Before Scopes: Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870-1925 (review)

The 1925 trial of John T. Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, continues to be the most famous event in the history of Protestant fundamentalism and the debate over teaching about human evolution in public schools. Israel's carefully researched history places the trial and the 1925 anti-evolution law that occasioned it in the context of the state's evangelicals' involvement with education. This book contributes to the history of the evolution controversy, showing that while most Tennessee evangelicals had always criticized evolution, the movement to bar teaching evolution emerged only after World War I. This study's major contribution, however, is in examining the social vision of southern Protestants and challenging interpretations that claim that individual conversion was nearly their sole concern. Israel shows that in the decades following the Civil War, Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists, the state's largest denominations, transformed from critics of public education to proponents of a form of social Christianity that sought to establish a "Christian civilization in the New South" particularly through the creation and control of educational systems (1).

Central to Israel's argument is a "home rule" compromise under which evangelicals were able to overcome their concerns about the secular character of the State-funded school system established in the 1870s. Local school boards exercised complete authority over curriculum and personnel, ensuring that schools reflected community values. Public elementary schools were supplemented by religious education in the home and in Sunday schools and by advanced education in the denominations' academies, colleges, and universities. With this compromise in place, church leaders became enthusiastic supporters of the public schools, looking to them as a "handmaid to Christianity" in educating and "regenerating society" (40–41).

In two chapters, Israel looks beyond public schools. First, he examines the universities Baptists and Methodists established as part of their post-elementary educational system. Southwestern Baptist University (renamed Union University in 1907) and Vanderbilt University were founded to supply an educated ministry and provide the laity with what one Baptist editor called "first class" schools that would not be "unfriendly to the faith of their fathers" (48). The Baptist university remained solidly denominational, while the Methodist school pursued a "broad" or "common Christianity" and grant money from major endowments (59, 61). Unsatisfied with Vanderbilt's trajectory, some Methodist leaders sought more control over the school, leading to the acrimonious divorce of Vanderbilt from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1914. Combined with the growth of state universities, the "loss" of Vanderbilt weakened the home rule compromise and caused evangelicals to direct more energy toward influencing all levels of public education.

Before continuing with the demise of the home rule compromise, Israel devotes the book's central chapter to the temperance and prohibition movements. While this chapter may appear to be an intrusion, it is pivotal to Israel's argument about the development of a social Christianity. Education and the temperance movement were linked by an 1877 law that prohibited the sale of intoxicating beverages within four miles of any school outside of an incorporated town and by evangelicals' efforts to use schools as a means of teaching temperance. More importantly, however, the prohibition movement led church leaders from their antebellum position of declaiming involvement in politics to seeing political action as a means to create a more Christian society. In this transition, they were influenced by three factors. First, the Lost Cause ideology of the post-Civil War South taught that the region's unique character depended on it being especially religious. Second, churches felt they needed to show themselves interested in society as a whole for people to accept their evangelical message. Third, the end of the Civil War eliminated the need for southern evangelicals to insist that churches must not be involved in politics in order to discredit northern, anti-slavery churches. The temperance movement gave Tennessee evangelicals an enlarged view of their mission and "experience in using a coercive paternalistic state" to impose...