-
6. Evolution on Trial, 1925
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Evolution on Trial, 1925 In the nineteenth century the United States witnessed a great ferment in Christianity that resulted in many schisms that persisted into the twentieth century. The religious climate was very different from that in most nations of Western Europe, which had establishedor dominant religions, such as the Episcopal (Anglican)Church in England and the Roman Catholic Church in France, Italy, and Spain. In the United States, some of the sects took an extreme fundamentalist position and insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible. One of the founding fathers of American fundamentalism was the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, whose position was that a line should be drawn between the church and the world and every Christian should get both feet out of the world. Among the sins of the world to be avoided were activities on Sunday such as sports, entertainment, reading the newspaper, attending the theater, and on all days, dancing, card playing, liquor drinking, pandering to the lusts of the flesh, and atheistic teachings such as evolution (Marsden 1980). Fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to the theory of evolution , since Genesis provided a very different account for the origin and diversity of life. In previous centuries many theologians had interpreted the Bible to say that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is the 148 / Evolution on Trial, 1925 center of the universe, and that the sun rotates around the Earth. The voyage of Magellan in 1522had provided convincing evidence that the Earth is not flat, but news seems to travel slowly, for in 1922a schoolteacher in Kentucky was fired for teaching that the Earth is round (Ginger 1958, 63). In 1543, just a few years after Magellan's voyage, Copernicus presented evidence that the sun, not the Earth, is the center of our solar system. His views, too, were eventually accepted. As time went on, more and more religious leaders relaxed their demands for inerrancy of the Bible relative to the discoveries that the Earth is neither flat nor at the center of the universe. The clergy were able to accept these apparent violations of Holy Writ and so could their congregations. This has not happened with evolution, however. Well into the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan, a famous Democratic politician and even more famous orator, proclaimed that "the evolutionary hypothesis is the only thing that has seriously menaced religion since the birth of Christ and it menaces all other religions as well as the Christian religion, and civilization as well as religion" (1923,679). THE SCOPES TRIAL A major challenge to the dominance of creationism and the rejection of evolution occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. John Thomas Scopes was tried for teaching Darwinism in his high school biology class-in defiance of an act recently passed by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee. The trial brought the evolution-creationism controversy to the nation's attention and emphasized the polar positions of the two sides. On January 28, 1925, the lower house of the Tennessee legislature passed a bill introduced by John Washington Butler. The critical paragraph read as follows. "Section I. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools [18.209.69.180] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:40 GMT) Euolutton on Trial, 1925 / 149 of the State, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." (Unlessnoted otherwise, the quotations are from the transcript of the Scopes trial, 1925.) Butler was no Bible-thumping firebrand but a kind, friendly gentleman who had become concerned when a young woman of his community had attended a university and returned home believing in evolution but no longer in God. Butler worried that a similar fate might befall his children, and he decided to do something effective: he ran for the state legislature and was elected. Part of his platform was the need to prohibit the teaching of evolution because it might corrupt young people. He introduced a bill to do just that, and by coincidence,the well-known politician, statesman, and fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan delivered a lecture in Nashville the very night following the introduction of Butler's bill...