This is a fascinating article by Stephen Carlson. While I don't agree with everything here, it's far too interesting to keep to myself. It's quite a long article, so I'm breaking it into a few parts. If you're impatient, you can read the whole article at http://www.lewrockwell.com/carson/carson17.html.
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Christians in Politics: The Return of the 'Religious Right'
by Stephen W. Carson
October 30, 2003
IV. 1900–1925: Prohibition, Modernist/Fundamentalist debates, Scopes Trial
To understand the sudden reengagement in politics of evangelicals in the late 1970s, I think we must first begin with what came before. Namely, how it came that a large segment of the American population stepped back from politics.
Coming out of revivals led by men like Dwight L. Moody, the 19th century was filled with religious activity. Marsden writes that "'Evangelical' (from the Greek for 'gospel') eventually became the common British and American name for the revival movements that swept back and forth across the English-speaking world and elsewhere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries... the revivalists' emphases on simple biblical preaching in a fervent style that would elicit dramatic conversion experiences set the standards for much of American Protestantism. Since Protestantism was by far the dominant religion in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century, evangelicalism shaped the most characteristic style of American religion."
While the seeds of a coming split quietly developed among evangelicals, the late 19th and early part of the 20th century seemed to be a time of triumph for evangelical influence on society. There were massive missionary efforts abroad as well as new organizations at home like the YMCA. The Prohibition movement resulted in the passage of numerous state laws beginning in 1917 which culminated in the passage of the 18th Amendment in early 1919 which made the "manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors" illegal in the United States. This alcohol Prohibition was repealed by the 21st Amendment in late 1933.
But the seeming unity among evangelicals was about to fall apart.
Marsden writes "... the vast cultural changes of the era from the 1870s to the 1920s created a major crisis within [the] evangelical coalition. Essentially it split in two. On the one hand were theological liberals who, in order to maintain better credibility in the modern age, were willing to modify some central evangelical doctrines, such as the reliability of the Bible or the necessity of salvation only through the atoning sacrifice of Christ. On the other hand were conservatives who continued to believe the traditionally essential evangelical doctrines. By the 1920s a militant wing of conservatives emerged and took the name fundamentalist. Fundamentalists were ready to fight liberal theology in the churches and changes in the dominant values and beliefs in the culture. By the middle of that decade they had gained wide national prominence. By a few years later, however, their support faded and they disappeared from the headlines."
Ed Dobson describes the origin of the term "fundamentalist": "The fundamentalist movement took its name from the publication of a series of booklets in 1909 named The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth, written by scholars from around the world. The authors represented Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal denominations and people of varying theological positions. These articles were designed to identify the essential (fundamental) doctrines of the Christian faith, which were under attack from the then-current tides of scientific inquiry. Five fundamental doctrines were identified as the basic tenets of the Christian faith:
1. The inspiration and infallibility of the Bible.
2. The deity of Christ.
3. The substitutionary atonement of Christ. The liberal theologians had begun propagating the idea that the death of Christ was merely that of a martyr and provided nothing more than a moral influence on society. That is, his death was a good moral example from which all people could benefit. To the fundamentalists this was a denial of the heart of Christianity and the soul of the gospel. Christ died a substitutionary death, and in so doing, he provided atonement for the sins of mankind.
4. The resurrection of Christ. Liberal theologians advocated a spiritual rather than literal resurrection... The fundamentalists, by contrast, loudly proclaimed the literal resurrection of Jesus.
5. The second coming of Christ. The fundamentalists believed not only in a literal, bodily resurrection, but also in a literal, bodily return of Christ to the earth."
"By 1918 the liberals and the fundamentalists had clearly articulated their positions and were ready for a head-on collision. Conservative Christians held their first major national conference in Philadelphia that year, with more than five thousand people attending. The next year they met at the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago and decided to go on the offensive against liberalism by establishing their own organization, which would later be known as the World's Christian Fundamentals Association. They also began advocating the establishment of new Bible institutes and conferences to combat the influence of liberalism. This was a major change of direction. Instead of staying in the major denominations and fighting against the liberals for control, the early fundamentalists withdrew and began their own organizations."
George Marsden in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism tells the story of the decline of fundamentalism as a nationally prominent movement: "World War I had produced among many conservative evangelicals both a sense of crisis over the revolution in morals and a renewed concern for the welfare of civilization... German civilization during the war was portrayed as the essence of barbarism, despite its strongly Christian heritage. Could the same thing happen here? The strong winds of change suggested that it could.
"The central symbol organizing fears over the demise of American culture became biological evolution. German culture, antievolutionists loudly proclaimed, had been ruined by the evolutionary 'might-makes-right' philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Darwinism, moreover, was essentially atheistic, and hence its spread would contribute to the erosion of American morality. Accordingly, soon after the war fundamentalists began organizing vigorous campaigns against the teaching of biological evolution in America's public schools. This effort was greatly aided when in 1920 William Jennings Bryan, three times Democratic candidate for president and one of the nation's greatest orators, entered the fray against Darwinism. Fundamentalist antievolution efforts were essentially political and so attracted a constituency wider than the nucleus of theologically conservative evangelical Protestants. By the middle of the decade laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools had been passed in a number of southern states, and legislation was pending in a number of others. These efforts led to the famous Scopes Trial testing the Tennessee antievolution law in 1925, an event that both thrust fundamentalism into worldwide attention and brought about its decline as an effective national force. John T. Scopes, a young high-school teacher who admitted to teaching biological evolution, was brought to trial and defended by famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow. William Jennings Bryan volunteered to aid the prosecution, thus bringing a dramatic showdown between fundamentalism and modern skepticism. The event was comparable to Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in the amount of press coverage and ballyhoo.
"Although the outcome of the trial was indecisive and the law stood, the rural setting and the press's caricatures of fundamentalists as rubes and hicks discredited fundamentalism and made it difficult to pursue further the serious aspects of the movement. After 1925 fundamentalists had difficulty gaining national attention except when some of their movement were involved in extreme or bizarre efforts."
Stephen W. Carson is a working software engineer and a graduate student in the Department of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis. This was delivered on September 12, 2003 at the Friday Night at the Institute lecture series sponsored by the Francis Schaeffer Institute.

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