Religious Modernists, Scientists, and the Culture Wars of the Scopes Era
2025 was the centennial of the Scopes trial. When it occurred it was the center of media attention in the United States. It later became a play and movie that were based on the trial but took liberties with the facts. The enemy in the 1950s was Senator McCarthy. People watching the movie “Inherit the Wind” today may not know the historical context in which the original trial occurred or the historical setting in which the play and movie were created. The stories suggest some kind of ending happened with the trial but obviously the Bible and science clash continues to this very day.
AHA Session 126
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Chair: Paul V. Murphy, Grand Valley State University
Panel:
Edward Davis, Messiah University
Gary Dorrien, Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University
Alexander Pavuk, Morgan State University
Matthew Stanley, New York University
Session Abstract
Science has become a political rallying cry in modern America, with liberals declaring “Science is real” and conservatives of various persuasions critical not only, as in the past, of evolutionary teaching that contradicts the Bible but also of new scientific claims linked to public policy, including assertions regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines and the potential dire consequences of human-caused climate change. Many scientists appeal to empiricism, experiment, and expert review. Others see belief in science as a matter of faith, even a competing faith, often to the discomfort of scientists.
This situation is not new. The proposed roundtable addresses the tensions between science and religion in the early twentieth century, highlighting an overlooked front in the culture wars of the 1920s. The Scopes anti-evolution trial of 1925 represented the culmination of almost two decades of conflict within Protestant denominations, in which “fundamentalism” emerged to challenge liberal Protestantism, but also an emerging division between religious conservatives and newly professionalized scientists and educators.
Between 1922 and 1931, the University of Chicago Divinity School’s American Institute of Sacred Literature published a series of ten pamphlets on “Science and Religion” written by the leading Protestant liberal spokesmen Shailer Mathews and Harry Emerson Fosdick as well as seven notable scientists, including Nobel physicists Robert Millikan and Arthur Holly Compton, biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, and geologist Kirtley Mather. Financially supported by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the university distributed the pocket-sized pamphlets widely, mailing them to every legislator and public school principal in the country and thousands of ministers.
Widely distributed at the time, they became difficult to find. Historians have hitherto overlooked this ambitious counterpart to the well-known Fundamentals, but Edward Davis has produced a scholarly edition of the pamphlets (Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era [Johns Hopkins, 2024]), with a lengthy introduction narrating their story and reassessing the Protestant modernist encounter with science.
This roundtable considers the significance of these pamphlets, now widely available for the first time in generations, and fosters a conversation about the way in which scientists and religious liberals negotiated an early moment in a conflict that continues to shape American society and politics.
– the media presented a two-dimensional view
– eugenics was a subtext of the confrontation
– religious pamphlets produced then have been overlooked by academia
Davis [plus my comments]
– pamphlets should be considered as long blog posts
– AISL (American Institute of Sacred Literature) founded by William Rainey Harper promoted the teaching of sacred Christian texts
– at the time there was a consensus that the earth was 100,000 years old in contrast to the date of 4004 BC calculated by Bishop Ussher in 1650: this dating becomes part of the Scopes trial
– during World War I and the flu epidemic the issue of the return of Christ became quite prominent. Books were written and pamphlets issued about the seeming nearness of the event. In 1917, leading theologian Shailer Mathews wrote Will Christ Come Again, one of many such examples. Christians organized time into dispensations and could calculate them based on biblical verses especially from the Gospels and the Book of Revelation when the next dispensation would occur.
– Prominent geologists Edward Hitchcock and Benjamin Silliman from the 1820s to 1840s working in the Connecticut River Valley maintained a steady stream of articles and books at the time Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology (1830-1833). We are now in the bicentennial of the Diluvian Age when geologists like searched for proof of Noah’s flood [I asked about this in the Q&A]. Hitchcock and Silliman both accepted the antiquity of earth in their geology books. Genesis commentaries then contained detailed geological expositions before turning to the actual verses from the Book of Genesis.
– The gap theory proposed there was a vast time gap between Genesis 1:1 (the initial creation of the universe) and Genesis 1:2 (the earth becoming formless and void). Back then the gap could be millions of years and would allow for the vast times being measured by geologists. Hitchcock endorsed it but Silliman did not.
– The geological controversy over by the Civil War [but then came Darwin].
Q&A race – Protestant elite white as subtext to the confrontation
