satisfactorily answer in the negative [Bryan‘s] question, ‘Is it not more rational to believe in the creation of man by separate act of God than to believe in evolution without a particle of evidence?’”2 Of course, the fact that all this evidence was within the reach of every public-school student constituted the nub of Bryan’s concern, and Osborn further baited antievolutionists by stressing how it undermined belief in the special creation of humans.
During the years leading up to the Scopes trial, antievolutionists responded to such evidence in various ways. The fundamentalist leader and Scopes trial consultant John Roach Straton, for example, denounced Piltdown man as a fraud.3 The adventist science educator George McCready Price, who devised a creationist theory of geologic history that Bryan cited at trial, challenged the antiquity and evolutionary order given to the fossilized humanoids. Placing their age at only a few thousand years rather than the hundreds of thousands of years reckoned by Osborn, Price wrote in 1924, “Such specimens as those from Heidelberg, Neanderthal, and Piltdown may be regarded as degenerate offshoots which had separated from the main stock both ethnically and geographically.”4 Bryan simply ridiculed paleontologists. “The evolutionists have attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances) that man is descended from the brute,” he declared in a 1923 address to the West Virginia state legislature. “If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit, they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses.” Responding in kind, Bryan then shouted derisively at people like Osborn: “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”5
The tone of these comments reflected the newfound militancy that characterized the conservative Christians from various Protestant denominations who called themselves fundamentalists during the 1920s and drew together to support the prosecution of John Scopes. Certainly some conservative Christians rejected Darwinism all along, but when doing so even Bryan earlier had added, “I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory.”6 Some articles in The Fundamentals dating from 1905 to 1915 criticized the theory of evolution, but others in that series accepted it. Indeed, the Baptist leader who founded the series and later helped launch the fundamentalist movement, A. C. Dixon, once expressed his willingness to accept the theory “if proved,” while a subsequent series editor, R. A. Torrey, persistently maintained that a Christian could “believe thoroughly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type.”7 Such tolerance largely disappeared during and after the First World War, as the fundamentalist movement coalesced out of various conservative Christian traditions.
Militant antievolutionism had not marked any of the four strands of nineteenth-century Christian theology that more or less came together under the fundamentalist banner during the 1920s, yet each joined in the new crusade against teaching evolution. Dispensational premillennialists such as Baptist leaders Dixon, Torrey, and C. I. Scofield brought an intellectual tradition of rigid biblical interpretation that divided history into separate divine dispensations and eagerly anticipated Christ’s second coming to replace the current fallen age with a new millennium of peace and justice. Although their otherworldly faith pulled them away from political activism, their biblical literalism committed them to defend the Genesis account of creation. Conservative theologians at the Presbyterian seminary in Princeton added a formal theory of biblical inerrancy, leading their denomination to adopt a five-point declaration of essential doctrines that became central tenets of fundamentalism: the absolute accuracy and divine inspiration of scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, salvation solely through Christ’s sacrifice, the bodily resurrection of Christ and his followers, and the authenticity of biblical miracles. Even though at least one founder of this school, the Princetonian B. B. Warfield, accepted theistic evolution, it clearly inclined followers toward a literal interpretation of Genesis.
The two other strands feeding into fundamentalism contributed to the cause more in terms of numbers than doctrines. The holiness movement, which grew out of Methodism to form a variety of small Protestant denominations, certainly clung to the Bible as true, but stressed personal piety and Christian service over intellectual issues. Penticostalism, which was then entering a period of dramatic growth that would last throughout the century, built on solid premillennialist and holiness foundations, but set them holy rolling by emphasizing the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of individual believers. Both groups brought to the antievolution crusade an army of loyal foot soldiers ready to fight any public-school teachings that threatened to undermine the religious faith of their children. Bryan, a practical politician with great personal faith in the Bible and no formal theological training, did not fit neatly into any one of these camps, but shared with them a sense that something was wrong with mainline Protestantism and American culture.
The culprit, they all agreed, was a form of theological liberalism known as “modernism” that was gaining acceptance within most mainline Protestant denominations. Modernists viewed their creed as a means to save Christianity from irrelevancy in the face of recent developments in literary higher criticism and evolutionary thinking in the social sciences. Higher criticism, especially as applied by German theologians, subjected the Bible to the same sort of literary analysis as any other religious text, interpreting its “truths” in light of its historical and cultural context. The new social sciences, particularly psychology and anthropology, assumed that Judaism and Christianity were natural developments in the social evolution of the Hebrew people. Modernists responded to these intellectual developments by viewing God as immanent in history. Conceding human (rather than divine) authorship for scripture and evolutionary development (rather than revelational truth) for Christianity, modernists nevertheless claimed that the Bible represented valid human perceptions of how God acted. Under this view, the precise historical and scientific accuracy of scripture did not matter. Judeo-Christian ethical teachings and individual religious sentiments could still be “true” in a realm beyond the “facts” of history and science. “In brief,” the modernist leader Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago divinity school wrote in 1924, “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons, is Modernism.”8
Conservative Christians drew together across denominational lines to fight for the so-called fundamentals of their traditional faith against the perceived heresy of modernism, and in so doing gave birth to the fundamentalist movement and antievolution crusade. Certainly modernism had made significant inroads within divinity schools and among the clergy of mainline Protestant denominations in the North and West, and fundamentalism represented a legitimate theological effort to counter these advances. Biblical higher criticism and an evolutionary world view, as twin pillars of this opposing creed, stood as logical targets of a conservative counterattack. A purely theological effort, however, rarely incites a mass movement, at least in pluralistic America; much more stirred up fundamentalism—and turned its fury against teaching evolution in public schools.
The First World War played a pivotal role. American intervention, as part of a progressive effort to defeat German militarism and make the world “safe for democracy,” was s
upported by many of the modernists, who revered the nation’s wartime leader, Woodrow Wilson, himself a second-generation modernist academic. A passionate champion of peace, William Jennings Bryan opposed this position and in 1915 resigned his post as Wilson’s secretary of state in protest over the drift toward war. He spent the next two years criss-crossing the country campaigning against American intervention.
Many leading premillennialists shared Bryan’s open hostility toward America’s intervention in the European conflict, seeing the war as both a product of the depravity of the age and the possible fulfillment of a prophesy regarding the coming of the next millennium. With Shailer Mathews leading the charge, some modernists used this opportunity to attack premillennialism as an otherworldly threat to national security in wartime. Some premillennialists responded in kind by stressing the German roots of higher criticism, attributing an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” mentality to German militarism and accusing modernism of undermining traditional American faith in biblical values. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” the premillennialist journal Our Hope declared in a 1918 editorial, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”9 The trauma of war stirred passions on both sides and helped spur a bitter, decade-long battle among American Christians. “These ideas, and the cultural crisis that bred them, revolutionized fundamentalism,” the historian of religion George M. Marsden observed. “Until World War I various components of the movement were present, yet collectively they were not sufficient to constitute a full-fledged ‘fundamentalist’ movement. The cultural issue suddenly gave the movement a new dimension, as well as a sense of urgency.”10
When a horribly brutal war led to an unjust and uneasy peace, the rise of international communism, worldwide labor unrest, and an apparent breakdown of traditional values, the cultural crisis worsened for conservative Christians in the United States. “One indication that many premillennialists were shifting their emphasis—away from just evangelizing, praying, and waiting for the end time, toward more intense concern with retarding [social] degenerative trends—was the role they played in the formation of the first explicitly fundamentalist organization,” Marsden noted. “In the summer of 1918, under the guidance of William B. Riley, a number of leaders in the Bible school and prophetic conference movement conceived of the idea of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.”11
During the preceding two decades, Riley had attracted a 3,000 member congregation to his aging Baptist church in downtown Minneapolis through a distinctive combination of conservative dispensational-premillennialist theology and politicized social activism. “When the Church is regarded as the body of God-fearing, righteous-living men, then, it ought to be in politics, and as a powerful influence,” he proclaimed in a 1906 book that urged Christians to promote social justice for the urban poor and workers.12 During the next decade, Riley focused his social activism on outlawing liquor, which he viewed as a key source of urban problems. By the twenties, he turned against teaching evolution in public schools. Later, he concentrated on attacking communism. Following the First World War and flushed with success upon ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment authorizing Prohibition, he was ideally suited to lead premillennialists into the cultural wars of the twenties.
In 1919, Riley welcomed some 6,000 conservative Christians to the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) inaugural conference with the warning that their Protestant denominations were “rapidly coming under the leadership of the new infidelity, known as ‘modernism.’ ” One by one, seventeen prominent ministers from across the country—the future high priests of fundamentalism—took the podium to denounce modernism as, in the words of one speaker, “the product of Satan’s lie,” and to call for a return to biblical fundamentals in church and culture. “It is ours to stand by our guns,” Riley proclaimed in closing the conference. “God forbid that we should fail him in the hour when the battle is heavy.”13 Participants then returned to their separate denominations, ready to battle the modernists. Only minor conflicts erupted within Protestant Episcopal and northern Methodist churches, where modernism was firmly entrenched, or in southern Baptist and Presbyterian congregations, where conservatives encountered little opposition. Both sides proved roughly equal in strength within the northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations, however, resulting in fierce battles for control. Indeed, it was during the ensuing intradenominational strife within the Northern Baptist Convention that conservative leader Curtis Lee Laws coined the word fundamentalist to identify those willing “to do battle royal for the Fundamentals.” 14 Use of the term quickly spread to include all conservative Christians militantly opposed to modernism.
Although these early developments laid the foundation for the antievolution crusade and the ensuing Scopes trial, they did not predestine it. Fundamentalism began as a response to theological developments within the Protestant church rather than to political or educational developments within American society. Even the name of the WCFA’s journal, Christian Fundamentals in Schools and Churches, originally referred to support for teaching biblical fundamentals in divinity schools and churches rather than opposition to teaching evolution in public schools—though it neatly fit the organization’s later emphasis. “When the Fundamentals movement was originally formed, it was supposed that our particular foe was the so-called ‘higher criticism,’ ” Riley later recalled, “but in the onward going affairs, we discovered that basic to the many forms of modern infidelity is the philosophy of evolution.” 15 Riley was predisposed to make this connection, as suggested by the title to one of his earlier books, The Finality of the Higher Criticism; or, The Theory of Evolution and False Theology, but it took William Jennings Bryan to turn the fundamentalist movement into a popular crusade against teaching evolution that led directly to Dayton.
Bryan was not a dispensational premillennialist; he was too optimistic. Certainly he shared with premillennialists a joyful hope in eternal life through faith in Christ. But Bryan did not agree with their view that the Bible prophesied the imminent degeneration of the world in preparation for Christ’s second coming. Quite to the contrary, he enjoyed things of this world—particularly politics, oratory, travel, and food—and believed in the power of reform to make life better. Reform took two forms for Bryan: personal reform through individual religious faith and public reform through majoritarian governmental action. He maintained a deep faith in both throughout his life, and each contributed to his final political campaign against teaching evolution. “My father taught me to believe in Democracy as well as Christianity,” Bryan observed late in his life.16 And so the twig was bent, which grew into the tree.
Bryan’s crusade against teaching evolution capped a remarkable thirty-five-year-long career in the public eye. He entered Congress in 1890 as a 30-year-old populist Democratic politician committed to roll back the Republican tariff for the dirt farmers of his native Nebraska. His charismatic speaking ability and youthful enthusiasm quickly earned him the nickname The Boy Orator of the Platte. Bryan’s greatest speech occurred at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, where he defied his party’s conservative incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, and the eastern establishment that dominated both political parties by demanding an alternative silver-based currency to help debtors cope with the crippling deflation caused by exclusive reliance on limited gold-backed money. Using a potent mix of radical majoritarian arguments and traditional religious oratory, he demanded, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The speech electrified the convention and secured the party’s presidential nomination for Bryan. For many, he became known as the Great Commoner; for some, the Peerless Leader.
A narrow defeat in the ensuing bitter election did not diminish Bryan’s faith in God or the people. He retained leadership of the Democratic party and secured two subsequent presidential nominations as he fought against imperialism and militarism following t
he Spanish-American War and for increased public control over corporate business practices. His vocation became speaking and writing, with majoritarian political commentary and evangelical Protestant lectures serving as his stock in trade. During the remainder of his life, the energetic Bryan gave an average of more than two hundred speeches each year, traveled continually throughout the country and around the world, wrote dozens of books, and edited a political newspaper with a nationwide circulation. After helping Woodrow Wilson secure the White House in 1912, Bryan became secretary of state and idealistically (some said naively) set about negotiating a series of international treaties designed to avert war by requiring the arbitration of disputes among nations. This became more of a religious mission than a political task for Bryan, who called on America to “exercise Christian forbearance” in the face of increasing German aggression and vowed, “There will be no war while I am Secretary of State.”17 Of course, he had to resign from office to keep this promise.