Getting over fundamentalism

Forty years after that long hot summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tenn., where the Scopes “Monkey Trial” was held, Southern Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney vividly recounted his memories. His parents were daily readers of the Knoxville News Sentinel, which claimed to be on the right side of God and the Bible, but his grandfather subscribed to the Cincinnati Post, which leaned left toward science and evolution.

Young Marney not only found himself pulled by political forces on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. He also felt the pressure to choose between faith and science. Despite the downsides, he expressed gratitude for the early existential crisis that inclined him to become a liberal dissenter in what he came to call the land south of God.

Science teacher John Scopes stood accused of violating the Butler Act, which banned teaching evolution in public schools. The case featured plenty of drama and spectacle, chronicled by the popular journalist and culture critic H.L. Mencken, spitefully known by locals as that “writing fellow.”

Scopes might have been the defendant, but Mencken left no question it was fundamentalist Southern religion that was on trial. He described the proceedings in apocalyptic imagery: “Darwin is the devil with seven tails and nine horns. Scopes, though he is disguised by flannel pantaloons and a Beta Theta Pi haircut, is the harlot of Babylon. And Darrow is Beelzebub in person.”

In a highly unusual move, Clarence Darrow, the counsel for the defense, called the prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan, to testify as a “biblical expert.” Darrow interrogated Bryan about whether he thought the Bible was literally true. Bryan agreed that God literally made Eve out of Adams’s rib, that a big fish really did swallow Jonah, and that Joshua did indeed make the sun stand still. Yet when asked if God created the world in seven days, Bryan hedged, saying the days of creation were not necessarily literal 24-hour days.

Bryan maintained he was “simply trying to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States.” The jury returned a guilty verdict after only 9 minutes of deliberation and fined Scopes $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court eventually ruled that the Butler law was constitutional, but it overturned the Scopes verdict on a technicality, ruling the fine should have been set by the jury instead of the judge.

The court of public opinion

Although the prosecution won the case, Bryan did not come off well in the court of public opinion. Mencken dismissed Bryan as “a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted” who was “ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest.”

Mencken was even more severe on the fundamentalist beliefs of Southerners, who remained “unshaken by Darrow’s ribaldries.” He exclaimed, “They believe that they are not mammals. They believe, on Bryan’s word, that they know more than all the men of science of Christendom. They believe, on the authority of Genesis, that the earth is flat and that witches still infest it. They believe, finally and especially, that all who doubt these great facts of revelation will go to hell. So they are consoled.”

Skeptics like Mencken came to Dayton expecting to witness the death of Appalachian religion. Marney observed, “Fundamentalism wasn’t dying; it never did die, it never would die, and if it did die it wouldn’t do it in Dayton, Tenn. It couldn’t get killed from there.”

As Marney perceptively recalled, Mencken “saw what he came to see.” What he saw was there, but there was much more there than what he saw. So it was that at a young age Marney began to wonder if there was an alternative to the over-belief of the fundamentalists and the unbelief of the infidels.

Baptist struggles

Baptists struggled mightily to come to terms with the modern scientific world. Shailer Mathews, Northern Baptist preacher and dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, where the aim of the curriculum was to make “religion as intelligible as arithmetic,” charted the modernist path. Mathews went on record as an expert witness at the Scopes trial.

E.Y. Mullins, the Southern Baptist preacher and president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declined the offer to go on the record. As a result, the reputation of Northern Baptists as more open and Southern Baptists as more resistant to modernity became fixed in the public imagination. Mullins even had an essay in the first volume of The Fundamentals (1910), which indicated the Northern-Southern divide. Yet the reality was more complicated.

Curtis Lee Laws, editor of The Watchman Examiner, observed that at the 1920 Northern Baptist Convention in Buffalo, N.Y., there were those “who still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal” for the faith. Northern Baptists had their share of fundamentalists. William Bell Riley, pastor of First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, known as “the Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism,” founded and led the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association.

In May 1925, prior to the Scopes trial in Dayton, the WCFA held a meeting in Memphis, where William Jennings Bryan was a featured speaker. Riding the wave of the Memphis gathering, fundamentalist leaders lobbied for Bryan to join the prosecution at Dayton to which he agreed.

The Southern Baptists Convention also convened at Memphis in May 1925. Moderates led by E. Y. Mullins turned back attempts by anti-evolutionist forces to amend the Memphis Articles on the Baptist Faith and Message. The reluctance to endorse the fundamentalist agenda was understandable given that the popular opinion of Baptists in the South was substantially in agreement with the theologically conservative viewpoint of Northern fundamentalists. They consequently felt less urgency about defending the faith from the onslaughts of evolution.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, Northern Baptist pastor and professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, voiced the lingering question in his 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Fosdick characterized fundamentalism as “illiberal and intolerant.” Nevertheless, he wondered if it would prevail.

John Roach Straton, the fundamentalist pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, New York City, turned Fosdick’s question on its head, asking, “Shall the Funny Monkeyists Win?” Straton contended “the fundamentalists are merely old-fashioned Christian believers, who are standing where we have always stood.”

Few bought the line. The Northern Baptists had fundamentalist splits in the 1920s and a conservative split in the 1940s. The Southern Baptists somehow managed to stay together, although it was a contentious fellowship that eventually fractured in the late 20th century.

Seeking another way

When Marney enrolled as a student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1940, he began seeking a way beyond fundamentalism that enabled him to welcome the modern world and remain a serious Christian. When he matriculated, Southern Seminary was just emerging from the economic effects of the Great Depression. The new president, Ellis A. Fuller, was eager to lead the seminary into a bold and aggressive vision he hoped would help bring Southern Baptists into the modern world.

A major piece of the seminary’s new posture was educating students with an awareness of the most recent scholarship that moved beyond the prevailing theology of Southern Baptists that was “provincial, dogmatic, apocalyptic and institutional.” Marney and likeminded Dixieland dissenters desired a way that was “liberal in its attitude, dynamic in its appeal, social in its application, and dedicated in its purpose to the achievement of the intention of God in history.”

“Marney described one as having its window stuck shut and the other as having its window stuck open.”

By the time Marney wrote his Dayton memoir, he had come to see both fundamentalism and liberalism as deficient, describing one as having its window stuck shut and the other as having its window stuck open. As he sardonically surmised, “In either event of extreme one loses the use of the window.” He continued to search for but never found, not so much an alternative between fundamentalism and liberalism, as an approach beyond them whereby he might regain use of his theological window.

A century after the Scopes trial, fundamentalism is far from dead. It is thriving.

Contemporary Southern Baptist social influencers viciously attack other Baptist evangelicals like J.D. Greear, Russell Moore, Karen Swallow Prior, Ed Stetzer, Gavin Ortlund and Beth Moore as “woke” and “progressive” apostates who have sold out the gospel in ways that echo their fussy fundamentalist forbears. The new Southern Baptist political theology stands closer to the old fundamentalism of Bob Jones, John R. Rice, J. Frank Norris, William Bell Riley and John Roach Straton than it does to the new evangelicalism of A.H. Strong, E.J. Carnell, Carl Henry, Bernard Ramm or Billy Graham.

The defining issue may no longer be evolutionary biology, although genetic science remains controversial for vexing questions of human sexuality and gender identity. Yet make no mistake about it. The new fundamentalism, which tries to pass itself off as traditional evangelicalism, is as stridently anti-science as the old fundamentalism ever was, and they are ever ready to engage in spiritual warfare to defend their version of the fundamentals, progress be damned.

A hundred years after Scopes, the way we live the faith is on trial again. Yet the goal of a new and vital Baptist witness is the same as it ever was — getting over fundamentalism and discovering again the good news of the gospel.

 

Curtis W. Freeman serves as research professor of theology and Baptist studies and Ruth D. Duncan Director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School. Among his publications is Undomesticated Dissent: Democracy and the Public Virtue of Religious Nonconformity, Pilgrim Letters: Instruction in the Basic Teaching of Christ, and Pilgrim Journey: Instruction in the Mystery of the Gospel. This article draws loosely from chapter 2 of his book Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists.

 

Related articles:

Scopes at 100: The lasting legacy of the trial over human origins

A hundred years after the Scopes trial, not much has changed | Analysis by Alan Bean

The Scopes Trial, then and now | Opinion by Bill Leonard