You love your birds. We love them, too, you know;
your stunning pictures allow us to believe
in the forgotten world we can’t retrieve–
the one you captured in the Folio.
We’re far removed from birds these days. The crow
you shot and skewered with wires to achieve
a life-like “Mankin,” posed as you conceive
the Truth of Crows, is dead, removed. Although
once you were almost killed for nothing more
than your gold watch. But they got theirs, the crone
and her two sons, strung up by Regulators.
Thus you were saved to paint what you adore:
your birds, your marvelous birds, for educators
and public alike—you, the crow, alone.
Holding Pattern over the Pacific
To Amelia
You said, “The love of flying is the love
of beauty.” Easy for you to say above
Pacific blue stretched out for miles and miles
as waves coalesce forming frothy smiles.
What you and Fred didn’t take into account
was the deceptive cumulus pile surmounting
the horizon—and, you know, at times, I forget
to check my blind spot, too. And my regret
for not sharing your love of beauty or hot
chocolate at eight thousand feet is not
universal regret. I’d like to circumscribe
the globe like Drake (as you and Fred once tried),
but really, how am I supposed to find
Howland, pinprick point on maps and in Fred’s mind
when he couldn’t navigate celestially?
I’d be no better off than you; I’d be
“running north and south”: the same last words the cutter
Itasca, amid the static, ever heard you utter.
Some days strike me as trials from God and
some don’t. So I still wait for you to land.
The Scopes trial and democracy
Back to Summer for the Gods – Edward Larson’s book on the Scopes trial. A quick recap for those just joining us (Part 1 here): The state of Tennessee passed a law banning the teaching of evolution. John Scopes agreed to be a test case for the ACLU, who hoped to show that the law was unconstitutional. He taught evolution in his biology class and was prosecuted for breaking the law. William Jennings Bryan, himself a leading proponent of anti-evolutionism, offered his services to the prosecution. Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney, attached himself to the defense team for Scopes.
One of the key disagreements at work in the Scopes case was not science versus religion, but rather differing political philosophies. The prosecution argued that the law banning the teaching of evolution expressed the will of the people; Scopes broke the law when he taught evolution. Open and shut case. Book ‘im. The defense countered that sometimes the will of the majority tramples on the rights of the individual. In this case, Scopes was denied the academic freedom to teach the generally accepted view of science. In other words, let the experts teach their subject.
William Jennings Bryan embodied the majoritarian argument of the prosecution. Majoritarianism had been his political philosophy his entire life. He was a populist and reformer. According to Larson, “Reform took two forms for Bryan: personal reform through individual religious faith and public reform through majoritarian governmental action” (37). It was an interesting paradox—he combined “left wing politics with right wing religion” (97). It’s hard to imagine such a politician today. He rose to fame at the 1896 Democratic convention, when, as a congressmen, he bucked the party establishment and the incumbent president Grover Cleveland by trying to win the nomination. Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech, a populist plea to ease the debt and credit burden on the farmers by switching from the gold standard to a currency backed by silver. The speech won over the audience, and he secured the nomination.
Though Bryan did become the party’s nominee for president, he lost the election. He ended up becoming the Democratic nominee twice more, but he never became president (again, impossible to imagine either modern political party nominating the same candidate three times for President). After losing the nomination to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, he served as Secretary of State in Wilson’s cabinet, but resigned in protest when Wilson wanted to enter World War I. Though out of office, he continued working towards reform. He gave hundreds of speeches and argued for the passage of several constitutional amendments:
- direct election of senators—previously, senators were chosen by the state legislature; by electing senators directly, voters had more say in who represented them, making this a majoritarian reform.
- Prohibition—this amendment made the possession and sale of alcohol illegal in an attempt to reform social ills.
- women’s vote—thus giving the right to vote to half of the population of voting age; clearly the most majoritarian reform possible at the time.
The Scopes case combined his views of majoritarianism with his personal faith. The vast majority of Tennessee voters didn’t believe in evolution, so a law banning the teaching of evolution expressed the will of the majority. It was his argument that the people who paid for the education of children should decide what they are taught.
Majoritarianism sounds like democracy in pure form, but it runs into an obvious problem when the will of the majority is immoral (slavery comes to mind as an easy example). I think another obvious problem is if the majority of people are ignorant. It’s vitally important to have an informed electorate. It’s no surprise that there are fights about curriculum: whoever controls public education wields great power. In my own life, I feel that my history education, much like my science education, was woefully inadequate in high school. I want to be an informed voter. It’s one of the reasons I have been reading a lot more American history lately.
The United States is not majoritarian (at least in most aspects, referenda and other state and local issues are sometimes put directly to the voter); rather, America is a representative democracy—we elect others to be our proxy, hoping they are experts in areas we don’t have the time or inclination to know enough about. When we do have strong opinions, we let our representative know how we feel, either beforehand by calling or writing our members of Congress (or state legislators, or city councilors), or afterwards at the ballot box.
I’m rather torn about majoritarianism. On the one hand, I want to affirm democracy. I want everybody to have a voice in how they are governed. But as oft-quoted Winston Churchill affirmed, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The majority can get it wrong. And that’s not to mention all the ways that democracy can be abused (stolen elections, suppressed votes, beholden politicians to money, etc.). In this specific case of anti-evolution laws, I would side with the scientists (who I would consider the experts) over the will of the majority. Does this make me anti-democratic? Perhaps. But this is why education is so important. If one disagrees with the majority, it’s then up to the minority to educate and persuade in order to change the will of the majority.
As a side note on education, high school curriculums can have a profound effect on later views of biology. A recent study shows that college students are more likely to accept creationism if it was taught in high school (even if it was presented along with evolution). Another study shows that high school biology teachers are often reluctant to teach evolution. It’s no wonder that a third of U.S. adults do not accept evolution. But acceptance of evolution is also a matter of who we consider the experts on the matter and how we decide who the experts are. When I was a young earth creationist, I had a group of experts I trusted, including teachers and creationist authors. But now that I accept evolution, my group of trusted experts has shifted accordingly. /end side note
I’d love to hear what others think about majoritarianism as a political philosophy. Feel free to bring up other issues besides the teaching of evolution that involve majoritarianism.
Hospital Stories (1)
A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer. It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life. What exactly is a constant observer? one might reasonably ask. A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore. There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some. I saw people at their most vulnerable state. This is the first in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.
He couldn’t get comfortable on the bed. And no wonder—his wife had told the nursing staff (and me) that normally at home he would sleep on a recliner for a few hours, get up to go to the bathroom, then lie down on another recliner. She said he could only sleep for a few hours at a time, suffering as he did from restlessness and frequent urges to urinate. I considered what this information meant for my evening. He had a catheter in place, so the urinating itself wouldn’t be a problem, but sometimes people still feel the urge to urinate. I’d also found that it’s hard to explain a catheter to someone who is already confused. I frequently would say “I know it feels like you have to go to the bathroom, but you have a tube that drains your bladder. It’s doing the work for you.” Sometimes I would show them the catheter bag filled with urine if I thought it would help them understand. With one guy I had to explain the catheter more than two dozen times in a day—he’d forget within five minutes what I had said. So the nurse brought a recliner—broken, but it was the only one on the unit—in an attempt to simulate the patient’s home environment. I put a garbage can under the foot rest to steady the chair. It wanted to lurch forward. He was cold so we put a few blankets on him. With that, he and his family accepted our illusion of home. But soon enough, after his visitors left, they put him back in the bed so they could put the bed alarm on. The alarm would let the nursing staff know if he tried to get out of bed, permitting them to dispatch me a few doors down to watch another patient. A short time later they asked me to return to his room because he was yelling and cursing. When I sat down next to the bed, he thought I was his wife there to comfort him. The lights were low and he was confused because of… I don’t even know. Old age? Alzheimer’s? A stroke? It was the middle of the night? He told me that he loved me so much. I grabbed his hand, thinking that might comfort him. He wanted to be comforted, so he was playing out the script of comfort. I didn’t want to break out of my role and shatter the scene. But then he started kissing my hand. Now I felt really uncomfortable. He was a total stranger, and he was kissing my hand. Also, it didn’t seem right, posing as his wife, letting him believe she was there. Still, I didn’t move at first because I was frozen. But the moments passed, and I still couldn’t yank my hand away. He was alone and disoriented in a place that was not his home, and I wanted him to be able to feel some comfort right then. I also hated the thought of facing his embarrassment if I made him realize his mistake. And I really didn’t want him to get upset again. I told him to relax and go back to sleep. I tucked him in, and then I withdrew back into the shadows of the room, thinking about how I had stumbled into misplaced intimacy.
He-Man Woman Haters Club?
I recently finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books (all six of them), and I’m sad that there are no more. The Earthsea books have magic and dragons, but what really impressed me is the depth of the female characters. As much as I enjoy Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it’s really a story about dudes. Sure, you have Eowyn disguising herself as a man and killing the witch-king, but by the end of the story she’s given up fighting to settle down as a healer and wife. I’ve also enjoyed George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which has many well-rounded female characters, but the world in which they live is so brutal. You wouldn’t wish it on your ex-girlfriend (I hope!). Thus it was a welcome change to read Le Guin’s series, especially the books in the series that treat the roles of women as interesting.
The first and third Earthsea books have familiar quest narrative plots, the kind of thing Tolkien made famous and has been copied time and again in the fantasy genre [e.g. a young man, raised by his uncle, growing up on a farm, always dreaming of the world beyond the horizon and feeling different from the other kids, meets a mysterious stranger and suddenly his life is an adventure with elves and magic and stuff]. That’s not to say that Le Guin doesn’t do a good job with the quest trope: the narrative in the first book follows naturally out of the main character’s personality and motivations (his name is Ged, by the way, a deliciously ridiculous fantasy name). By the third book he is older and wiser, but again on a typical fantasy quest to the land of the dead. However, it’s when the series departs from the exploits of Ged and focuses on women, especially Tenar, that it really shines and stands apart from the fantasy that I’ve read.
The second and fourth books focus on the lives of women and the options that they have in the world of Earthsea. The stories are about the daily lives of women instead of merely writing another quest with a woman in the role of protagonist instead of a man. The second book focuses on the childhood of Tenar when she is groomed to become the high priestess in a mysterious religion on the outskirts of Earthsea. As a priestess she is isolated from everyone, especially men. She has nominal power, but two old priestesses really run the show at the temple. None of them have actual power anyway. The fourth book is primarily a domestic novel. Years later Tenar is a widow living on a small farm by herself. Her children are grown, but she takes in an abused and abandoned girl and adopts her. Their life together constitutes much of the book. The contrast to the male quest narratives is stark. Ultimately, the climax of this mostly quiet and excellent book is the most important revelation of the entire series. It turns the patriarchal world of male wizards and monarchs on its head, setting up a conclusion of ultimate reconciliation in the sixth book.
The series can be described as feminist in a genre not known for its progressive attitudes towards women. And it’s good, too. The writing is strong and economical (the books are short compared to the usual heavy tomes associated with the genre). It definitely deserves its place in the Fantasy Hall of Fame. But its respect for female characters definitely makes it an outlier. And it got me thinking about my enjoyment of other genre fiction. When I’m not reading serious books, I enjoy getting swept up in a spy novel, a hard-boiled mystery, or some super-hero comics. I try to be discriminating and find out which are the best of the best in these genres and stick to those. But it doesn’t change the fact that these genres by and large have trouble with their depictions of women.
The A.V. Club had a feature up yesterday about the state of superhero comics in regard to gender and minority representation. The panel discussion highlights some positive steps the comics industry has made (like a new teenage Muslim Ms. Marvel), while also talking about how much better it could and should be in the area of in its representations of women and minorities (seriously, check out the Hawkeye Initiative to see how ridiculous the representation of women can be). Some of my favorite superhero stories of the last decade or so involve female characters (e.g. Renee Montoya in Gotham Central and later in Fifty Two, Batwoman first introduced in Fifty Two and then later getting her own series, and the most recent incarnation of Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello). But all of these stories were still written by dudes. Not that dudes can’t write good women characters (but they usually don’t), but there should be options. DC and Marvel need to hire more women writers (and editors, artists, and colorists, etc.), not just to write women characters, but to tell good stories.
So what does that say about me? Looking at the rows of comics on my bookshelf, I suddenly have the urge to trot out my feminist bona fides. Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather are two of my very favorite authors. My wife works while I stay home with the kids. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer (thanks to my wife). I believe pay inequality is a real issue that needs correcting. I listen to Lucinda Williams and Cat Power. I think we’re long past due having a woman president. I accept influence! Really! But I can’t shake off my disturbed feeling at how much enjoyment I have derived from literature that does not treat women with adequate respect. Just reading Ursula Le Guin doesn’t make up for it.
Often the only role a woman plays in a spy or detective novel – another of my (now guilty) pleasure genres — is the love interest. Or the femme fatale. And I usually gloss over the sad representation of women as I try to figure out who committed the murder or if the hero will get the intel out from behind enemy lines. Sometimes I’ll notice how cliché or predictable the women characters are, but I forge on, even relishing the sad loner-ness of our anti-hero protagonist in his fight against the injustice of the world. But mostly I sleepwalk through the stories, turning pages to find out what happens.
I’m waking up to it. A lot of this escapist reading goes back to the type of reading I did as a kid. Reading cold war spy novels or X-Men comics in my room. It’s comforting to try to return to that seemingly simpler time. A few years back I reread some of the authors I liked in high school and I was embarrassed for myself. That’s nothing new, I suppose, but it was like cold water on the face. The stuff I read now, more highbrow than what I read then (spy novels by le Carre or mysteries by Benjamin Black), still can hardly be called feminist lit. It’s a good thing it’s not a large percentage of my literary diet.
Maybe reading is like the food pyramid. It’s important to have a diverse and wide-ranging diet of authors and genres. And it’s okay to have dessert, but not too much, or I’ll get sick. Or to try another food analogy, maybe sexism in literature is like MSG. It’s not good for me, but it’s in lots of yummy foods so I eat it anyway, hoping it won’t harm me.
The Scopes trial and me, part 2 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept Evolution)
The question of evolution is one I’ve thought about a lot, and from both sides of the issue. I started as a William Jennings Bryan and have become, if not a Clarence Darrow, at least a member of the defense counsel for Scopes.
When I was in grade school I was convinced that I was going to disprove evolution. How exactly I was to do that I wasn’t quite sure. My first step involved filling a notebook with a list of dinosaur names and facts about them. I attended a private Christian school throughout elementary, junior and senior high. So when it came time to put together a Science Fair project, I did one on the extinction of the dinosaurs. My report was a garbled mishmash of Flood geology, a water vapor canopy, and National Geographic articles about extinction events like asteroids or a comet. I created a diorama in a fish tank of plastic dinosaurs on land made of green Play-doh surrounded by blue plastic wrap to signify water: Voila! The Flood. What this was supposed to show or prove is beyond me. Even my teacher had doubts about my project, noting that I had not followed the scientific method. I had no testable hypothesis.
The standard Young Earth Creationist explanation of the dinosaurs’ extinction is that dinosaurs were created on the 6th day along with the other animals. This happened approximately 10,000 years ago, give or take (or 4,004 B.C. if one is following James Ussher’s chronology where he added up all of the genealogies in the Bible to arrive at a date for creation). Humans and dinosaurs coexisted until the time of the Flood. The Flood was a catastrophic event that changed everything. Before that time there was a water canopy that surrounded the Earth. Once the water canopy was gone, (presumably the water rained down as part of the Flood), then the climate of the Earth changed. Pre-Flood, the Earth’s climate was temperate and mild. Post-Flood, the climate became closer to what it is today, perhaps even allowing for some sort of ice age or two (though the work of glaciers on the landscape could just as easily be explained by the Flood). So dinosaurs died out after the Flood presumably because of the change in climate (or maybe an extinction event like an asteroid/comet also contributed, or so I guessed).
In high school, instead of learning evolution, we learned evidence that the Earth and the universe were young, no older than 10,000 years. The evidence included the rate of magnetic decay of the Earth and the amount of dust found on the moon (the latter of which I could not find with a quick perusal of Young Earth Creationist websites, perhaps that argument is no longer used) [edited to add: Subsequently I found on the Answers in Genesis site a long paper which concludes that the moon dust argument “should for the present not be used by creationists”]. We were told that the magnetic force would have been too strong if the Earth were older, and the moon would have had much more dust. There was a lot more evidence. The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was meant to show that catastrophism could cause immense change that would make the affected area appear old. The Flood, of course, was meant to be the prime catastrophe that caused mountains to appear or layers of sediment, and all the fossils and the Grand Canyon, etc. Carbon dating was right out. It didn’t show what it was meant to show, and wasn’t even accurate past a few thousand years. Troubling aspects like visible light from distant galaxies was hand-waved away with the confidence that God could create the universe with the light already having traveled to Earth. The universe could have the appearance of age if God so chose. Humans, animals, and plants were all created fully formed, so it made sense that so would the universe. Why it had to be so big was a question I never asked.
I continued my education at a private Christian college in the South. Halfway through my first year, I picked up Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time from my roommate’s shelf. I didn’t know much about it, except that Hawking was supposed to be a genius. My memory of the experience is that much of the astrophysics went over my head, but that the overall grandeur of the universe, its immensity, hit home. The evidence for a nearly 14 billion year old universe stacked up. I faced some major cognitive dissonance. The thought of an old universe was unsettling, but I had no intention of giving up my faith. I remember trying to broach the subject of an old earth with some friends in the cafeteria. I was nervous because it seemed like I might be flirting with potential heresy. Nothing we talked about gave me an idea how to reconcile the impasse, so I ruminated on it for the next few months.
Fortunately for me, the college had invited Hugh Ross as a speaker for their annual lecture series in the Spring. Ross is a Christian astrophysicist who interprets the days of Genesis as long periods of time (commonly referred to as the day-age theory of creation). His interpretation does not allow for any macro-evolution of species into other species, instead relying on God to perform special creation at various stages of cosmic history. It was a huge relief to me that there were other Christians who thought the Earth might be old, too. I didn’t have to give up my faith or my new understanding of the universe. I didn’t know much about science at that point, but it was clear to me that the Young Earth Creationism that I had believed considered a certain interpretation of Genesis as primary over scientific inquiry. The only point of science was to prove what was already known from the Bible. There was no discovery possible, only confirmation. In theological terms, Young Earth Creationism treats special revelation (the Bible) as superior to natural revelation (the created universe). Now that I’d had a personal encounter with science (not one mediated by the lens of creationism), I could no longer accept that.
So how could I have let go of my belief in a young earth, given my fundamentalist upbringing? I had only attended Christian schools up to this point. I was surrounded by people who thought very similarly to me, who believed the same things I did. Before I heard Ross, I had never had a serious discussion about the age of the Earth where it wasn’t already assumed that it was created less than 10,000 years ago. While it was this bubble that created my confident belief in a young earth, I think that it was also this same environment that actually let me question those assumptions. If I had gone to a public high school or a state university, I would have felt under attack for my faith. I undoubtedly would have stood up for my beliefs in a biology class, and held onto them all the tighter because they were part of my identity. Because my belief about the age of the earth was safe in my Christian school environment, I could question it.
A few years later while in graduate school I read Del Ratzsch’s The Battle of Beginnings and Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, two books that attempt to reconcile Christianity with evolution. I found both of them very interesting and compelling, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready to agree that God used evolution. But I was now willing to say it was possible. In the years since then, there wasn’t a single dramatic moment when I decided that I could accept evolution as an explanation for the diversity of species, but it gradually happened. I suppose a change like this takes a lot of time.
I’ve only had a handful of conversations with family and friends about evolution since I became evolution-friendly, but the situation always makes me feel like the outsider, the stranger, the black sheep. I’m no longer on the creationist team. It’s the Bizarro-version of the creationist standing up to the evolutionist teacher and defending the faith: Now I’m the one standing up for evolution (or not saying anything). It’s pretty strange.
Evolution is a topic I’d like to return to again as I read (and reread) more. I’d like to explore the theological implications of evolution: what does it mean for creation and humanity. But I’d also like to look at the science of it, too, as a layperson who doesn’t know much about science.
Cross that River
To continue with the river theme, here’s a song I’ve been listening to lately. Whenever I hear it I think of my friend Andy, and sometimes when I’m thinking of him I put it on. He was killed six years ago; the anniversary of his death was last week. He was a police officer, and he was responding to a domestic disturbance at a club when he was killed.
Andy attended the same Christian high school as I did. We went off to Christian college together as roommates. Yes, it was confusing when we got phone calls, but most people called us by our last names. We did a lot of hiking on and around campus, as well as in nearby Tallulah Gorge. One time we were down in the Gorge. We were scrambling on the rocky embankment to get around a bend in the river. It was wet and slippery in January. There were some metal bolts in the rocks that we used to steady ourselves, but they were few and far between. Andy had made it to higher and drier ground. He was safe. I was between bolts and nearly slipping down the steep slope. Andy offered to come down and take my hand. I refused him and told him to stay where it was safe. I didn’t want to drag him down with me if I slid. When I finally made it up to safety, he called me the most stubborn person he knew. He was right; I was being ridiculous.
After college we went separate ways: he went to seminary, and I went to grad school to study literature. We kept in touch and visited each other when it was feasible, even traveling hundreds of miles to do so. Though we changed after those years in college, we were still such close friends. It didn’t matter if we’d started to diverge in some of our theological or political views and no longer agreed on nearly everything. He still accepted me and knew who I was, as I did him. But it’s hard for me to think of him as a police officer. He’d been an officer a little over a year when he was killed. We lived in different states. The last time I’d seen him he was still in training.
Before he became a police officer, he was aiming to become a missionary. He had spent years preparing to go overseas. He had studied at Bible college and seminary. He had worked all sorts of odd jobs for years while he tried to raise funds of support. It didn’t work out. By then he had a family to support, so he suspended his missionary candidacy and got a job that had stability. And barely over a year later he was dead. I think I would have come to accept his new vocation, learned to re-orient my understanding of him. But I never really got the chance. And it wasn’t all that much of a change, now that I think about it. He was willing to take risks to help people, just like he was reaching out to me so I wouldn’t fall down the steep slope into the river. Except he did end up getting dragged down.
This blog is about strangers and change. I don’t think Andy and I would have ever been strangers no matter the changes we went through. He was that kind of friend. I miss him terribly.
Postscript. Concerning the song, there’s nothing that is all that particular about Andy or his life, but I love the picture of needing a helping hand to cross the rivers of our lives, even though the story I’ve told is one where I didn’t accept his help. If I had it to do over, I’d take his hand. I also like the image of a “flying amphibian,” which in its ridiculousness does make me think of Andy. He had a menagerie of animals in high school, from an iguana to an albino python.
On “Topography”
So my wife says that I shouldn’t just post poems (or excerpts) without explaining why. So here’s why I posted the excerpt from “The Topography of History.” I’m very interested in the ideas of continuity and change. I love the image of the river that is both constant (you can draw it on a map) and flowing (someday that water will reach the ocean). I feel like that. There are all these selves that I’ve lived at different times of my life, in different places and with different people, but I’m still myself. Or at least I want to believe I’m always myself, that there is some sort of me that is constant. But I know I’ve changed. A lot. Sometimes I feel like a stranger, to others and to myself. And that’s why I’ve started this blog: to chronicle some of that change, to understand my history, to not lose my love down the river.
How
How shall that Sentimentalist love the Mississippi?
His love is a trick of mirrors, his spit’s abstraction,
Whose blood and guts are filing system for
A single index of the head or heart’s statistics.
Living in one time, he shall have no history.
How shall he love change who lives in a static world?
His love is lost tomorrow between Memphis and
the narrows of Vicksburg.
(Thomas McGrath, from “The Topography of History”)
The Scopes trial and me, part 1
Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson is a history of the Scopes trial of 1925. This trial pitted populist former politician William Jennings Bryan against famed defense attorney and atheist Clarence Darrow in a battle over the teaching of evolution. The Scopes trial was one of the early so-called “Trials of the Century” (there have been a lot of them besides O.J.). The trial resulted because the state of Tennessee was the first to pass a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. The ACLU wanted to challenge this law, so they found someone – Scopes—who had taught evolution (sort of, anyway – he was a substitute teacher, not a biology teacher) and was willing to go along with the suit. The drive for anti-evolution laws was led by William Jennings Bryan, who helped make it a crusade for the growing Christian Fundamentalist movement.
First, a word about fundamentalism. It’s vital to understand fundamentalism to understand the creation-evolution debate and the Scopes trial in particular. It’s also my background, so I want to understand where I come from. In American Protestantism, it started as a reaction to modernism, especially as embodied in higher criticism. In the early years of the 1900s a wide range of theologians wrote a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, which is where the name came from. These pamphlets stressed the vital points of Christian belief, acting as a conserving force opposed to the drifting away they saw in modernism. They affirmed five “fundamental” beliefs:
- inerrancy of the Bible (because it was inspired by the Holy Spirit)
- Christ’s virgin birth
- Christ’s death on the cross atoned for sin
- Christ’s bodily resurrection
- Christ’s miracles are historical fact
Incidentally, two of the contributors to the pamphlets, B.B. Warfield and James Orr, espoused or were open to evolutionary ideas in biology (Larson 20).
The higher criticism that the Fundamentalists opposed is a type of literary criticism consisting of source, form, and redaction criticism, among others. It’s often referred to as the “historical-critical” method. Criticism in this sense is not negative, but merely the application of critical analysis to the text, with the goal of understanding the meaning of the text in the original context. This sounds good, but an example would be an analysis of vocabulary and style to determine if a text has been woven together from more than one source. This is essentially the documentary hypothesis Wellhausen proposed for the Pentateuch, that the first five books of the Torah were not composed by a single author but stitched together from other sources. Fundamentalists had a problem with this denial of Moses’ authorship naturally, and all that stemmed from it. It tended to lead to the denial of the miraculous events recorded and to accepting errors in the text. Practitioners of higher criticism tended to have naturalistic presuppositions (i.e. disbelieving the supernatural out of hand, opting for a rational explanation instead). The feud between Fundamentalists and modernists split more than one denomination apart in America. In fact, the two categories of churches, mainline and evangelical, go back to these disagreements.
I grew up in an evangelical church but now I attend a mainline Episcopal church. I’ve crossed over, though I can’t say that I’ve completely left everything fundamentalist behind. Looking at the list of “fundamentals” above, I can still positively affirm the four about Christ. In fact, I don’t know how I could give up those beliefs. They feel intrinsic to the idea of who Christ is, and without Christ there is no Christianity. The first fundamental, about Biblical inerrancy, I have questions about. I’m not sure that “error” and “fact” are meaningful categories to apply to the Bible, given the genres of the original books and their context (for a fuller discussion on this, see these two posts by Josh Way). [I plan to talk more about how I’ve “strayed” from fundamentalism in future entries.]
It seems that in some ways the higher criticism has won out, even in academic fundamentalist circles. When I was an undergraduate at a fundamentalist Bible college, I was taught to practice a version of the historical-critical method, just with different presuppositions. We were trying to understand the original meaning of the text to the original audience in historical context, but we believed that it was all true. In fact, we believed that there was no error in the original text because it had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. We added to the method by also trying to ascertain what the text means for us today. Or, how can we apply the lessons of the Bible to our own lives and situations? I still think this is the way to approach the Biblical text, and it is hard for me to change my presuppositions as well. I still believe it is true. But as I change some external beliefs, such as my stance on evolution, it changes how I interpret the truth of the Bible. Where once I understood the words of Genesis as literal truth, now I read the first chapters and consider their genre and the poetic structure to understand the truth they are trying to convey.
These personal observations on my experience touch on some deep issues that I’ll be returning to, probably many times, in the future. I’m still figuring myself out (and myself is still changing). Any readers who want to share their experiences and observations are more than welcome to in the comments. I’d be interested in hearing about them. Now, back to the history lesson.
Fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan had many reasons, both moral and theological, to object to evolution. Bryan focused on the moral objections. It was what evolution implied that made it unacceptable, “a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that justified laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, and militarism” (Larson 27). Bryan was a populist politician who fought against these excesses in his career. He stood up for the weak against the strong (e.g. his famous “Cross of Gold” speech was a defense of Midwestern farmers and their economic situation). Evolution was also used as support for eugenics, which was a popular idea in the 1920s, leading to sterilization laws in many states for the mentally challenged, epileptics, and habitual criminals. These moral objections against social Darwinism are forceful, but to direct them at evolution is a mistake of categories. Natural selection, the mechanism of evolution, is not moral or immoral. It simply postulates that within the variety of a population, traits that enhance reproductive success in an environment will be passed on more often. Its cousin, artificial selection, or selective breeding, is the bogeyman of these moral objections. Most people do not object to breeding dogs for certain traits, but it becomes macabre when humans are the subject of breeding programs.
The theological objections to evolution relate to humanity’s relation to God. In Genesis 1 and 2, humans are created separately from the rest of the animals “in the image of God.” Whatever this “image” might mean, it appears to be something humanity has that the rest of the animals don’t. So if the Bible has no errors, then humans cannot be related to other animals. Some people then and now have a hard time accepting the idea that chimpanzees are their relatives. Perhaps even more troublesome than the “image” problem is the doubt that evolution puts on a historical Adam and Eve. Again, if the Bible is infallible, then Adam and Eve were real people created by God from dust and a rib, respectively. They didn’t come from earlier hominids.
Okay, enough of the background for now.
Summer for the Gods is a fascinating book that tells the story of the trial from all sides. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998 and got positive reviews from Mark Noll (history professor, formerly at Wheaton, currently at Notre Dame) and Philip Johnson (lawyer and author of Darwin on Trial), among many others. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in American history, religion, or science.
Stay tuned for part two where I talk about my personal intellectual journey with the idea of evolution…
strangerextant 