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Church History Since the Reformation

Transcript - CH507 Church History Since the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 17 of 24CH507

Fundamentalism and Modernism in a Time of Transition

Church History Since the Reformation

This is lecture number 17—Fundamentalism and Modernism in a Time of Transition. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me ask you to join me, as we always do at the start of our lecture, in prayer. Let us pray. Good and gracious Lord, we come to you once again today asking that you would guide us by your Spirit, so that all that we say and everything that we think would be honoring to you. For it’s in your name we pray, Amen.

In our last lecture, we began to explore some of the enormous changes—intellectually, socially, economically, religiously—which were taking place in America between the Civil War and the First World War. Our nation in 1920 was a vastly different place from what it had been in 1860. During most of our history, America had been largely rural and agriculturally based. Following the Civil War, however, it increasingly became an urban industrialized state. The first federal census, in fact—in which more people were related to urban centers than to rural populations—came in 1920. New heroes were beginning to emerge within the society. Names like Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Morgan, and others were replacing Jefferson’s famous “yeoman farmer” as the heroes of our society.

We see that reflected in part in an editorial in The Journal of the Independent in 1921.

Among the nations of the earth today, America stands for one idea—business. In this fact lies potentially the salvation of the world. Through business properly conceived, managed, and conducted, the human race is finally to be redeemed. How and why a man works foretells what he will do, think, have, give, and be; and real salvation is in doing thinking, having, giving and being—not in sermonizing or theorizing. What is the finest game? Business. What is the soundest science? Business. What is the truest art? Business. What is the fullest education?

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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Business. What is the fairest opportunity? Business. What is the cleanest philanthropy? Business. What is the sanest religion? Business.

Of course, not all were happy with that kind of emphasis, and the late nineteenth century is strewn with a whole variety of the so-called farm protest movements, the Populist, the Greenbackers, the Grangers, and others. As farmers were pushed to the periphery of the economic center, so business industry was emerging as the core focus of American life, aspirations, and hopes.

Liberals—modernists, as they’re often called—tended to open their arms to these vast changes that were taking place here in America. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, tended to be skittish about them, fearing lest these new social and intellectual changes undermined sound doctrine and the faith once delivered to the saints. In effect, these shifts were creating some enormous new problems within our country. Some speak of this era as “the gilded age.” Those of you who have visited the capitol buildings, statehouse buildings across our country may have had occasion to go up to look at those bright, shining domes close on. If you have, you’ve noticed that though they gleam in the sunshine from a distance, most of them close on are either peeling or coming apart or being defaced by graffiti of one kind or other. This is reflective, in a sense, of what was going on in this age. From a distance, America looked prosperous. Its growth was phenomenal, and yet when you come to look at it closely, you see that under that bright surface are the festering sores of a very hurting society.

If Carnegie’s steel mills were providing a foundation for a strong America, they were also, in some ways, brutalizing the workers, many of whom for twelve hours a day shoveled coal into searing hot furnaces. The basic philosophy of the day was social Darwinism, a philosophy which emphasized survival of the fittest. Darwin in 1859 had published his famous Origin of the Species, indicating the possibility of an evolutionary pattern in biology. The concept, however, reached far beyond the field of biology. Scholars in other areas began to consider how this might affect their disciplines—anthropology, history, sociology, and the like.

It was in the area of sociology that particular relevance began to emerge. Herbert Spencer, probably the most important writer in America during the last half of the nineteenth century, emphasized what came to be called “social Darwinism,” an application of this evolutionary scheme to society. Spencer, in his Study of Sociology,



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published in 1890, suggested that all of society is something like an organism, like an animal in growth, differentiation, and integration. In practical terms what this pointed to was the fact that we ought to encourage the most fit to survive. We see that picked up by folk like John D. Rockefeller in his famous paragraph. Let me quote it: “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and the law of God.”

There were critics to this emphasis upon survival of the fittest. You have folk like Walt Whitman looking at our society and diagnosing it with real concern. “I say we had better look our times and lands searchingly in the face,” Whitman wrote, “like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the states are not honestly believed in. It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body and then left with little or no soul.”

That’s a pretty powerful kind of critique of what was going on within the society, as it moved into these new industrialized phase. This, of course, created a lot of inner conflict for many of those who were part of that whole process. Andrew Carnegie is an excellent example of that. Carnegie himself had been enormously successful, his family having come over from Scotland. He had become involved in the railway business, had made some money, began to invest his money and develop his skills in the new burgeoning steel industry. Ultimately, by the end of the century, Carnegie’s steel interests were larger than all of the combined steel interests of England itself, which was the first great industrialized Western nation. But Carnegie was concerned, as were others, about what this was doing to him and, in fact, to our nation. He wrote himself a note, as a matter of fact, when he was thirty-three. I’d like to read that memo to himself, because it’s very revealing of some of the struggle between those who were committed to “the gospel of wealth,” as it was called—the material success undergirded by social Darwinism—and those who were concerned about human decency, frugality, benevolence, generosity to others. And you see that in Carnegie.



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Thirty-three and an income of $50,000 a year. [Lecturer’s comment: That was an incredible amount then. It’s still not bad today.] By this time, in two years, I can arrange all my business as to secure at least $50,000 a year. [That’s without working.] Beyond this, never earn. Make no effort to increase your fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes. Cast aside business forever, except for others. Settle in Oxford and get a thorough education, making the acquaintance of literary people. This will take three years’ time. Pay special attention to speaking in public. Man must have an idol. The amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry. [This is Carnegie speaking to himself.] No idol more debasing than the worship of money. [And then with some special insight he writes,] Whatever I engage in, I must push inordinately. [He was a Type A.] Therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character. To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares, and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will therefore resign business at 35.

Those of you who know the life of Carnegie will remember that he was not able to resign business at thirty-five, and, in fact, he continued to earn enormous amounts of money. Some have even suggested that his huge philanthropic efforts at the end of his life were a way of salving a conscience which had been piqued by these kinds of concerns in the struggle between the gospel of wealth and the compassion of Christian benevolence. However one might look at that, it’s easy to fault Carnegie; but the very same things were going on in the minds and in the hearts of people who had far less material goods but who had deep yearnings to earn more, to buy more, to consume more.

America itself has been captivated by the gospel of wealth, and it is an issue that has faced the church now for many years and which we are still a long way from solving. This is not to fault the business leaders. It’s been all too easy for us to look upon the large industrialists as a group of avaricious rascals, the robber barons, like those of the Middle Ages, people who were trying to bilk the public through their railroads, steel, oil, and financial empires. It’s far too easy to point the finger at them, as if they were to blame. The fact is that all of us have been affected (and, in fact, infected) by this deep yearning to have more, to earn more,



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to buy more, to eat more, to wear more. That basic inner conflict is one that we all share, and it has been reinforced by the kind of new society which was emerging following the Civil War as one of the enormous changes which were part of life at that time.

There were a number who began to critique what was going on. In addition to Walt Whitman, whom I read a moment ago, there were voices like those of Lester Ward, a sociologist himself who had come from very humble, rough, frontier backgrounds and who argued vigorously against social Darwinian thought. “At times,” he said, “competition actually prevents the most fit from surviving. Indeed, laissez-faire allows monopoly, which eventually crushes free competition. There’s need, therefore, for government regulation. The stress should be on cooperation, rather than competition.”

It was interesting in reflecting on this; not long ago our daughter came home from school. She had left for school, along with her friends, with great delight and joy, because they had at school what they called “Crazy Days.” That meant that they could wear anything they wanted—the oddest assortment of colors, different socks, different shoes, strange collections. Essentially, what they were all encouraged to do was to look as odd as possible, and they planned and planned for days on what they were going to wear. They went off to school, she and some of her friends, with great smiles and happiness, but returned home with tears. The reason was that they had decided at school that they would decide by vote who was the craziest, so that one child went home happy, and probably almost everyone else went home feeling that they had somehow failed.

Competition doesn’t always create the ends that we hope for, and Christians in particular, I think, have been seduced by the desire to build everything around competition—not that some competition isn’t good, because it is—but there are limits to how much we might use that in our Sunday school programs, in our vacation Bible schools, in our church programs themselves. Competition, unbridled, that isn’t carefully conceived, can be destructive.

[Peter] Kropotkin in his Mutual Aid, published in 1902, argued that many in the animal world live in cooperation with one another. Wolves hunt in packs. Beetles help each other. Why can’t this be true for human beings? he asked. One critic phrased it, “Mr. Spencer is like one who might insist that each should swim for himself in crossing a river, ignoring the fact that some have been



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artificially provided with corks, and others artificially loaded with lead.” It’s not an even race, folks, and those of you who have lived in urban areas of America and around the world know that is true.

The muckrakers pointed additional lights in the dark and dingy corners of American life. They focused on all kinds of problems that were emerging as a result of this urbanized, industrialized America that was emerging out of the late nineteenth century. Lincoln Steffens studied government graft; Ida Tarbell examined the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey; C. E. Russell looked at the beef trust; Ray Stannard Baker examined the railroads; Alfred Lewis, the International Harvester Company; Burton Hendrick, life insurance industry; Jake [Jacob] Riis, the slums; Sam Adams, pure food; Upton Sinclair, Chicago factories; and the list goes on and on. In fact, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the period in which magazine production first took off. Because of new printing techniques and the life, they could produce magazines that were inexpensive enough for people to buy, and people started buying magazines in great profusion. And these muckrakers, as they were called, raked muck in one issue after another, pointing out some of the problems, the festering sores, that were under this gilded surface of this enormous and very successful industrial exercise.

What does the church do when it confronts a new kind of society in which, though America’s becoming wealthier and wealthier, thousands of people are getting hurt, destroyed, and damaged? What happens when one shoveling coal in the steel mill loses his arm as a result of an accident? There’s no one there to protect him; and, in fact, the result is that he not only loses the arm, but he loses his job because he can no longer shovel, and that’s the only thing that he has to do. That’s all he’s trained to be able to perform. The church itself began to struggle with those kinds of issues, and you begin to hear those struggles in the pages of preachers’ sermons, in the pages of books that are being produced by the religious Christian community. Some of those give examples that I think are useful for us.

One very well-known figure is Charles Sheldon. He wrote a book titled In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? This was published in 1896. The book sold over twenty million copies and, in fact, continues to sell. I think probably some of you have it on your bookshelves. Essentially, Sheldon is trying to apply, in this form, Christian faith to the practice of life. Let me give a little background. Sheldon was the son of a South Dakota farmer-minister. He was educated



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at Phillips Academy, Brown University, and did his theological training at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1889 he accepted a call to what was a lifetime pastorate in a newly formed church, the Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas. Before he started his ministry, he decided to go to Topeka and live, without being known, for a week at a time in eight social groups in town. He took jobs with the railway. He took jobs in one of the local schools. He took jobs in the newspaper. And for a week he worked in those jobs, talking with people, observing, trying to determine what was going on. Then, when he got into his ministry, he began to try to apply the biblical teachings to the things that he had discovered that represented, in broad outline, the kinds of things that people in his church were doing.

In addition to this, he found that the Sunday evening attendance at his church was low. That’s not a new problem, and it’s not one that we’re unfamiliar with today. It may be that in some of our churches we don’t even have Sunday evening services any longer. In order to beef up the attendance, he decided to write serial stories, which he would then read in the evening worship. This boosted attendance, and it became a powerful tool for communicating his concerns. He wrote a lot of these stories, but one reached a particularly broad audience; and that became this book, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? In those days, there was no television, and there was no radio, and you had very little entertainment available. So it became popular to create this kind of serial “wait till next week” kind of communication, and it was quite successful.

The most famous of his stories takes place in the town of Raymond. The setting is the socially elite First Church where an eloquent, polished minister, Reverend Henry Maxwell, is delivering his smooth sermon to his contented congregation. You can see the kind of scene. At the close of the service, to the people’s dismay, a dusty, worn, shabby young man walks down the aisle. Disrupting the service, he turns to the congregation from the bottom aisle below the pulpit, and he says, “You can’t all go out hunting jobs up for people like me, but what I’m puzzled about is when I see so many Christians living in luxury and yet singing ‘Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow thee.’ What’s meant by following Jesus? I remember how my wife died gasping for air in a tenement owned by a church member. I suppose I don’t understand, but what would Jesus do?” He collapsed in the aisle, the pastor took him to his home, and later that week he died. But the question that he asked never died: What would Jesus do? It lingered in the



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pastor’s mind, and eventually he proposed that for a year those who would be willing covenant with him to do nothing in their life unless they first asked “What would Jesus do?” Some fifty responded, and eventually over a hundred. Among them were an heiress, president of a local college, a newspaper editor, a gifted soprano, a railway superintendent, a local merchant, and so on, representing in broad outline the things that he had done prior to starting his pastorate there.

His story is essentially moving from one area to another, telling the story of those who had committed themselves to this, and answering the question “What would Jesus do?” The Sunday edition of the newspaper would undoubtedly cease, because if Jesus were the editor, He would not produce a newspaper on Sunday. Liquor and tobacco advertising would be left out of the paper. The town would become alcoholically dry if Jesus were here. Businesses would be run as trusts for the welfare of employees if Jesus were the proprietor. Making money for one’s own sake was something that Jesus would not have done. There wouldn’t be any cheating in business. Jesus would be interested and active in civic affairs, and the like.

So he tells this story in detail, and it’s captivated people’s minds ever since. Aren’t you interested in the kinds of implications that that question might have for your own life? But there’s one problem which it creates; for Sheldon’s answer, like the answer of so many across the history of the church, is focused only on individual Christians and their response to that kind of question. What do you do in a new society in which evil comes wrapped not only in individual form, but now comes wrapped in corporate and structural form? What do you do with a society that’s no longer an individualized, rural, agricultural society but a society which is now a much broader, integrated, interactive, industrial state?

That’s the problem that begins to exercise people like Walter Rauschenbusch. Rauschenbusch is an especially interesting figure. For evangelicals, he’s often seen in very negative terms as the father of the social gospel. We will see in part how that came to be attached to him. In actuality, Rauschenbusch was raised in a pietistic German Baptist home. Born in 1861, he was by the age of seventeen deeply converted to Christ. All through his life, he profoundly valued that experience of conversion and preached for conversion. Listen to his comment later on:



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Spiritual regeneration is the most important fact in any life history. A living experience of God is the crowning knowledge attainable to the human mind. Each one of us needs a redemptive power of religion for its own sake, for on the tiny stage of the human soul all of the vast tragedy of good and evil is reenacted. In the best social order that’s conceivable, men will smolder with lust and ambition and be lashed by hate and jealousy, as with the whip of a slave driver. No material comfort and plenty can satisfy the restless soul in us and give us peace within ourselves. Only conversion can do that.

And yet Rauschenbusch, after his training, went to be a pastor in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. He began to see the realities, the desperation of many of the people in his parish and in that city. He became deeply exercised over social evil, that structural or corporate evil—a kind of evil that you can’t point to an individual and say, “You did this.” It’s the kind of evil that you look at in structural forms, that the system itself is destroying people, even though those systems may be overseen by very good and compassionate people. How do you deal with that kind of a systemic evil? He came to believe by studying the Scripture that the answer resided in a new understanding and appropriation of the kingdom of God. “Then the idea of the kingdom of God offered itself,” he wrote, “as the real solution for the search for some principle whereby both the needs of the individual and of the society could be met.”

Then, in one of the most powerful statements to come out of this era—and let me read it for you—you have Rauschenbusch focusing upon the core of the issue that I’m trying to focus us upon today.

Most people look only to the renewal of the individual. Most social reformers look only to the renewal of society. We believe that two factors make up the person—the inward and the outward. And so we work for the renewal and Christianization of the individual and of society. Most Christians demand a private life for God and leave business to the devil. Most social reformers demand justice for business life in order that private life can be given to pleasure. We plead for self-sacrifice in private life in order to achieve justice in business life, and for justice in business life that purity in private life may become possible. Most Christians say, “Wait till all men are converted. Then a perfect social order will be possible.” Most social reformers



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say, “Wait until we have a perfect social order, and then everyone will be good.” We say, “Go at both simultaneously.” Neither is possible without the other. They all say, “Wait.” We say, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

That’s pretty powerful writing, and I think Rauschenbusch, along with many others, had come to see the core issue which was vexing the church in many of these social changes. Sin has been a problem across the centuries of history. The message of the gospel is that God, by the grace offered to us through Jesus Christ, addresses that sin problem and solves it. Most of us have seen that only in individual terms, but Rauschenbusch and many others were beginning to see, now that a whole new world was emerging—an integrated, industrialized state—was that the gospel also addresses and penetrates that reality of social or structural evil. And that’s a matter that I think all of us need to struggle with and come to understand in new ways.

One of my favorite statements of this came from a committed evangelical, one who called himself a fundamentalist but who believed deeply in this—one of the namesakes of our school, Adoniram Judson Gordon. He was a Baptist pastor in Boston in the late part of the nineteenth century. He was the one who started the Boston Missionary Training School which eventually, merging with Temple University’s School of Theology, became Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. In 1887 he gave a speech in Washington, DC, that is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. Let me share a little bit of that with you:

Now we are [accustomed] to say that responsibility is measured by opportunity. That is certainly one of its measures, but there are two factors necessary to constitute an opportunity; that is, the ability and the occasion. There may be the ability without the occasion, or there may be the occasion without the ability. In either case we have but half an opportunity, which cannot evoke a very great responsibility. But where both are present in large degree—ability and occasion—the upper and nether millstones of accountability have come together, and woe be to the Christian who gets between them. For if now corn is not ground into bread for a suffering world, the owner of the corn will himself be ground. If he does not give his substance, he will be in peril of losing his soul. It is estimated that eight billions of dollars are treasured up in the hands of Protestant Christians today in the United



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States, a sum so great that it staggers our mathematics to compute it. That is one single element of our ability. Into our doors the untaught and unregenerated populations of the old world are pouring by the hundreds of thousands every year.

You’ll recall that we talked in our last lecture about the fact that the American population, which was less than four million total when we became a nation in the 1770s, had added to it fifty million immigrants over the next century. That’s an incredible kind of an impact. And he goes on to say, and this is Gordon still speaking,

While through our doors we can look out to every nation of the globe as a field ripe for missionary harvest, here is our occasion [Lecturer’s comment: the flooding new immigrants into our nation and the missionary opportunity around the world]. It is enough to startle one into alarm, to think of the stupendous obligation created by the conjunction of these two elements. The church, according to its primitive ideal, is the one institution in which every man’s wealth is under mortgage to every man’s want, every man’s success to every man’s service, so that no laborer in any part of the field should lack means for prosecuting his work so long as any fellow disciple in any other part of the field has ability to supply his lack. As surely as darkness follow sunset will the alienation of the masses follow sanctimonious selfishness in the church. If a Christian model is “Look out for number one,” then let him look out for estrangement and coldness on the part of number two. [This is pretty powerful stuff.] It is not orthodox creed which repels the masses, but orthodox greed.

What Gordon is saying in this powerful address—and I wish I could even read more, because it’s something that we need to hear today. This is way back in the 1880s by one whose credentials are very clearly evangelical and fundamentalist. What he is saying is precisely the same kind of thing that Rauschenbusch is trying to aim at as well, that the new society created by the growth of industry, the burgeoning of the cities, the intellectual changes and ferment which are taking place—that this new world is one that has to be confronted by the biblical mandates, by the clear message of the Good News which has come to us in Jesus Christ.

What begins to happen, however, is that in the nineteen-teens and twenties and on into the 1930s, you have a growing



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polarization between those who espouse what comes to be called the social gospel, basically in the modernist or liberal camp, and the fundamentalists who abandon that deep longstanding commitment to social justice, which is such an integral part of the whole evangelical heritage. We’ve talked about that in earlier classes. There’s no question that in the eighteenth and nineteenth century the leaders, the outstanding voices, those who were willing to go to the mat for the concerns of people in practical ways, were the evangelical Christians. And yet in the battles of the nineteen-teens and twenties, one of the elements of polarization—I think one of the sad elements—is that the evangelical tradition began to lose its concern for, its active participation in, social justice and the needs of other people. And the modernists tended to adopt that, without along with that adopting the deep commitment to biblical Christianity and to personal piety. The very concern that Rauschenbusch had of the division between the two is one that in effect took place. It’s almost as if it were prophetic of what was yet to come.

We still struggle with that today; and, in fact, one of the powerful articles that emerged out of the new evangelical movement, the renaissance of evangelicalism in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, is the article which was produced by Carl F.H. Henry, titled “The Uneasy Conscience of the Fundamentalists.” Why was he uneasy? Because of the abandonment of that longstanding commitment to social justice, to the concerns of people, to the practical needs of the neighbor which God called us to in the Great Commandment. We want to return to that later on, but it’s an illustration of literally scores of things that in the heat of the battle are polarized and eventually land in one camp or the other, as these two groups begin to divide from one another.

There are many other levels at which the battle takes place. Let me mention several to further flesh out this notion. The first of those is the kind of struggle to advance both fundamentalism and modernism in the educational structures of our country. The most famous of the events that we have focused upon for this particular area is the Scopes trial of 1925, a very interesting event. John Thomas Scopes was tried in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in the high school. He was a biology teacher there. It actually had grown out of the fact that the Tennessee legislature, dominated at that time by fundamentalists, had passed a bill providing—and let me read it for you—“that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals, and all other public schools of the state, which are supported in whole or in



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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.”

It happened that John Scopes and his friend, George Rappleyea, a mining engineer, were sitting together in Robinson’s Drug Store. They were drinking lemon phosphates, and they decided that they would put this law to the test. The idea was that Scopes would teach, with everybody’s knowledge, what the Tennessee legislature had prohibited him from teaching. And, in fact, he was not only able to teach that, but he was arrested and brought to trial as a result of it. It probably wouldn’t have turned out to be such a great event or so well-known had it not been that William Jennings Bryan decided to argue for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, a kind of William Kunstler of his day, decided to argue the case for the defense.

The trial was set for July 1925, and little Dayton, Tennessee, was on the map with a vengeance. All kinds of people flooded into town. Farmers came in their mule-drawn wagons wanting to hear their faith defended against these foreign elements. Revivalists came to hold meetings around town. Booksellers came to sell volumes, especially on biology. Hot dog vendors came, lemonade stands were set up, and Western Union installed twenty-two telegraph operators in the local grocery store. Of course, they couldn’t hold it inside. They had to go outside because there was such an interest in it. It was hot, it was the summertime. This was the first event to be broadcast on a radio station, Chicago’s WGN. There were newspaper people from London, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan—all of them descending on this sleepy little town.

The trial itself is fascinating; and some of you have perhaps read about it or even seen the movie that was made of this particular trial. There you have Bryan and Darrow going at each other. The highlight, perhaps, is the period in which Darrow puts Bryan on the stand as an expert on the Scriptures. And he asks him about Jonah and the fish, Joshua and the sun, where Cain got his wife, the date of the flood, the tower of Babel, and so on. Bryan affirmed his belief that the world was created in 4004 BC, as Archbishop Ussher had indicated; that Eve was literally made out of Adam’s rib; that the Tower of Babel was responsible for the diversity of languages in the world; that the big fish had actually swallowed Jonah. When asked where Cain got his wife, Bryan said, “No,


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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sir, I don’t know. I leave the agnostics to hunt for her”—a very interesting interchange on a whole series of levels.

The result is that Scopes was found guilty and fined one hundred dollars. In effect, one might say that the fundamentalists had won the trial; but remember, the whole world had been watching, and what the world judged that trial to represent was a deep strain of anti-intellectualism that ran through fundamentalism. In fact, that trial, perhaps more than anything else, signified the loss in the battle for the mind of the young generation emerging in America. Some of the intellectual struggles in geology, with fossil studies; in biology, with Darwinian evolution; in history, in the use of higher critical methods to study the Bible and the like—all of these tended to coalesce around a kind of symbolic event in a little unlikely place in Tennessee to mark a sort of watershed between the modernists or liberals that lined themselves up with the new learning and the fundamentalists who came increasingly to be seen as obscurantist anti-intellectual folk.

That division is simply another illustration of some of the changes and polarizations that are going on. I want to talk about yet others of these, as we see the battle being waged in the churches, in the denominations, as we see it being waged in society itself. And we’ll pick those stories up in our next lecture.

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