In the past when I have invited your responses to questions about history, many of you have pointed me to Harry Emerson Fosdick’s 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” That so many of you cite this as an influential teaching in your own journey points to how significant a role it played in US Protestantism’s liberal-fundamentalist schism. Just three years after Fosdick’s salvo (which sparked an investigation and ultimately his resignation), another pivotal event occurred in this contentious history: the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial.
Here at the centennial of that trial, we have an insightful analysis from Michael A. Smith that covers not only the trial’s unusual nature but also its legacy in American religious, educational, and political life. To be sure, fundamentalism’s legacy is not just the stuff of sociological reflection. It has concrete effects in real people’s lives, as McKenzie Watson-Fore discusses in her essay on the theological harms of evangelical youth groups and church camps.
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“The trial is often remembered as a straightforward confrontation between science and religion. In fact it was a complex intersection of theological disputes, cultural anxieties, media transformation, and economic opportunism.”
“Life became a sin scavenger hunt. At the end of every day, I curled up with my journal in my blue-and-green loft bed for a moral inventory. ‘How have I been disappointing you lately, God?’ I wrote.”
We are excited to share with you, for the first time ever online, the insightful letters we received from readers that were published in our Letters & Comments section. Here is the collection from our July issue.
