Today, we are living in a post-Christian culture. Despite what we may want to believe about our society, we have collectively abandoned God and confined him to the “private sector”. How did this come to be? How did we regress from a strong nation founded on Christian principles to a postmodern country which rarely lets God out of his box and into the public sector? I did not happen overnight. There were small compromises made here and there. If you crack the door just an inch the Devil is sure to capitalize until the door is wide open. As we go back in history we can find the moment when we strayed and cracked the door.
Of course, when I say that America was a Christian nation I don’t mean that every American was a steadfast Christian. That said, however, there was a general, collective godliness in Americana prior to the Civil War. (With the obvious exception of slavery.) The industrialism and monetary focus of the Industrial Revolution paved the way for more and more indifference to the message of Christianity. Religion began to lose its grip on daily life and work and money took its place.
One particularly detrimental event occurred in 1927: the Scopes Trial. This trial did more to open the door to postmodernism and skepticism than I believe any other event in the early twentieth century. This trial, indeed, dealt a decisive blow to Christian fundamentalism.
The man on trial was John Scopes. John was a school teacher from Tennessee. In 1927, and indeed now, the South finds itself more conservative than the North. Back then, it was against the law to teach Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in Tennessee schools. Christian fundamentalists had Scopes arrested when he began teaching evolution in school. The trial became a national to-do. On the side of Christian fundamentalism was three-times-failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. In defense of Scopes, and indeed modernism, was Clarence Darrow. The two attorneys set at it in the heat of that Tennessee courthouse. Eventually, Bryan won the case. He did so at a cost.
In the course of Bryan’s victory, Darrow had made quick work of Bryan’s intellectual reputation and had caught with his own words on more than one occasion. In the great showdown between fundamentalism and modernism, the latter had emerged with the greatest image. From then on, ignorance became a defining stereotype of Christian fundamentalists. Modernists were perceived as intelligent and thoughtful. Fundamentalists were perceived as ignorant and bigoted. Skepticism and eventually, distrust in the Bible, crept into America and from there the door only opened further. Indeed, on that fateful day, Bryan, and the rest of Christian America with him, inherited the wind.