The most celebrated and controversial episode in the history of American fundamentalism came in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, at the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” As I have written before, liberals and evolutionists blew the significance of the Scopes Trial out of proportion. But with the play and 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, American pop culture fixed upon the Scopes Trial as the ultimate disaster for rural Southern bumpkins, all grouped under the (now pejorative) label “fundamentalists.”
Whether this stereotype was fair or not, the Scopes Trial was certainly damaging for the fundamentalist movement, which had originated in concern over higher biblical criticism and the influence of modernist theology in American churches and seminaries. Since the advent of debates over Darwinian evolution, conservative Protestants were never totally unified about just how damaging evolutionary theory was to traditional Christian beliefs. From the outset, many had seen evolution as a fatal compromise of the plain teaching of Scripture about the process of creation and God's means of creating humankind through Adam and Eve.
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