What the Scopes Trial Meant: Bryan, the Protestant Modernists, and Science

Revisiting the Scopes Trial, One Century Later

This July marks the one hundredth anniversary of the most famous event in the history of American religion and science, the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee high school. The rookie teacher was convicted of violating a new state law prohibiting public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.” 

Ironically, both the prosecution and the defense wanted a conviction. Responding to a solicitation from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Dayton school board had asked Scopes to stand trial, hoping to find him guilty so the law itself could be overturned in higher courts—a strategy that ultimately failed.

Scholars have generated an enormous literature related to Scopes in the century since it happened. WorldCat database returns more than 1,200 books catalogued with “scopes trial” as a keyword, including more than 500 with that phrase in the title of the book or one of its chapters. 

Why did I write one more book about a topic so well explored? Serendipity.

In this leaflet, Schmucker used sexual selection to connect an eternally existing nature with a wholly immanent God who had not created its laws. Photograph by Edward B. Davis, from the author’s collection.

Discovering the “Science and Religion” Pamphlets

Decades ago, while doing research on antievolutionist Harry Rimmer before the internet revolutionized historical research, I stumbled upon a virtually unknown tract about “Science and Religion” from 1926. 

The author, naturalist Samuel Christian Schmucker of West Chester (PA) State Teachers College, was prominent in Nature Study, an early form of environmental education that stressed taking students outside, Under the Open Sky, to borrow the title of one of his books. He was also a nationally known popularizer of evolution in the 1910s and 1920s, especially at Chautauqua where his lectures (illustrated with lantern slides) drew the largest crowds. Two of his books were used as texts by the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle, rather like a college without walls. 

He had been such a popular teacher that the science building at West Chester, dedicated twenty years after his death, was named for him—only to have his name removed three years ago when his strong support for eugenics became widely known on campus; one of my articles was cited in the process.

The Voices of Protestant Modernism Between the World Wars

When I first saw Schmucker’s pamphlet, I could not identify the American Institute of Sacred Literature, the now-defunct entity named at the top of the front cover (above). Soon I learned it was a correspondence arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and that Regenstein Library holds a large archive of papers and correspondence related to it.

There and in the correspondence of Shailer Mathews, the theologian and Dean of the Divinity School who supervised the AISL, I found letters from dozens of leading scientists about their religious beliefs, which are mostly unknown to historians. They were surrounded by other documents about the “Science and Religion” pamphlets, some of which were listed when I turned the page.

Ten were published between 1922 and 1931. The full set of authors and titles (see the table of contents from my book) included some important names in American history: Nobel Laureate physicists Robert Millikan (president of Caltech) and Arthur Compton (who chose Fermi and Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project), Mathews, and the most famous liberal preacher of his generation, Harry Emerson Fosdick. All but one—Columbia physicist Michael Pupin, a Serbian Orthodox believer who was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925—were religious modernists.

In other words, the pamphlets were written by the very people whose ideas William Jennings Bryan most despised, those liberal Protestants who wanted to “modernize” Christianity by discarding biblical miracles and the orthodox creeds, in favor of the Social Gospel and vaguer notions of God that (in their view) did not conflict with modern science.

Intended to diminish opposition to evolution and to persuade Christians to adopt more positive attitudes toward modern science, the pamphlets were widely distributed to high school principals, university campuses, scientists, clergy, and legislators. Very scarce today, the pamphlets and their history constitute a revealing window on the Protestant modernist encounter with science, adding new context for understanding Bryan and his religious opponents at the trial.

Hundreds of books scrutinize Bryan and his fundamentalist friends, but the modernists are typically seen only as Bryan’s foil or the obvious alternative to Bryan’s folly. That is why I wrote the first book about modernist views of science and religion between the world wars: it’s high time someone deconstructed them.

A Shared Concern: Bryan and the Modernists on Social Darwinism and Morality

What did I learn? First, Bryan’s concerns about evolution and education were at least partly shared by the modernists, especially Bryan’s view that survival of the fittest undermines human decency and morality.

Bryan referred to this aspect of evolution as “the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” He detested social Darwinism, one form of which especially motivated him to launch his anti-evolution crusade: alleged links between evolution and German militarism.

Stanford entomologist Vernon Kellogg, a pacifist who joined efforts headed by his former student Herbert Hoover bringing relief to civilians in Belgium and France before America entered the Great War, wrote a book called Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in France and Belgium (1917). Kellogg portrayed the German officers he encountered as bloodthirsty Darwinians: “the creed of survival of the fittest based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the Gospel of the German intellectuals.”

Others were equally worried, including pamphlet author Kirtley Mather, a Baptist geologist at Harvard who emphatically rejected fundamentalism while embracing socialism and the Social Gospel.

“Underneath the ancient warfare between theology and science,” Mather told readers of Atlantic Monthly in 1918, “there is an unvoiced, but very real, fear that in the last analysis the doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is diametrically opposed to the conception of the brotherhood of man; that evolution according to Darwin and [Hugo] Devries and [August] Weissmann [sic] is the antithesis of Christianity according to Christ and John and Paul.”

Dartmouth zoologist William Patten, a modernist who debated Bryan on campus, taught the first required college course on evolution in the United States partly to address the same misunderstanding.

‘Origins prove nothing in the realm of values’: Modernists and Philosophical Reductionism

Many modernists also shared Bryan’s view that college professors were undermining the religious beliefs of their students. However, they did not put the blame on evolution. The danger for them lay in philosophical reductionism, the view that science somehow “explains away” our humanity, since chemicals have no values and we are nothing more than pre-programmed biochemical machines. 

As Mathews put it once with typical wit, “Man has always felt himself to be something more than a peripatetic chemical laboratory driven by the sex instinct.” Mather, who had taken a Bible class taught by Mathews, agreed that “the administrative directive toward orderly organization of increasingly complex systems transcends the urge for survival.” 

Addressing this in his pamphlet, Fosdick said, “One writes this with warm sympathy for the cause which gives Mr. Bryan such anxious concern. He is fearful that the youth of the new generation, taught the doctrine of a materialistic science, may lose that religious faith in God and in the realities of the spiritual life on which alone an abiding civilization can be founded. His fear is well grounded, as everyone closely associated with the students of our colleges and universities knows,” but Fosdick offered a different solution. 

With characteristic eloquence he summarized his opinion in the 1920s equivalent of a tweet, an art at which he had few if any peers: “Origins prove nothing in the realm of values.” 

Millikan’s brother-in-law, Congregationalist pastor and theologian Robert Brown, was so worried about the irreligious tendencies of higher education that he persuaded Millikan to publish a statement originally drafted by Brown about the compatibility of science and religion in the New York Times. 

However, Millikan declined a further request to call on universities to hire faculty “not only [for] scholarship and character, but also [for] sympathy with the moral and spiritual ideals of religion.” In Millikan’s opinion, that would be tantamount to a denial of academic freedom.

Protestant Modernists’ Belief in Evolution and Design

A surprising fact uncovered in my research is that the modernists believed in both evolution and design, despite rejecting the traditional Christian theology embraced by many advocates of “intelligent design” today. 

Indeed, Compton used that exact term when addressing an audience at a Unitarian church in 1940: “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.”

Mathews’ pamphlet spoke of “a cosmic intelligence” that underlies the “rational and purposeful activity which in the course of evolution results in personal life,” while Millikan believed in a “Great Architect” who “had put the great sources of atomic power deep within the structure of the stars.” 

Another pamphlet author, Princeton biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, was influenced by Harvard chemist Lawrence Henderson, an early proponent of the anthropic principle, to say almost the same thing in his controversial book, The Direction of Human Evolution (1921). A lapsed Methodist who had become a pantheist by his own admission, Conklin nevertheless believed in purposeful divine action within evolution, which “must have been guided by something other than chance. If progressive evolution is increasing the complexity of organization and increasing adaptation to the environment, it is surely no accident that organization and environment have been so correlated.” Overall, “it is impossible to escape the conclusion that evolution has revealed a larger teleology than was ever dreamed of before—a teleology which takes in not only the living but also the lifeless world.”

In a letter to classicist Theodore A. Miller, author of The Mind Behind the Universe (1928), Conklin let the metaphysical rubber meet the moral road: “The modern attitude that there is no God and no purpose in the Universe has led to a philosophy of pleasure and ultimately of despair and sometimes suicide. I believe that the best antidote for such a philosophy is the conviction that there is mind and purpose behind the universe and every individual life.”

“Scientific” Racism: Protestant Modernists and Eugenics

Conklin’s enthusiastic involvement with the American Institute of Sacred Literature is the canary in this coal mine. It came about partly because of his activities on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest umbrella organization for scientists and publishers of the journal Science, the premier American journal in its field. 

Just as Bryan’s crusade got rolling early in 1922, the AAAS appointed a three-person committee to defend evolution: Conklin, a scientific racist who felt that eugenics was a moral imperative; Charles Davenport, director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island; and Columbia paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. With Davenport, the notorious white supremacist Madison Grant, and others, Osborn founded what was soon to be called the American Eugenics Society, which Conklin directed for most of the decade.

The composition of the committee speaks volumes about what the scientific establishment in the 1920s thought evolution meant: it was about not only how all species had evolved in the past, but also how humans could take charge of their own evolution in the future, as shown in the famous eugenics tree (above).

Evolution and eugenics were commonly linked with the justification of white supremacy, as in the famous exhibit Osborn designed for his museum, the Hall of the Age of Man, showing “human evolution as a process of racial hierarchical positioning and competition.”

The year after the Scopes trial, fundamentalist minister John Roach Straton of Calvary Baptist Church in New York attacked the exhibit for depicting evolution as a fact, calling his essay in The Forum, “Fancies of the Evolutionists.” Osborn’s reply, “Facts of the Evolutionists,” ended with a chart (below) showing “Existing Facts of Human Ascent,” which placed the “Caucasian” at the apex of the “Ascent of Increasing Intelligence.”

Bryan and Straton were no less racist than many other whites of their day, but they did not proffer a “scientific” basis for racism and they rejected the “scientific” theory of moral improvement through eugenics that was dear to many elite scientists—and to which liberal clergy flocked in droves. When Mathews assembled an anthology called Contributions of Science to Religion in 1924, Davenport contributed a chapter on “Eugenics,” while Mathews opined that St. Augustine would have appreciated “our modern knowledge of evolution and eugenics.”

One of the modernists who went to Dayton to testify for the defense at the trial, zoologist William Marion Goldsmith of Southwestern College (Kansas), a Methodist school, mingled theistic evolution, eugenics, and racism in his biology textbook, The Laws of Life: Principles of Evolution, Heredity and Eugenics (1922).

Concerning a “mixed family of white and black children,” he added that “the mother of this brood was said to have been a most vile prostitute and to have never been married.” The children “had inherited the lowest strains of physical, mental, and moral constitutions.” Unfortunately, if “the germ plasm of these illegitimates” were mingled with the “pure line” of a “respectable family,” then “many wrecked homes” might result from “the matings of such unequal young people, altho[ugh] they might be placed in an identical environment.” Goldsmith despaired of solving such problems without a better understanding of “the principles of heredity, eugenics, and euthenics.”

Of course, the textbook used in most white Tennessee schools, George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), also taught scientific racism and eugenics. It distinguished “five races or varieties of man,” with “the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

Bryan’s Visualization of the “Descent of the Modernists”

The single most important takeaway from my research involves a famous image reproduced on the front cover of my book. 

For Bryan, any form of “theistic evolution”—a term in use since at least 1877 referring to the idea that God used evolution to create living things—was “a way-station on the highway that leads from Christian faith to No-God-Land.”

The cartoon below by Ernest James Pace deftly depicts Bryan’s mental picture, which he shared in a letter to Pace’s editor at the Sunday School Times that is now in the Library of Congress. Bryan wrote that evolution was “the cause of modernism and the progressive elimination of the vital truths of the bible.” He imagined “three well-dressed modernists,” a student, a preacher, and a scientist, descending a staircase with “no stopping place” with “Atheism” at the bottom.

The more I read modernist publications, the more I was struck by the accuracy of Bryan’s raw analysis of the modernist trajectory, even though many modernists did not make evolution the prime mover behind it (some did). 

The strongest confirmation came from an unimpeachable source, philosopher Edwin Arthur Burtt. Reared by evangelical missionaries to China, Burtt studied theology at a modernist stronghold, Union Theological Seminary (New York), and slid progressively away from his parents’ faith. He helped draft the first Humanist Manifesto and signed the second decades later. 

While teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, Burtt attended Hyde Park Baptist Church (now Hyde Park Union Church), almost directly adjacent to campus. Mathews and Compton were active members, Mather and his wife had attended during his doctoral studies, and the minister Charles Gilkey (father of the famous theologian Langdon Gilkey) was also a pamphlet author. 

When Burtt wrote Religion in an Age of Science (1929), he spoke frankly of his modernist friends: “‘How much can I still believe?’ is the question pathetically asked. … Beginning with two score or more doctrinal articles there ensues a process of elimination and attenuation till today, in liberal circles, the minimum creed seems to have been reduced to three tenets: belief in God, confidence in immortality, and conviction of spiritual uniqueness in Jesus of Nazareth. … Thus the pathetic game of give what must, hold what can, continues.”

Andrew Dickson White and the Conflict Thesis

Burtt and Bryan were spot on. Unbeknownst to them, the bogeyman behind it all was Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University and an outspoken proponent of the infamous Conflict Thesis of science and religion. The title of his magnum opus says it all: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). 

The wonderful image below by Udo Keppler brilliantly displays the close links between American religious liberalism at the turn of the century and White’s historical fable.

The bearded man bent over the Gatling gun even bears some resemblance to White, but he’s the radical Jewish thinker Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement and the Ethical Culture School in New York, whose most famous alumnus is probably J. Robert Oppenheimer. Adler’s gun is labeled “History, Archaeology, Evolution, Enlightenment, [and] Geology,” and the boxes of ammunition are labeled “Scientific Facts,” “Historical Facts,” and “Rational Religion.”

His allies, gathered under the banner “Think or be Damned,” are four influential liberal Protestants (left to right): Episcopalian priest Richard Heber Newton, an early proponent of the Social Gospel; theologian Charles Augustus Briggs, expelled by the Presbyterian Church for heresy; Congregationalist theologian Lyman Abbott, a social progressive and an early proponent of theistic evolution; and (feeding rounds into the gun) Unitarian minister Minot Judson Savage.

Their anonymous opponents, emerging from the castle of “Medieval Dogmatism” (terminology taken directly from White), are united under a banner proclaiming, “Believe or be Damned.” The defenders of orthodoxy are immersed in darkness, since we see them only by a searchlight planted firmly on the side of reason.

Keppler’s cartoon underscores an important fact about White and his ideas: unlike the New Atheists of our day, who borrow extensively from White to advance their own agenda in the name of science and reason, White was promoting a very liberal type of religion, a broad and vague theism largely untethered to Christianity, against all forms of traditional Christianity. 

The main source of conflict with science in the history of Christendom was what he called “Dogmatic Theology,” a term he used as a pejorative against religious opponents whom he regarded as nothing more than misguided obscurantists fighting a losing battle. He wanted Christian ethics to remain a crucial element in the modern world, and in his view that could happen only if theology got out of the way, preferably quietly and peacefully but as quickly as possible, so that progressive religion could flow on “beneficent and beautiful.”

How the Conflict Thesis Reshaped Protestant Modernist Thinking

Fast forward to 1936, when Mathews published his autobiography, aptly titled New Faith for Old. 

In a fascinating chapter called “Religion and Science,” he indicted his life’s work: “It is yet to be seen how far intelligence is consonant with religion.” What follows is pure unadulterated White. “As natural forces replace Divinity and bacteria replace devils, the area of fear within which religions have had control contracts.” 

To become credible for modern times, Mathews argued, religion had to recognize what science had done–and what it had done to religion. “Laboratory science did something more than lead to research. It undermined habits of thought and substituted the tentativeness of experiment for authoritative [theological] formulas. True, there were some scientists like Asa Gray who championed Darwinian evolution while holding to the Nicene Creed,” but Mathews did not think Gray was worth emulating. 

Why not? “Scientific method had not [yet] reached religious thought. It was only when educational processes had ceased to be controlled by the study of classical literature and grew more contemporary [owing to science], that orthodox theology was felt to be incompatible with intellectual integrity.” 

Likewise, the radical modernist theologian Gerald Birney Smith, who taught a correspondence course on modern theology at Mathews’ seminary, recommended White’s book as “a most readable and striking account of the gradual substitution of the empirical method for the method of conformity to authorized doctrine in various realms of thought. It reflects the scientific man’s impatience with the traditional theological ideal.”

White’s two-volume screed appeared just in time to precipitate an intense spiritual crisis in the life of the young man later regarded by Martin Luther King, Jr. (no mean preacher himself) as the greatest preacher of the twentieth century–Fosdick. 

Following his first year at Colgate University, Fosdick encountered White’s book, which “finally smashed the whole idea of Biblical inerrancy for me.” 

It seemed “unanswerable. Here were the facts, shocking facts about the way the assumed infallibility of the Scriptures had impeded research, deepened and prolonged obscurantism, fed the mania of persecution, and held up the progress of mankind. I no longer believed the old stuff I had been taught. Moreover, I no longer merely doubted it. I rose in indignant revolt against it.” 

Like many other modernists, Fosdick lifted the “conflict” picture of White and Draper uncritically from his plate and dutifully swallowed it whole, taking its alleged “facts” as gospel truths to illuminate a new path to righteousness.

One of Fosdick’s countless admirers was Conklin, who as a junior scientist had originally endorsed Asa Gray’s view that Darwinian evolution was compatible with the orthodox creeds. As he grew older, however, Conklin changed his mind. 

In language that almost sounds like it was lifted from Pace’s cartoon, he described his own spiritual journey as one that “orthodox friends” might interpret as “descending steps,” leading him further from the traditional Methodist faith of his youth. 

“My gradual loss of faith in many orthodox beliefs,” he recalled, “came inevitably with increasing knowledge of nature and growth of a critical sense.” 

Significantly, he identified White and his intellectual ally John William Draper as formative influences. As he saw it, they “showed the impossibility of harmonizing many traditional doctrines of theology with the demonstrations of modern science.” 

The pamphlets by Conklin and Fosdick, which inaugurated the ”Science and Religion” series in September 1922, both silently incorporated false or misleading information from White to make that very point.