Divided, We Stand
America's long struggle to balance church and state isn't getting any easier
As modernist thinking encroached upon religion itself--subjecting bedrock principles of faith such as the virgin birth to scientific-historical scrutiny--a number of evangelical ministers responded by asserting the "fundamentals." The World's Christian Fundamentals Association, which took its name from a book of pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, first convened in 1919 and set out to refute modernist criticism of Christian doctrine and the Bible. "It would take another 75 years," explains New York University legal scholar Noah Feldman in his valuable new book, Divided by God, "and the transformation of a peripheral movement into one supported by its own universities and national political organizations, but fundamentalism would eventually change the face of American religion and politics, and give its name to a broader worldwide phenomenon of enormous historical importance."
More immediately, a defining battle between fundamentalists and secularists was joined in a Tennessee courtroom in 1925. William Jennings Bryan, a prominent spokesman for "old-time religion" and a three-time Democratic candidate for the presidency, had taken up the cause of resisting the spread of secularist ideas--namely, Darwinian theory--in America's classrooms. (Evangelical fervor was then wedded not to the Republican Party but to the populist wing of the Democratic Party.) Bryan, "the Great Commoner," brought his crusade to a head in his courtroom clash with the aggressively secularist attorney Clarence Darrow, who defended John Scopes's right to teach evolution in defiance of Tennessee law. Bryan won the Scopes "monkey trial," but historians have argued ever since over whether extreme secularism or fundamentalist religion suffered the greater setback. At the very least, secularists could now be impugned as haughty elitists, while the religiously devout could be characterized as know-nothing hicks--caricatures that would serve in the future culture wars and be hurled across the now infamous divide between "red" and "blue" America.
But in the shorter term, the extremists went into remission, as the nation pulled itself together to face growing international challenges--fascism and communism--in wars both hot and cold. Churchgoing actually increased during the decades after the Scopes trial, but fundamentalism took a distant back seat to a milder, more liberal form of religion that reconciled science with allegorical readings of the sacred texts and generally accentuated the social gospel over dogma and doctrine.
A wary world. Yet the wars that united Americans also subtly reintroduced questions about the place of religion in the public sphere. The grim spectacle of Hitler's persecution of the Jews made Americans aware, and wary, of discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. Sensitivity to this bias lay partly behind the landmark 1962 Supreme Court decision, Engel v. Vitale, which brought an end to government-sponsored prayer in public school classrooms. While Baltimore atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair gets the credit for banishing school prayer, what began to move religion out of public schools was the objection of a Jewish resident of New York to a state-written classroom prayer. One year later, the court's decision in Abington School District v. Schempp, in which Murray O'Hair was the secondary plaintiff, declared unconstitutional any state-sponsored devotional uses of the Bible in the classroom.
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