IV.

The Early 20th Century

Despite the increasing presence of the theory of evolution in schools and churches throughout the United States, evangelical Christians in the United States tended to remain skeptical of the theory. However, even the most militant among them refrained from organizing campaigns to have it removed from public discourse. The Fundamentals (1910-1915), a series of pamphlets that launched the fundamentalist movement (see Fundamentalism), treated evolution critically but did not reject it as the work of the Devil. In a Fundamentals essay entitled “The Passing of Evolution,” minister-geologist George Frederick Wright, a one-time collaborator of Asa Gray's, affirmed that the Bible taught “an orderly progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life.” Yet he insisted that the first humans had come “into existence as the Bible represents, by the special creation of a single pair, from whom all the varieties of the race have sprung.”

American fundamentalists did not turn against the threat of evolution in earnest until after World War I ended in 1918. This change in attitude toward evolution resulted partly from the popular belief that German aggression expressed a Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest (see Social Darwinism). The leader of the crusade against evolution was Presbyterian layman and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who entered the controversy in the early 1920s. Before the decade ended, three states—Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas—had passed laws banning the teaching of human evolution, and two others—Florida and Oklahoma—had officially condemned it.

No event drew more attention to the creationist cause in the United States than the 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, of high-school science teacher John T. Scopes (see Scopes Trial). Scopes volunteered to assist the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in testing the constitutionality of the recently passed Tennessee anti-evolution law, even though he was not certain that he had ever taught the banned theory. International attention focused on the event when well-known Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow, an outspoken agnostic (one who believes that certainty in religious matters is impossible), agreed to defend Scopes, and Bryan offered to assist the prosecution. The jury convicted Scopes and the judge fined him $100, a verdict later set aside by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality. Despite scathing attacks in some magazines and newspapers on fundamentalists and their creationist beliefs, and the death of Bryan a few days after the trial, the anti-evolution movement continued to flourish for two or three years more before dying out in the late 1920s.

Contrary to widespread belief—inspired in part by the play Inherit the Wind (1955; motion picture, 1960)—Bryan did not follow 17th-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher in dating the creation of the world to 4004 bc. For years Bryan had subscribed to the Day-Age theory, which permitted him to believe that the process of creation might have occupied hundreds of millions of years. In fact, with one prominent exception, virtually all of the leading creationists of the 1920s endorsed either the Day-Age or Gap interpretation of Genesis. The exception was Seventh-day Adventist teacher and amateur geologist George McCready Price, who followed Adventist prophet Ellen G. White in limiting the history of life on earth to about 6000 years. Price attributed most fossil-bearing rock formations to the geological disruptions of the biblical flood (see Deluge). Although Price converted a few non-Adventists to so-called flood geology before his death in 1963, the overwhelming majority of creationists during the first two-thirds of the 20th century rejected his rigid reading of Genesis in favor of the more flexible Day-Age and Gap theories.