Second, how did fundamentalists relate to mainstream 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 fundamentalism, fundamentalists, are these terms that you hear today . Do you know people who call themselves fundamentalists and use this label . I see some nodding. Any examples . Yes. Trying to describe alternate groups that can do terrorist attacks. Its a term that you hear more often in islam. What about here with American Christian groups . From up north, many people we would call fundamentalist christians. I dont think its often at least in my experience, its not often used by the fundamentalists themselves. Youve heard it more of a pejorative term. Thats interesting. That lines up with my own experience. There are exceptions. I have certainly met some proud independent baptists who claim that term fundamentalist, but generally it seemed to be used as an insult. Its not a label that most christians would want applied to themselves. And i think the history of that connotation, that 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. Now 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. Now, the aclu, the American Civil Liberties union wanted to challenge the constitutionality of this law. And so they put together and financed a case. They recruited a Tennessee High School teacher, a substitute science teacher, young 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, to get him in trouble, so 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 the 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, you would have seen trained chimpanzees playing on the courthouse lawn, billboards featuring a picture of a chimp drinking the local variety of soda pop. So local merchants were trying to capitalize on this moment in the sun. And the trial itself was pretty sensational. Both sides managed to recruit a star for their side. On the Prosecutions Team was William Jennings brian, the great commoner, the populist democrat who had run for president three times. He had been Woodrow Wilsons secretary of defense. He was noun as a great defender. And the most famous left wing lawyer of the time and famously agnostic on the matter of religion, and thats Clarence Darrow who was known for his bold politics. Here he is in his flourish, making his opening arguments. Heres darrow and brian on the upper right here and heres sort of a sample of the street scene. This is a table set up with antievolution tracts and books. Both sides of this debate seeing this as an opportunity. Now, the aclu wanted to challenge the law on the grounds of academic freedom. That is the attack they wanted to take. But darrow veered in a different direction. He decided to put traditional religion on trial. And so he summoned to the stand for cross examination brian himself. This was very unorthodox for one of the attorneys to be summoned for crossexamination. And darrow wanted to showcase the conflict between science and religion. And so he asked brian questions like how could joshua possibly have compelled the sun to stand still or can you tell us the exact date of the flood . And brian did his best to remain defending his views. In many cases he didnt really have a clear and sharp answer to rebut 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 script temperatuure and kind off as an old man who was 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 this High School Teacher had broken the law. It was clear that he had. And so in the end, the jury found scopes guilty and he was ordered to pay a fine. Although the conviction was later thrown out on a technicality. Inside the courthouse, the crowd was 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 was dispatched to cover this trial and he wrote some just incredibly 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 great speech yesterday seems to be preciously the same as if he had bawled it up a rain spout in the interior of afghanistan, the morons in 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 fore lorn and lonely farms. His nonsense is their ideal of sense when he deluges him with his theo logic bilge. No matter what you might think of his ideology, he had a certain genius for comicc dissension. 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 red neck. 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. I told you about that great moment of protestant unity in canada when the presbyterians and the methodists joined together to make one denomination and that happened at the very same time that american proper American Protestantism was breaking apart. And it shows us this set of path that canadian and American Protestantism were heading down. What are the historical reasons for this very different character of American Protestant product and what who are these fundamentalists . Who are we really talking about when we use this label . First we got to be clear about what fundamentalism means. Because this word is used pretty carelessly in todays culture in media. In this class, we will use it in a very historically precise way. Fundamentalists im giving you a definition now, fundamentalists are conservative protestants who militantly opposed new ideas about the bible, science and society. And often, although not always, broke away to found their own churches, schools and religious organizations. 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. When these conservatives were fighting just brutally to retain control of those old, established northern denominations, we call the main line. Now this week youre reading a famous sermon by a liberal baptist preacher and i think that gives you some sense of the conflict. Heres fosnick. He appeared on the cover of time magazine. And this 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. You might need to talk with your classmates about whether actually that is whats going on beneath it. I think at least on the surface fosnicks approach was very different from darrows. Essentially he says if a person is a true liberal, then they should have no problem with other christians believing, say, that god created the university in six days, even if they themselves dont happen to believe that. Fosnick says the problem with these fundamentalists is not their theology, they can believe what they like. The problem is their beliefs about church, the fact that they think liberals like fosnick dont belong in any truly christian church. Now this sermon was a sensation. His brother, fosnicks brother, ran the Rockefeller Foundation for 30 years. And the foundation funded the nationwide distribution of this sermon as a pamphlet. It had much wider reach by direct mail than just the people who happened to hear it preached. But ive been reading fosnicks autobiography and its interesting. He refers to this sermon and he calls it a failure. Even though it was really widely read, to him it failed in his main hope which was to stop the fighting and restore harmony. Maybe thats a bit naive. But it is true after about 1930, the fundamentalist movement as on organized movement descend grats. They lost their bid to control those main line churches which is why we so often say now the liberal main line. Thats how people refer to those denominations. Fundamentalism didnt go away. At this point we can describe as fundamentalism as maybe not an organized movement, but as a set of networks, a subculture. Fundamentalists built their own world of bible colleges, denominations, prophesy conferences, anticommunist crusades, radio ministries, a really powerful network of religious and political groups that for quite a long time, maybe up until the 60s and 70s, was not really on the mainstream medias radar. It seemed like after the scopes trial, fundamentalists had crawled into holes somewhere and 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. One more point about terms. In these years, the first half of the 20th century, the terms fundamentalism 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 instead to mean a conservative protestant who is still doctrinely awfully fundamentalist but is not so militant about it. Im talking about people like billy graham. An evangelical was someone who wanted to engage mainstream culture, maybe collaborate a bit more with other christians, rather than separating from the world in an extreme way or picking lots of fights over doctrine. 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 now briefly to the matter of theology. Say a little bit more about what fundamentalists believed and believe today. Now, fundamentalism looked slightly different in Different Church traditions. So a baptist fundamentalist would believe slightly different things, worship differently than a mennonite fundamentalist. But theyre called fundamentalists because they did tend to share a set of fundamentals. We can make some broad comments about that. They tended to have a pietistic concern for holiness. Many of them came in some way out of the puritin tradition. Kyk disagreement among fundamentals on things like the end times. I struggled to come up with a good acronym until a few years ago when i put this out as a challenge to some of your predecessors in this class and one lovely student who graduated last spring came up with marvin. The fundamentals, this comes from a list drawn up by conservative presbyterians in 1910 who wanted to figure out, what are the most things that we cannot compromise on. M for miracles. Belief that the miracles reported in the bible really did happen. A for atonement. 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 handy moral example for us. He really did take our place on the cross and die for our sins. R for resurrection. He was actually bodily resurrected. V, christ was born of a virgin and in for inner ran si meaning the bible is totally without error, 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 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. Youre reading an excerpt from one of his sermons this week. He was born in 1851. He was the son of a well to do Cattle Breeder in kentucky. He came from arrest tistocatic. 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 modernism by defending this doctrine known as biblical inerancy. This idea that everything in the bible is true no matter what scholars might say, that spr scripture has no error in it, and christians have depended the bible as a perfect source of true. But inerrancy has a more recent history. We need to unpack this a bit to understand whats going on. So to tell the story of the doctrine of inerrancy i need to backtrack back to the early, mid 17th century. Bear with me. In these years a couple generations after the start of the protestant reformation, a group of protestant theologians found themselves surrounded on the battlefield. On the one hand, they had to deal with the scientists and philosophiers of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment who were using new scientific methods to raise awkward questions about the bibles accounts of the miraculous and supernatural doctrines and on the other hand they had to face the gre the great theologins, these scholastic thinkers who were picking apart protestant arguments about authority. So these protestant thinkers were caught in the middle and they responded by essentially trying to turn their enemies weapons back upon them by creating a highly rationalistic, highly logical method of defending the authority of scripture. These protestant thinkers took as god is perfect and unchanging. But these conservatives said that if thats true, then it follows logically that gods revelation is perfect and unchanging as well. Not just in matters in salvation, but in every scientific and historical matter, from the scope of the flood to the most granular details of ancient israels politics. So what this means is that religious truth and scientific truth are the same. The bible is equally reliable on both matters. Benjamin warfields mentor at princeton, Charles Hodge said the bible is a storehouse of facts. Think about that phrase. A storehouse of facts. And a theologians job is to arrange and harmonize these facts just as a scientist arranges and classifies data from a natural world. Hes saying that theyre a kind of scientist. These princeton thinkers followed that model of commonsense realism that i told you about a couple of weeks ago and how they thought about science. Science is about using your godgiven commonsense to make sense of the data in gods creation. Very different view from the idea of science that we start to see emerge with Charles Darwin and the thinkers who come after him who develop for sophisticated methods for dealing with uncertainty in their scientific endeavors. Warfield and his colleagues were not dummies. These guys were sophisticated thinkers who kept abreast of the latest scholarship coming out of european universities and they were well aware of the discrepancies in the bible, the parts that seem to not quite line up, seem to kind of contradict each other. But they argued that the appearance of these problems in scripture was simply the result of our mortal imperfect, human misunderstandings. Its not a reflection of gods error. Now, warfield, unlike some of these colleagues, was even open to some version of theistic evolution, that is evolution driven by god. If you think about his biography, this makes sense. Remember, his dad was a Cattle Breeder. He spent a lot of time in kentucky working on the family ranch and he had observed, firsthand, how breeding works. How inherited traits can change over time. He died a few years before the scopes trial. But im pretty sure he would have been very uncomfortable with the all or nothing debate about evolution that took place there. However, war field and his colleagues at princeton were really worried about the presuppositions, the assumptions beneath this modernist scientific work and biblical scholarship and thats really what hes getting at in the sermon youre reading this week. He and his colleagues believed that any scholar in any field has to start with the assumption that the bible is free from all error. They said by definition, gods revelation is perfect. This is not something you should try to prove. You have to just accept this assumption. And they worried that liberal scholars who said, okay, maybe you can grant that perhaps the miracles and the gospels didnt happen, maybe christ didnt raise anyone from the dead, but you can still believe christ is your savior. You can have the corcoran faith. Warfield and his buddies say no way. If you give the socalled details, eventually you give up the reliability of the whole bible. So they were prepared to fight very hard for these details. They didnt see them as details at all. There are a few reasons why warfields approach became so dominant in the United States. The first is that america had always had many more churches of warfields tradition, the reformed protestant tradition than you would have found in the United Kingdom or canada. And reform protestants have been really into figh