Conservative Christians drew together across denominational lines to fight for the so-called fundamentals of their traditional faith against the perceived heresy of modernism, and in so doing gave birth to the fundamentalist movement and antievolution crusade. Certainly modernism had made significant inroads within divinity schools and among the clergy of mainline Protestant denominations in the North and West, and fundamentalism represented a legitimate theological effort to counter these advances. Biblical higher criticism and an evolutionary world view, as twin pillars of this opposing creed, stood as logical targets of a conservative counterattack. A purely theological effort, however, rarely incites a mass movement, at least in pluralistic America; much more stirred up fundamentalism—and turned its fury against teaching evolution in public schools.
The First World War played a pivotal role. American intervention, as part of a progressive effort to defeat German militarism and make the world “safe for democracy,” was supported by many of the modernists, who revered the nation’s wartime leader, Woodrow Wilson, himself a second-generation modernist academic. A passionate champion of peace, William Jennings Bryan opposed this position and in 1915 resigned his post as Wilson’s secretary of state in protest over the drift toward war. He spent the next two years criss-crossing the country campaigning against American intervention.
Many leading premillennialists shared Bryan’s open hostility toward America’s intervention in the European conflict, seeing the war as both a product of the depravity of the age and the possible fulfillment of a prophesy regarding the coming of the next millennium. With Shailer Mathews leading the charge, some modernists used this opportunity to attack premillennialism as an otherworldly threat to national security in wartime. Some premillennialists responded in kind by stressing the German roots of higher criticism, attributing an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” mentality to German militarism and accusing modernism of undermining traditional American faith in biblical values. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” the premillennialist journal
Our
Hope declared in a 1918 editorial, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”
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The trauma of war stirred passions on both sides and helped spur a bitter, decade-long battle among American Christians. “These ideas, and the cultural crisis that bred them, revolutionized fundamentalism,” the historian of religion George M. Marsden observed. “Until World War I various components of the movement were present, yet collectively they were not sufficient to constitute a full-fledged ‘fundamentalist’ movement. The cultural issue suddenly gave the movement a new dimension, as well as a sense of urgency.”
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When a horribly brutal war led to an unjust and uneasy peace, the rise of international communism, worldwide labor unrest, and an apparent breakdown of traditional values, the cultural crisis worsened for conservative Christians in the United States. “One indication that many premillennialists were shifting their emphasis—away from just evangelizing, praying, and waiting for the end time, toward more intense concern with retarding [social] degenerative trends—was the role they played in the formation of the first explicitly fundamentalist organization,” Marsden noted. “In the summer of 1918, under the guidance of William B. Riley, a number of leaders in the Bible school and prophetic conference movement conceived of the idea of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.”
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During the preceding two decades, Riley had attracted a 3,000 member congregation to his aging Baptist church in downtown Minneapolis through a distinctive combination of conservative dispensational-premillennialist theology and politicized social activism. “When the Church is regarded as the body of God-fearing, righteous-living men, then, it ought to be in politics, and as a powerful influence,” he proclaimed in a 1906 book that urged Christians to promote social justice for the urban poor and workers.
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During the next decade, Riley focused his social activism on outlawing liquor, which he viewed as a key source of urban problems. By the twenties, he turned against teaching evolution in public schools. Later, he concentrated on attacking communism. Following the First World War and flushed with success upon ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment authorizing Prohibition, he was ideally suited to lead premillennialists into the cultural wars of the twenties.
In 1919, Riley welcomed some 6,000 conservative Christians to the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) inaugural conference with the warning that their Protestant denominations were “rapidly coming under the leadership of the new infidelity, known as ‘modernism.’ ” One by one, seventeen prominent ministers from across the country—the future high priests of fundamentalism—took the podium to denounce modernism as, in the words of one speaker, “the product of Satan’s lie,” and to call for a return to biblical fundamentals in church and culture. “It is ours to stand by our guns,” Riley proclaimed in closing the conference. “God forbid that we should fail him in the hour when the battle is heavy.”
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Participants then returned to their separate denominations, ready to battle the modernists. Only minor conflicts erupted within Protestant Episcopal and northern Methodist churches, where modernism was firmly entrenched, or in southern Baptist and Presbyterian congregations, where conservatives encountered little opposition. Both sides proved roughly equal in strength within the northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations, however, resulting in fierce battles for control. Indeed, it was during the ensuing intradenominational strife within the Northern Baptist Convention that conservative leader Curtis Lee Laws coined the word
fundamentalist
to identify those willing “to do battle royal for the Fundamentals.”
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Use of the term quickly spread to include all conservative Christians militantly opposed to modernism.
Although these early developments laid the foundation for the antievolution crusade and the ensuing Scopes trial, they did not predestine it. Fundamentalism began as a response to theological developments within the Protestant church rather than to political or educational developments within American society. Even the name of the WCFA’s journal,
Christian Fundamentals in Schools and Churches
, originally referred to support for teaching biblical fundamentals in divinity schools and churches rather than opposition to teaching evolution in public schools—though it neatly fit the organization’s later emphasis. “When the Fundamentals movement was originally formed, it was supposed that our particular foe was the so-called ‘higher criticism,’ ” Riley later recalled, “but in the onward going affairs, we discovered that basic to the many forms of modern infidelity is the philosophy of evolution.”
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Riley was predisposed to make this connection, as suggested by the title to one of his earlier books, The Finality of the Higher Criticism; or, The Theory
of Evolution and False Theology,
but it took William Jennings Bryan to turn the fundamentalist movement into a popular crusade against teaching evolution that led directly to Dayton.
Bryan was not a dispensational premillennialist; he was too optimistic. Certainly he shared with premillennialists a joyful hope in eternal life through faith in Christ. But Bryan did not agree with their view that the Bible prophesied the imminent degeneration of the world in preparation for Christ’s second coming. Quite to the contrary, he enjoyed things of this world—particularly politics, oratory, travel, and food—and believed in the power of reform to make life better. Reform took two forms for Bryan: personal reform through individual religious faith and public reform through majoritarian governmental action. He maintained a deep faith in both throughout his life, and each contributed to his final political campaign against teaching evolution. “My father taught me to believe in Democracy as well as Christianity,” Bryan observed late in his life.
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And so the twig was bent, which grew into the tree.
Bryan’s crusade against teaching evolution capped a remarkable thirty-five-year-long career in the public eye. He entered Congress in 1890 as a 30-year-old populist Democratic politician committed to roll back the Republican tariff for the dirt farmers of his native Nebraska. His charismatic speaking ability and youthful enthusiasm quickly earned him the nickname The Boy Orator of the Platte. Bryan’s greatest speech occurred at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, where he defied his party’s conservative incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, and the eastern establishment that dominated both political parties by demanding an alternative silver-based currency to help debtors cope with the crippling deflation caused by exclusive reliance on limited gold-backed money. Using a potent mix of radical majoritarian arguments and traditional religious oratory, he demanded, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The speech electrified the convention and secured the party’s presidential nomination for Bryan. For many, he became known as the Great Commoner; for some, the Peerless Leader.
A narrow defeat in the ensuing bitter election did not diminish Bryan’s faith in God or the people. He retained leadership of the Democratic party and secured two subsequent presidential nominations as he fought against imperialism and militarism following the Spanish-American War and for increased public control over corporate business practices. His vocation became speaking and writing, with majoritarian political commentary and evangelical Protestant lectures serving as his stock in trade. During the remainder of his life, the energetic Bryan gave an average of more than two hundred speeches each year, traveled continually throughout the country and around the world, wrote dozens of books, and edited a political newspaper with a nationwide circulation. After helping Woodrow Wilson secure the White House in 1912, Bryan became secretary of state and idealistically (some said naively) set about negotiating a series of international treaties designed to avert war by requiring the arbitration of disputes among nations. This became more of a religious mission than a political task for Bryan, who called on America to “exercise Christian forbearance” in the face of increasing German aggression and vowed, “There will be no war while I am Secretary of State.”
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Of course, he had to resign from office to keep this promise.
Once again left without a formal governmental post but with an expanded sense of mission, Bryan resumed his efforts as an itinerant speaker and writer on political and religious topics. Although his campaign for peace failed, he helped to secure ratification of four constitutional amendments designed to promote a more democratic or righteous society: the direct election of senators, a progressive federal income tax, Prohibition, and female suffrage. During this period, the aging Commoner moved to Miami for his wife’s health and got in on the ground floor of the historic Florida land boom of the early twenties. Although publicly he played down his profits, the spectacular rise in land prices made Bryan into a millionaire almost overnight.
Private wealth did not diminish Bryan’s public zeal as he found two campaign targets: the conservative Republican administrations in Washington and teaching evolution in public schools. Both targets remained fixed in his sights throughout the final years of his life. Indeed, after seeing himself portrayed in a political cartoon as a hunter shifting his aim from a Republican elephant to a Darwinian monkey, Bryan admonished the cartoonist: “You should represent me as using a doublebarreled shotgun fixing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury and another at Darwinism—the monkey—as he tries to enter the school room.”
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Bryan remained a progressive even as he crusaded against teaching evolution. “In William Jennings Bryan, reform and reaction lived happily, if somewhat incongruously, side by side,” biographer Lawrence W. Levine concluded. “The Bryan of the 1920’s was essentially the Bryan of the 1890’s: older in years but no less vigorous, no less optimistic, no less certain.”
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Bryan’s antievolutionism was compatible with his progressive politics because both supported reform, appealed to majoritarianism, and sprang from his Christian convictions. Bryan alluded to these issues in his first public address dealing with Darwinism, which he composed in 1904 at the height of his political career. From this earliest point, he described Darwinism as “dangerous” for both religious and social reasons. “I object to the Darwinian theory,” Bryan said with respect to the religious implications of a naturalistic explanation for human development, “because I fear we shall lose the consciousness of God’s presence in our daily life, if we must accept the theory that through all the ages no spiritual force has touched the life of man and shaped the destiny of nations.” Turning to the social consequences of the theory, Bryan added, “But there is another objection. The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”
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The Great Commoner was no more willing to defer to ivy tower scientists on this issue than to Wall Street bankers on monetary matters. “I have a right to assume,” he declared in this early speech, “a Designer back of the design [in nature]—a Creator back of the creation; and no matter how long you draw out the process of creation; so long as God stands back of it you can not shake my faith in Jehovah.” This last comment allowed for an extended geologic history and even for limited theistic evolution; but Bryan dug in his heels regarding the supernatural creation of humans and described it as “one of the test questions with the Christian.”
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Although Bryan regularly delivered this speech on the Chautauqua circuit during the early years of the century, he said little else against Darwinism until the twenties, when he began blaming it for the First World War and an apparent decline in religious faith among educated Americans.