Creationism in Public Schools and gained national attention. Later, she talks about the origins and growth of pentecostalism which strives for the divine and faith healing and speaking in tongues. All right. Lets begin. My name is molly worthen, were at the university of North Carolina at chapel hill and its american fundamentalism and pentecostalism and ill try to answer three Big Questions today. Number one, what is protestant fundamentalism . What does the term mean . Second, how did fundamentalists relate to main street culture . And third, why has fundamentalism been so much more influential in the United States than in any other society in the western world . Im curious, is fundamentalism, fundamentalist, are these terms that you hear today . Do you know people who call themselves fundamentalist or use this label . I see some nodding. Any examples . Yes. Trying to describe alternate groups. It is a term that you hear more often in the context of islam. What about here among American Christian groups do you hear the label . Im from up north and many people who are christians down here we would call fundamentalist christians often as a pejorative, i dont think often at least in my experience its not often used by the fundamentalists themselves. Thats interesting. That lines up with my own experience. Today there are exceptions. I have certainly met some proud, independent baptists who claim that term fundamentalist and generally, it seems to be used as an insult. Its not a label that most christians would want applied to themselves, and i think that the history of that connotation, kind of negative sense in which we hear the word today really became crystallized in one particular historical episode and thats the infamous or famous, depending on your view, scopes trial there we go of 1925. The monkey trial that dominated newspaper headlines in the summer of 1925. The scopes trial has a certain status in popular culture. Youre probably at least vaguely aware of what it involved, but let me tell you the basic facts of this trial. The state of tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of the theory of evolution in tennessee public high schools. The aclu, the American Civil Liberties union, wanted to challenge the constitutionality of this law, and so they put together and financed a case. That recruited a Tennessee High School teacher and a substitute science teacher, a guy named john scopes who agreed to purposefully incriminate himself by making a point of teaching the chapter from their textbook on the theory of evolution, and then urging his own students to testify against him, to rat him out and get him in trouble so that he would be charged with this crime and it would go to trial. So thats exactly what happened and this turned out to be just an amazing publicity opportunity for the little town of dayton, tennessee. 200 reporters descended on a town in july of 1925. A few thousand spectators from various parts of the south and further afield if you had walked down the street of dayton in july she would have trained chimpanzees playing on the lawn, drinking the local variety of soda pop and local merchants were trying to capitalize on this moment in the sun. The trial itself was pretty sensational because both sides, the defense and the prosecution managed to recruit a star for their side. So on the Prosecutions Team was William Jennings bryant, the great commoner, and the populist democrat who had run for president three times. Hed been Woodrow Wilsons secretary of state. He was known as this great defender of traditional protestantism and a great lawyer joined the defense team, as well, probably the most famous leftwing lawyer of the time and famously agnostic on the matter of religion and thats Clarence Darrow who was very known for his bold politics. Here he is in his characteristically flourish making his opening arguments. Here is darrow and brian on the upper right here and here is sort of a sample of the street scene, too. And this is a table set up with antievolution tracks and books. Both sides of this debate really seeing this as an opportunity, and now the aclu wanted to challenge the law on the grounds of academic freedom. That is the track they wanted to take, but Clarence Darrow veered in a very different direction. He decided to really put traditional religion on trial, and he summoned to the stand for crossexamination bryant himself. This was very unorthodox for one of the attorneys for the prosecution to be summoned for crossexamination and darrow aimed to make a fool of this great statesman. He really wanted to showcase the conflict between science and religion, and so he asked brian questions like how could joshua possibly have compelled the son to stand still or can you tell us the exact date of the flood, and brian did his best to remain firm in defending his views, although in many cases he didnt have a clear and sharp answer to rebutt darrow . I will say that brian refused to defend young earth creationism. He would not defend the view that each day of creation described in genesis literally means 24 hours. He said it could mean a longer period of time, but in general, he defended the conservative traditional reading of scripture and he didnt he kind of came off as an old man who was a bit out of his depth. The judge ended up throwing out this testimony and in fact, most of the testimony for the defense as irrelevant to the question of whether or not the teach her broken the law. It was pretty clear he had. The jury found scopes guilty and he was ordered to pay a fine, although the conviction was later thrown out on a technicality. Now, inside the courthouse, the crowd was definitely on brians side, on the side of the prosecution cheering for brian, but darrow and the defenders of evolution really seemed to win over the Mainstream Press in the big cities. A journalist for the baltimore sun, h. L. Minkon was dispatched to cover this trial and he had searing, mocking reports of the people he met there, and i just want to read us an excerpt of one of his reports. The net effect of Clarence Darrows speech, meaning his closing arguments yesterday seemed to be preciously the same as if he had balled it up in a rain spout in the interior of afghanistan and more on the audience when it was over simply hissed it. Brian had these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of the remote hills and the forlorn and lonely farms. His nonsense is their ideal of sense when he deluges them with his theologic bilge. Holy cow no matter what you might think of minkins ideology he had a certain genius for comiccon dissension and reports like this had effects and this trial came to be widely seen as a cultural defeat for fundamentalism. As the moment that made famous the caricature of the fundamentalist as the uneducated redneck and the scopes trial has become this icon of the clash between fundamentalism and modernism, and i think it is so telling that 1925 was also the year of the creation in canada of the United Church of canada. Remember, i told you about that great moment of protestant unity in canada when the baptists, the congregationalists sorry, not the baptists, the presbyterian, the congregationists and the methodists joined together to make one big denomination and its this lovely, historical coincidence that that happened at the very same time that American Protestantism was so clearly polarizing and breaking apart. Its very handy. It givious one date that you have to memorize for the final, you know . And it shows us this divergent set of paths that canadian and American Protestantism were headed down. So we have to ask then, what are the historical reasons for this very different character of American Protestant conflict and what who are these fundamentalists . I mean, who are we really talking about when we use this label . So first, weve got to be clear about what fundamentalism means because this word is used pretty carelessly, i think in todays culture and media. In this class we will use it in a historically precise way. Fundamentalists, im giving you a definition now. Fundamentalists are cop serve tiff protestants who militantly opposed, militantly opposed. Th that, militance is important, about the bible, science and society, and often, although not always, broke away to found their own churches, schools and religious organizations. So these are militant protestants who really oppose in an aggressive way these new changes and in many cases they broke away to found their own groups. We can talk about an organized fundamentalist movement, from roughly 1900 to, say, 1930, and when these conservatives were fighting, just brutally to retain control of those old, established northern denominations we call the main line. Now this week you are reading a famous sermon by a liberal baptist preacher, Harry Emerson fosnick, and i think that gives you some sense of the conflict. Heres Harry Emerson fosnick. He appears on the cover of Time Magazine and the cultural status of the liberal princes of the pulpit and the Presbyterian Church is where he originally gave this sermon, shall the fundamentalists win in 1922. When you read it, i think youll see that his sermon was not a fight over doctrine. At least not explicitly and you might want to talk with your classmates about what is going on beneath it, at least on the surface. Fosnicks approach was very different from Clarence Darrows. Essentially, hes if a person is a true liberal, then they should have no problem with other christians believing, say, that god created the universe in six days even if they themselves dont happen to believe that. Fosnick says the problem with these fundamentists is not their theology. They can believe what they like. Their problem are their beliefs about church. The fact that they believe that liberals like fosnick dont belong in any truly christian church. This sermon was a sensation. His brother, fosnicks brother ran the Rockefeller Foundation for 30 years and the foundation funded the nationwide as a pamphlet. So it had much wider reach than the people who read it, preached. Ive been reading his autobiography. He refers to this srl op and he calls it a failure, be even though it failed in what his main hope was which was to stop the fight ing and restore harmony. After 1930 the fundamentalist movement as an organized movement disintegrates. The conservatives basically lost their bid to control those main line churches which is why we so often say now the liberal main line. Thats how people defer to those nominations. Fundamentalism did not go away, though. So at this point we can describe fundamentalism as not an organized movement, but as a set of networks, a sub culture. Fundamentalists built their own world of bible colleges, denominations, and conferences and empty communist crusades and radio ministries and a really powerful network of religious and political groups that for quite a long time, maybe up to the 60s and 70s was not on the mainstream medias radar. It seemed like after the scopes trial fundamentalists had crawled in the hole somewhere and, you know, never appeared from the perspective of the average reporter at the New York Times or Something Like that. In fact, fundamentalism was growing into this powerful subculture. Now one more point about terms. In these years, so the first half of the 20th century, the terms fundamentalist and evangelical were more or less interchangeable. People would use them both to talk about the same individuals, to talk about themselves, but in the 1940s that starts to change and the term evangelical comes to mean a conservative protestant who is doctrinally often fundamentalist, but is not so militant about it. So im talking about people like billy graham. An evangelical was someone who wanted to engage mainstream culture, maybe collaborate a little bit more with other christians rather than separating from the world in an extreme way or picking lots of fights over doctrine. So thats what evangelical comes to mean and its still how its used today, i believe. This, then, is the big arc of the fundamentalist movement in our story. I want to turn to the matter of theology to say more about what fundamentalists believed and believe today. Now, fundamentalism looked slightly different in Different Church traditions. So a baptist fundamentalist would believe Different Things and worship differently than an mennonite fundamentalist. They did tend to share a set of fundamentals. We can make some broad comments about that. They tended to have a piutistic concern for holiness, for good behavior. Many of them came in some way out of the puritan tradition and maintained the rigorous doctrine, systematic theology with piutism and the spirit. Lots and lots of fundamentalists, although by no means all of them were premillennialist in their view of the end times and you remember from last week that means they thought that jesus was going to return probably pretty soon in the flesh to inaugurate the prophecies predicted in the group of revelation and eventually after the battle of armageddon and all that jazz, the kingdom of the saints. We can move down to the more basic level of fundamentals, and you can have disagreement among the end times. I struggled for a long time to come up with a good acronym to help students remember the fundamentals until just a couple of years ago when i put this out as a challenge to some of your predecessors in this class, and one lovely student, a woman named Miranda Rosser who graduated last spring came up with marvin which was so handy. And i came up with ivam, and how do you remember ivam . Its not even a word. This was a list brought up by conservatives in 1910 who said what are the most important things we cannot compromise on. M for miracles, that the miracles in the bible really did happen. A for atonement and that is a belief in the traditional doctrine of christs substitutionary atonement on the cross. That is jesus was not just a nice guy, he was not just a moral example for us and he did take our place on the cross and died for our sins. R for resurrection. He was actually bodily resurrected. V, christ was born of a virgin and i for inerancy. The doctrine of innerancy meaning the bible is totally wouter ror no matter what scientists and historians may say. Now i want to push back a bit against the scopes trial caricature of fundamentalists as country bumpkins by talking about i guess you can call them the thinking mens fundamentalists at princeton theological seminary. Princeton in the late 19th century was one of the intellectual powerhouses behind the conservative response to modernist theology, and i want to focus on benjamin b. Warfield who was a scholar at princeton and you are reading an excerpt from one of his sermons this week. He was born in 1851. He was the son of a welltodo kalth breeder in kentucky. He came from pretty aristocratic stock. His greatgrandfather was a u. S. Senator. One of his uncles was a confederate general in the civil war and his family was presbyterian and warfield really threw himself into serving his family faith. He went to princeton as a student and he returned to the seminary about a decade later in 1887 to teach there and to spend his life fighting against modern ifrm modernism by defending this doctrine as biblical innerancy. We need to spend time in the idea of innerancy. So this idea that everything in the bible is true no matter what scholars might say, that scripture has no error in it, the baseball idea is very old. Christians have always been concerned to defend the bible as a perfect source of truth, but in errancy as warfield understood it as fundamentalists and evangelicals have come to understand it in many cases has a more recent history and we need to unpack this a bit to really understand whats going on. So to tell the story of the doctrine of inerrancy and i need to backtrack to the early and mid 17th century, okay . So bear with me. In these years, so a couple of generations after the start of the protestant reformation, a group of protestant theologians found themselves in a bit of a bind, found themselves kind of surrounded on the intellectual battlefield and im talking primarily about the thinkers in the reformed tradition. These are theologians who followed john calvin and those guys. On the one understand that, they had to deal with the scientists and philosophers of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment who were using new scientific methods to raise awkward questions about the bibles account of the miraculous and supernatural doctrines, and on the other hand, they had to face the great theologians of the catholic counter reformation, these scholastic thinkers who were annoyingly adept at logically, systematically picking apart from the stand aurps about authority. So these protestant thinkers were caught in the middle and they responded by essentially trying to turn their enemys weapons back upon them by creating a highly rationalistic, and highly logical method of defending the authority of scripture. These protestant thinkers took as their starting point the philosophical principle that god is perfect and unchanging. And christians debate about whether that principle is actually explicit in scripture, its not clear that it is. If thats true, then it follows logically that gods revelation is perfect and unchanging, as well. Not just in salvation, but in every matter from the scope of the flood to the most granular details of ancient israels politics. So what this means is religious truth and scientific truth are the same. The bible is equally reliable on both matters. Benjamins Charles Hodge had a great way of putting this, said the bible is a storehouse of facts. Think about that phrase. A storehouse of facts. And a theologians job is to analyze these facts by arranging and classifying data from the natural world, and a theologian is a kind of scientist and this really drives home the point that these princeton thinkers follo