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The 1925 Tennessee v. John Scopes case - the Scopes ""Monkey
Trial"" - is one of America's most famous courtroom battles. Until
now, however, no one has considered at length why the sensational,
divisive trial of a public high school science teacher indicted for
teaching evolution took place where, and when, it did. This study
ranges over the fifty years preceding the trial to examine
intertwined attitudes toward schooling and faith held by the
politically dominant white evangelical Protestant Tennesseans.
Those decades saw accelerating social and economic change in the
South, writes Charles A. Israel. Education, long the province of
family and community, grew ever more centralized, professionalized,
and isolated from the local values that first underpinned it. As
Israel tells how parents and church, civic, and political leaders
at first opposed public education, then endorsed it, and finally
fought to control it, he reveals their deep ambivalence about the
intangible costs of progress. Lessons that Evangelicals took away
from failed adult temperance campaigns also prompted them to
reexert control over who and what influenced their children.
Evangelicals rallied behind a 1915 bill requiring the Bible to be
read daily in public schools. Then, the Butler bill of 1925
criminalized the teaching of evolution, which had come to symbolize
all that was threatening about theological liberalism and
materialistic science. The stage for the Scopes trial had been set.
Delving deeply into the collective mind of a people in an age of
uncertainty, Before Scopes sheds new light on religious belief,
ideology, and expression.
Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century
is a collection of fifteen essays by award-winning scholar Wayne
Flynt that explores and reveals the often-forgotten religious
heterogeneity of the American South. Throughout its dramatic
history, the American South has wrestled with issues such as
poverty, social change, labor reform, civil rights, and party
politics, and Flynt's writing reaffirms religion as the lens
through which southerners understand and attempt to answer these
contentious questions. In Southern Religion and Christian Diversity
in the Twentieth Century, however, Flynt gently but persuasively
dispels the myth-comforting to some and dismaying to others-of
religion in the South as an inert cairn of reactionary
conservatism. Flynt introduces a wealth of stories about
individuals and communities of faith whose beliefs and actions map
the South's web of theological fault lines. In the early twentieth
century, North Carolinian pastor Alexander McKelway became a
relentless crusader against the common practice of child labor. In
1972, Rev. Dr. Ruby Kile, in a time of segregated churches led by
men, took the helm of the eight-member Powderly Faith Deliverance
Center in Jefferson County, Alabama and built the fledgling group
into a robust congregation with more than 700 black and white
worshippers. Flynt also examines the role of religion in numerous
pivotal court cases, such as the US Supreme Court school prayer
case Engel v. Vitale, whose majority opinion was penned by Justice
Hugo Black, an Alabamian. These fascinating case studies and many
more illuminate a religious landscape of far more varied texture
and complexity than is commonly believed. Southern Religion and
Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century offers much to readers
and scholars interested in the South, religion, and theology.
Writing with his hallmark wit, warmth, and erudition, Flynt's
Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century
is a vital record of gospel-inspired southerners whose stories
revivify sclerotic assumptions about the narrow conformity of
southern Christians.
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