The Birth of American Fundamentalism: A Good Place to Start

Today, the word ‘fundamentalism’ evokes a particular fear for most Americans, the fear of radical fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. For most of our nation’s history, however, fundamentalism has almost exclusively been understood in a Christian sense. Christian fundamentalism has, historically, played a very large role in our country. George Marsden examines fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the United States in his 1991 volume, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. It is poignant to note that Marsden was writing from a pre-9/11 perspective, and thus does not provide for an audience as affected by the term as the general American public is today.

Marsden discusses the beginnings of Christian fundamentalism in America with the onset of World War I. During the war, Protestants began to associate patriotism with Christian ideals. Billy Sunday even said, “Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms (51).” After the war, the church was initially more united than ever, gaining victories such as the passing of Prohibition (53). However, along with the Red Scare, social unrest, and secularization of American culture that came in the 1920s came divisions in the American Protestant church. The church split into two main branches, one expressing social liberalism and wanting to remain a part of the larger American culture, and a more conservative one that resisted the chaos and confusion that came with the changing of the times. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 became a symbolic battle between these two schools of thought.

John Scopes was a public high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who agreed to be arrested and prosecuted for breaking Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools, in order that he might challenge the constitutionality of the law. The trial was immediately thrust into the national spotlight, a first for the American legal system at that time. John Scopes was no more than a pawn in a trial that turned into a battle between two quintessential American public figures, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan, whom at this point in his career had run for President (and lost) three times, was a champion of the Democratic Party of the day and a staunch Prohibitionist and socially conservative Presbyterian. Of the Scopes trial, Bryan said that he was “trying to save the Christian Church from those who are trying to destroy our faith.” Darrow, on the other hand, was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and was widely respected throughout America as an unbeatable lawyer with very liberal views. Darrow called the south “an intellectual desert.” Throughout the trial, Darrow attempted to illustrate that the anti-evolution law was unconstitutional, stating that if that kind of law were upheld then eventually the country would turn into a battle of “man against man… creed against creed… until we are back to the times when bigots burned the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.” Bryan opposed, declaring that evolution was synonymous with atheism. The trial was really won when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand and gleaned from him that he believed the book of Genesis was subject to interpretation, saying that “the creation could have gone on for millions of years.” The legal outcome of the trial was that the Tennessee Supreme Court eventually upheld the anti-evolution law and determined Scopes guilty of violating it. However, it was also stated by the Supreme Court of Tennessee that no prosecutor could again bring an indictment against a teacher for violating the law. The social outcome of the trial, though, was that the country ridiculed the Southern Christians fighting behind Bryan, and they lost the cultural battle of Bible versus Darwin. In Marsden’s words, the Scopes Monkey Trial “thrust fundamentalism into worldwide attention and brought about its decline as an effective national force (60).”

*Information about Scopes Monkey Trial from PBS Documentary.

The Scopes Monkey Trial was the catalyst that separated Christian fundamentalists from the American Evangelical Protestants. Marsden states, “What chiefly distinguished fundamentalism from earlier evangelicalism was its militancy toward modernist theology and cultural change (66).” The Scopes Monkey Trial made it very clear that American culture was changing and embracing modernist theories of science and religion. Fundamentalists built walls for themselves, both literally and figuratively, so that they could separate themselves from the rest of American culture. Jerry Falwell, a famous American Evangelical Christian Pastor, has defined fundamentalism in a catchy way: “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something (Marsden 1991).” The early twentieth century certainly made a large number of Evangelical Protestants angry, and they reacted by becoming fundamentalists, separate from the rest of the church and the rest of the nation.