Evolution
Fundamentalists in the 1920s devoted themselves to fighting the teaching of evolution in the nation's schools and colleges, especially by passing state laws that affected public schools. Riley took the initiative in the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925 to bring in famed politician William Jennings Bryan as an assistant to the local prosecutor. Liberals saw a division between educated, tolerant Christians and narrow-minded, tribal, obscurantist Christians. In the half century after the Scopes Trial the Fundamentalists had little success in shaping government policy, and generally were defeated in their efforts to reshape the mainline denominations. The Mainline Protestant denominations refused to join the attacks on evolution and welcomed modern ideas.
However Edwards (2000) challenges the consensus view among scholars that in the wake of the Scopes trial a humiliated fundamentalism retreated into the political and cultural background, a viewpoint evidenced in the movie "Inherit the Wind" and the majority of contemporary historical accounts. Rather, he argues, the cause of fundamentalism's retreat was the death of its leader, Bryan. Most fundamentalists saw the trial as a victory and not a defeat, but Bryan's death soon after created a leadership void that no other fundamentalist leader could fill. Bryan, unlike the other leaders, brought name recognition, respectability, and the ability to forge a broad-based coalition of fundamentalist religious groups to argue for the anti-evolutionist position.
Gatewood (1969) analyzes the transition from the anti-evolution crusade of the 1920s to the creation science movement of the 1960s. Despite some similarities between these two causes, the creation science movement represented a shift from religious to scientific objections to Darwin's theory. Creation science also differed in terms of popular leadership, rhetorical tone, and sectional focus. It lacked a prestigious leader like Bryan, utilized scientific rather than religious rhetoric, and was a product of California and Michigan instead of the South.
Read more about this topic: Christian Fundamentalism
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)