Introduction

however, their ideology was different. They might see their social crusades as a war against Satan or as a spiritual challenge to the prevailing materialism, but they were just as concerned about low wages, child labor, and poor working conditions as such liberals as Stelzle. Conservatives would later become very critical of the Social Gospel, and would argue that it was pointless to try to save a world that was doomed. Yet in the early years of the century, even such an arch-conservative as William B. Riley, who had founded the Northwestern Bible College in 1902, was willing to work with social reformers to clean up Minneapolis. He could not approve of the methods of such Social Gospelers as Stelzle, who invited Leon Trotsky and Emma Goldman to lecture in his Temple, but conservatives had not yet moved over to the right of the political spectrum, and led their own welfare campaigns throughout the United States.
But in 1909, Charles Eliot, professor emeritus of Harvard University, delivered an address entitled “The Future of Religion” which struck dismay into the hearts of the more conservative. This was another attempt to return to a simple core value. The new religion, Eliot believed, would have only one commandment: the love of God, expressed in the practical service of others. There would be no churches and no scriptures; no theology of sin, no need for worship. God’s presence would be so obvious and overwhelming that there would be no need for liturgy. Christians would not have a monopoly on truth, since the ideas of scientists, secularists, or those who belonged to a different faith would be just as valid. In its care for other human beings, the religion of the future would be no different from such secularist ideals as democracy, education, social reform, or preventative medicine. This extreme version of the Social Gospel was a recoil from the doctrinal disputes of recent decades. In a society that valued only rational or scientifically demonstrable truth, dogma had become a problem. Theology could easily become a fetish, an idol that became a supreme value in itself instead of a symbol of an ineffable and indescribable reality. By seeking to bypass doctrine, Eliot was trying to get back to what he regarded as fundamental:
love of God and neighbor. All the world faiths have emphasized the importance of social justice and care for the vulnerable. A disciplined and practically expressed compassion had been found, in all traditions, to yield a sense of the sacred, as long as it did not become a do-goo ding ego trip. Eliot was thus attempting to address the real dilemma of Christians in the modern world by building a faith that relied more upon practice than upon orthodox beliefs.
The conservatives, however, were appalled. Faith without infallible doctrine was not Christianity in their view, and they felt obliged to counter this liberal danger. In 1910, the Presbyterians of Princeton, who had formulated the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture, issued a list of five dogmas which they deemed essential: (i) the in errancy of Scripture, (2) the Virgin Birth of Christ, (3) Christ’s atonement for our sins on the cross, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the objective reality of his miracles. (This last doctrine would later be replaced by the teachings of premillennialism.) Next, the oil millionaires Lyman and Milton Stewart, who had founded the Bible College of Los Angeles to counter the Higher Criticism in 1908, financed a project designed to educate the faithful in the central tenets of the faith. Between 1910 and 1915, they issued a series of twelve paperback pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals, in which leading conservative theologians gave accessible accounts of such doctrines as the Trinity, refuted the Higher Criticism, and stressed the importance of spreading the truth of the Gospel.
Some three million copies of each of the twelve volumes were dispatched, free of charge, to every pastor, professor, and theology student in America. Later this project would acquire great symbolic significance, since fundamentalists would see it as the germ of their movement. However, at the time, the pamphlets caused little critical interest, and the tone was neither radical nor particularly militant.
But during the Great War, an element of terror entered conservative Protestantism and it became fundamentalist. Americans had always had a tendency to see a conflict as apocalyptic, and the Great War confirmed many of them in their premillennial convictions. The horrific slaughter, they decided, was on such a scale that it could only be the beginning of the End.
These must be the battles foretold in the Book of Revelation. Three big Prophecy Conferences were held between 1914 and 1918, where participants combed through the Scofield Reference Bible to find more “signs of the times.” Everything indicated that these predictions were indeed coming to pass. The Hebrew prophets had foretold that the Jews would return to their own land before the End, so when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration (1917), pledging its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the premillennialists were struck with awe and exultation. Scofield had suggested that Russia was “the power from the North” that would attack Israel shortly before Armageddon; the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), which made atheistic communism the state ideology, seemed to confirm this. The creation of the League of Nations obviously fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 16:14: it was the revived Roman empire that would shortly be led by Antichrist. As they watched world events, the premillennial Protestants were becoming more politically conscious. What had been in the late nineteenth century a purely doctrinal dispute with the liberals in their denominations, was becoming a struggle for the future of civilization. They saw themselves on the front line against satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. The wild tales of German atrocities circulating during and immediately after the war seemed to prove to the conservatives how right they had been to reject the nation that had given birth to the Higher Criticism.
Yet this vision was inspired by deep dread. It was xenophobic, fearful of foreign influence seeping into the nation through Catholics, communists, and Higher Critics. This fundamentalist faith shows a profound recoil from the modern world. Conservative Protestants had become extremely ambivalent about democracy: it would lead to “mob rule,” to a “red republic,” to the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.” Peacekeeping institutions, such as the League of Nations, would henceforth always be imbued with absolute evil in the eyes of the fundamentalists. The League was clearly the abode of Antichrist, who, St. Paul had said, would be a plausible liar whose deceit would take everybody in. The Bible said that there would be war in the End-times, not peace, so the League was dangerously on the wrong track. Indeed, Antichrist himself was likely to be a peacemaker.
The fundamentalists’ revulsion from the League and other international bodies also revealed a visceral fear of the centralization of modernity and a terror of anything resembling world government. Faced with the universalism of modern society, some people instinctively retreated into tribalism.
This type of conspiracy fear, which makes people feel that they are fighting for their lives, can easily become aggressive. Jesus was no longer the loving savior preached by Dwight Moody. As the leading premillennialist, Isaac M. Haldeman, explained, the Christ of the Book of Revelation “comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love.... His garments are dipped in blood, the blood of others. He descends that he may shed the blood of men. “ The conservatives were ready for a fight, and, at this crucial moment, the liberal Protestants went on the offensive.
The liberals had their own difficulties with the war, which challenged their vision of a world progressing inexorably toward the Kingdom of God.
The only way they could cope was to see this as the war to end all wars, which would make the world safe for democracy. They were horrified by the violence of premillennialism, and its devastating critique of democracy and the League of Nations. These doctrines seemed not only un-American but a denial of Christianity itself. They decided to attack, and, despite their Gospel of love and compassion, their campaign was vicious and unbalanced. In 1917, theologians at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, the leading scholastic institution of liberal Christianity in the United States, began to attack the Moody Bible Institute on the other side of town. Professor Shirley Jackson Chase accused the premillennialists of being traitors to their country and of taking money from the Germans. Alva S. Taylor compared them to the Bolsheviks, who also wanted to see the world remade in a day. Alfred Dieffenbach, the editor of the Christian Register, called premillennialism “the most astounding mental aberration in the field of religious thinking.”
By linking the devout teachers of the Moody Bible Institute with foes who were not only their political enemies but whom they regarded as satanic, the liberals had hit below the belt. The conservatives struck back, hard. The editor of the Moody Bible Institute Monthly and president of the Institute, James M. Gray, retorted that it was the pacifism of the liberals which had caused the United States to fall behind Germany in the arms race, so it was they who had jeopardized the war effort. In The King’s Business, a premillennial magazine, Thomas C. Horton argued that it was the liberals who were in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism which they taught in their Divinity School had caused the war and was responsible for the collapse of decent values in Germany. Other conservative articles blamed rationalism and evolutionary theory for the alleged German atrocities.
Howard W. Kellogg of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles insisted that the philosophy of evolution was responsible for “a monster plotting world domination, the wreck of civilization, and the destruction of Christianity itself.” This acrimonious and, on both sides, unchristian dispute had clearly touched a raw nerve, and evoked a deep fear of annihilation. There was no longer any possibility of reconciliation on the subject of the Higher Criticism, which, for the conservatives, now had an aura of absolute evil.
The literal truth of scripture was a matter of the life and death of Christianity itself. The critics’ attacks on the Bible would result in anarchy and the total collapse of civilization, the Baptist minister John Straton declared in a famous sermon entitled “Will New York City Be Destroyed If It Does Not Repent?” The conflict had got out of hand and it would become almost impossible to heal the rift.
In August 1917, William Bell Riley had sat down with A. C. Dixon (1854-1925), one of the editors of The Fundamentals, and the revivalist Reuben Torrey (1856--1928) and decided to form an association to promote the literal interpretation of scripture and the “scientific” doctrines of premillennialism.
In 1919 Riley held a massive conference in Philadelphia, attended by six thousand conservative Christians from all the Protestant denominations, and formally established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (W.C.F.A.). Immediately afterward, Riley escorted fourteen speakers with a troupe of Gospel singers on a superbly organized tour of the United States, which visited eighteen cities. The liberals were entirely unprepared for this onslaught, and the response to the fundamentalist speakers was so enthusiastic that Riley believed that he had launched a new Reformation. The fundamentalist campaign was perceived as a battle. Constantly, the leaders used military imagery.
“I believe the time has come,” wrote E. A. Wollam in the Christian Workers Magazine, “when the evangelistic forces of this country, primarily the Bible Institutes, should not only rise up in defense of the faith, but should become a united and offensive power.” In the same issue, James M. Gray agreed, calling for the need “for an offensive and defensive alliance in the Church.” At a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1920, Curtis Lee Laws denned the “fundamentalist” as one who was ready to regain territory which had been lost to Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.” Riley went further. This was not just an isolated battle, “it is a war from which there is no discharge.”
The fundamentalists’ next objective was to expel the liberals from the denominations. Most of the fundamentalists were either Baptists or Presbyterians, and it was here that the fiercest battles were fought.
In his celebrated book Christianity and Liberalism (1923), the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), the most intellectual of the fundamentalists, argued that the liberals were pagans, who, by denying the literal truth of such core doctrines as the Virgin Birth, denied Christianity itself. There were horrific fights in the general assemblies of the denominations, when fundamentalist Presbyterians tried to impose their five-point creed on the church;
after a particularly bitter dispute, Riley seceded from the Baptist Assembly to found his own Bible Baptist Union of hard-liners. Some fundamentalist Baptists remained in the mainline denomination, hoping to effect reform from within, only to earn Riley’s undying hatred.
The campaigns continued; feeling escalated to such a point that any attempt at mediation only made matters worse. When the liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878--1969), a peaceable man and one of the most influential American clergymen of the time, pleaded for tolerance in a sermon delivered at the Baptist Convention of 1922 (later published in The Baptist as “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”), the rancor of the response showed the visceral disgust that these liberal ideas inspired. It spread to other denominations. After the sermon, there seemed to be a landslide movement toward the fundamentalist camp: the more conservative Disciples of Christ, Seventh-Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and the Salvation Army rallied to the fundamentalist cause. Even Methodists and Episcopalians, who had remained aloof from the controversy, were challenged by the conservatives in their ranks to define and make obligatory “the vital and eternal truths of the Christian religion. By 1923, it looked as though the fundamentalists would indeed win and that they would rid the denominations of the liberal danger. But then a new campaign caught the attention of the nation and eventually brought the whole fundamentalist movement into disrepute.
In 1920, the Democratic politician and Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) had launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges. In his view, it was not the Higher Criticism but Darwinism that had been responsible for the atrocities of the First World War. Bryan had been impressed by two books which claimed to establish a direct link between evolutionary theory and German militarism: Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power (1918) and Vernon L. Kellogg’s Headquarter Nights (1917), which included interviews with German officers who described the influence that Darwinism had allegedly played in persuading the Germans to declare war. Not only had the notion that only the strong could or should survive “laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history,” Byran concluded, but “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible.” At the same time, in his book Belief in God and Immortality, Bryn Mawr psychologist James H. Leuba produced statistics that “proved” that a college education endangered religious belief. Darwinism was causing young men and women to lose faith in God, the Bible, and other fundamental doctrines of Christianity.
Bryan was not a typical fundamentalist; he was not a premillennialist nor did he read scripture with the new stringent literalism. But his “research” had convinced him that evolutionary theory was incompatible with morality, decency, and the survival of civilization. When he toured the United States with his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism,” he drew big audiences and received extensive media coverage.
Bryan’s conclusions were superficial, naive, and incorrect, but people were ready to listen to him. The First World War had ended the honeymoon period with science; there was now an uneasiness about its fearsome potential and in some quarters a desire to see it kept within bounds. Darwin’s scientific theory was a prime example of the disturbing tendency of some scientific experts to fly in the face of “common sense.” People who wanted a plain-speaking religion were all too eager to find a plausible reason-that they could understand--to reject evolution. Bryan gave them this and, single-handedly, pushed the topic of evolution to the top of the fundamentalist agenda. It was a cause that appealed to the new fundamentalist ethos, since Darwinism contradicted the literal truth of scripture, and Bryan’s paranoid interpretation of its effect tapped the new fears that had surfaced after the First World War. As Charles Hodge had argued fifty years earlier, the Darwinian hypothesis was repugnant to the Baconian mind-set of the fundamentalists, who still clung to the scientific outlook of early modernity. Intellectuals and sophisticates might follow these new ideas with enthusiasm in Yale and Harvard and in the big eastern cities, but they were alien to many small-town Americans, who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist establishment. Yet the campaign against evolution might still never have replaced the Higher Criticism as the chief fundamentalist bugbear had it not been for a dramatic development in the South, which had hitherto taken little part in the fundamentalist battle.
There had been no need for southerners to become fundamentalists. The southern states were much more conservative than the North at this point, and there were too few liberals in the southern denominations to warrant a fundamentalist campaign. But southerners were worried about the teaching of evolution in the public schools. It was an example of the “colonization” of their society by an alien ideology, and bills were introduced in the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas to ban the teaching of Darwinian theory. The anti-evolution laws in Tennessee were particularly severe, and to put them to the test and strike a symbolic blow for freedom of speech and the First Amendment, John Scopes, a young teacher in the small town of Dayton, confessed that he had broken the law when he had once substituted for his school principal in a biology class. In July 1925, he was brought to trial, and the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist lawyer and campaigner Clarence Darrow (1857--1938). At the request of Riley and other fundamentalist leaders, William Jennings Bryan agreed to support the law. Once Darrow and Bryan became involved, the trial ceased to be simply about civil liberties, and became a contest between God and science.
The Scopes Trial was a clash between two utterly incompatible points of view. Both Darrow and Bryan were defending crucial American values;
Darrow was for free speech, and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary people, who had long been leery of the influence of learned experts and specialists.
Bryan’s political campaigns had all championed the common man. A review of In His Image (1922), Bryan’s answer to Darwin, claimed that he was “the spokesman for a numerically large segment of the people who are for the most part inarticulate. In fact, he is almost the only exponent of their ideas who has the public ear. They are part of the body politic and by no means negligible or to be regarded solely with derision as ‘lunatic fringe. This was undoubtedly true, but unfortunately Bryan was not able to articulate these inchoate and ill-informed anxieties adequately at the trial.
Where Darrow was able to argue brilliantly for the freedom that science must have to express itself and advance, Bryan, the Presbyterian and Baconian, insisted that, in the absence of definite proof, people had a right to reject an “unsupported hypothesis” such as Darwinism because of its immoral effects. Where Scopes himself treated the whole trial as a farce, Darrow and Bryan were in deadly earnest, and fighting for values that each considered sacred and inviolable. But when Darrow put Bryan on the stand, his merciless cross-examination exposed the muddle-headed and simplistic nature of Bryan’s views. Cornered, Bryan was forced by Darrow to concede that the world was far more than six thousand years old, as a literal reading of the Bible implied, that the six “days” of creation mentioned in Genesis were each longer than twenty-four hours, that he had never read any critical account of the origins of the biblical text, that he had no interest in any other faith, and that, finally, “I do not think about things I don’t think about” and only thought about the things he did think about “sometimes.” It was a rout. Darrow emerged from the trial as the hero of clear rational thought, and the elderly Bryan was discredited as bumbling, incompetent, and obscurantist;
he died a few days after the trial, as a result of his exertions.
Scopes was convicted, but the ACLU paid his fine, and Darrow and modern science were the undoubted victors at Dayton. The press gleefully exposed Bryan and his supporters as hopeless anachronisms. In particular, the journalist H. L. Mencken denounced the fundamentalists as the scourge of the nation. It was, he crowed, appropriate that Bryan had ended his days in a “one-horse, Tennessee village,” because he loved all country people, including the “gaping primates of the upland valleys.” Fundamentalists were everywhere. They are thick in the mean streets behind the gas-works. They are everywhere learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouses.
Fundamentalists belonged to the past; they were the enemies of science and intellectual liberty, and could take no legitimate part in the modern world.
As Maynard Shipley argued in The War on Modern Science (1927), if the fundamentalists managed to seize power in the denominations and impose their strictures on the people by law, Americans would lose the best part of their culture and be dragged back to the Dark Ages. Liberal secularists felt threatened, and hit back. A culture is always a contested matter, with different groups striving to make their visions prevail. At Dayton, the secularists won the battle and, by pouring scorn on the fundamentalists, seemed to have vanquished them by showing that they could not and should not be taken seriously. The fundamentalists went quiet after the Scopes trial, the liberals gained control of the denominations, and there seemed to be a detente.
William Bell Riley and his followers appeared to have given up their struggle; by the end of the decade, Riley was willing to sit on a panel with the liberal Harry Fosdick.
But in fact the fundamentalists had not gone away. Indeed, after the trial their views became more extreme. They felt embittered and nursed a deep grievance against mainstream culture. At Dayton, they had tried--badly-to fight the view of the more radical secularists that religion was an archaic irrelevance, and that only science was important. They could not express this point of view effectively and chose the wrong forum in which to do it.
Bryan’s anti-German phobia was paranoid, and his demonizing of Darwin inaccurate. But the moral and spiritual imperatives of religion are important for humanity and should not be relegated unthinkingly to the scrap heap of history in the interests of an unfettered rationalism.
The relationship between science and ethics has continued to be an issue of pressing concern.