#99
# 99, Crusade Against Evolution
By Alvin Petty, retired area minister
In 1920 a tragedy began for American Fundamentalist Christianity. The democratic politician, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in public schools. He believed Higher Criticism and Darwinism were linked in humanity destroying power. But he blamed Darwinism’s evolution for the atrocities of WWI.
Bryan’s studies led him to believe the Darwinian idea that only the strong should survive created the basis for the bloodiest war in history. (But the strongest are those who learn to compassionately live in community with their fellows.) This science he reasoned, manufactured the poisoned gases to suffocate soldiers and this same science preaches that man has a brutal ancestry and it eliminates the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible. So he was certain that evolution was evil in every way. This evil symbolized modernity’s ruthless destructive potential.
Bryan’s reasoning was wrong and naïve but he picked the right moment to get a quick and strong following from his fellow Fundamentalists in the campaign against evolution. The friendship between science and fundamentalist Christians ended with horror of the Great War. Fundamentalists wanted plain speaking, unquestioning religion and Bryan gave it to them on a silver platter with a silver tongue. All by himself he put evolution at the top of the Fundamentalist agenda where it remains today. It replaced Higher Criticism as number one on the hate list because of a drama that unfolded in Tennessee.
Until Bryan started his fight on evolution, the southern states had taken little part in the Fundamentalist movement which started about 1912. However, the South was very worried about evolution being taught. The state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas introduced bills to ban the teaching of evolutionary theory. Tennessee had the strictest anti evolutionary law.
John Scopes, a young teacher in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, wanted to strike a blow for freedom of speech and confessed to breaking the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. A trial was set for him in July of 1925. The newly formed American Civil Liberties Union sent a team of lawyers led by the great rationalist, Clarence Darrow. Bryan agreed to prosecute Scopes in favor of the Tennessee law.
The press gleefully began portraying the trial as a judging between Christianity and science and the circus of the century came to Dayton, Tennessee. Darrow made a disaster of Bryan taking the witness stand. The press portrayed the Fundamentalists as hopelessly behind the times and unable to take part in the modern world. A few days after losing the trial Bryan died., perhaps of a broken heart.
There occurred something with the the Fundamentalists in this event that we should be mindful of in dealing with them. When they were attacked and made to look foolish, they reacted by becoming more extreme in their fury against evolution. They soon came to express creation science which espouses Genesis 1 as literally true in every detail. For all of history most of the church had never taken Genesis 1 as totally literally happening. Then they became more angrily literal in their interpretation of all scripture. Before Scopes, they had been willing to to work for social reform but now they left that behind to work only on ³saving souls². They have become more isolated associating only with their own kind and moved to the far right of the political spectrum where they remain today.
This is typical of how the Fundamentalist mindset reacts to loss of face and it always makes them more reactionary and dangerous with self destructive behavior. We need loving compassion and the wisdom of Solomon to ever turn a fundamentalist from his bent. And even then we may not succeed.