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Cultural Impact of the Scope Trial

Creationism and the Scopes Trial

 

Geology in the 1800’s interpreted the topography of the earth not to have been caused by a brief global flood but by a variety of other factors occurring over a prolonged period of time. This well predated any sort of scientific dating methods and was based in large part on analysis of sedimentary layers which didn’t correspond to what would be produced by a brief flood event (see Lyell’s Principles of Geology). In biology Charles Darwin had proposed a theory that was seen at the time as potentially eliminating the need for God to explain life and making man no more than a random biological entity.  Marx was so pleased with this he offered to dedicate the English translation of “Das Capital” to him but Darwin, not being totally comfortable with the social implications of his work (or possibly because his wife was a devout Christian), declined(1 p. 37).  Even the existence of people and places in the Old Testament account were being questioned or denied all together (1 pp. 34-38). Thomas Huxley, who has been described as Darwin’s bulldog but, unlike Darwin, was vehemently anti-religious, said this in celebration of the perceived victory of secularism: “The myths of paganism (the Old Testament) are dead as Zeus and the man who would revive them in opposition to the knowledge of our time would be justly to scorn… In the 19th century, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the opprobrium of the orthodox…The Doctrine of special creation (of each species) owes its existence very largely to the supposed necessity of making science accord with Hebrew cosmogony”. (2 p. 9)

The response to this was creationism which held to a seven 24 hours day interpretation of Genesis that also teaches Genesis 2 and 3 are a retelling of the same series of events as opposed to two separate events. The featured point of this in the mind of most was specific biological creation of the human species as opposed to people evolving over an extended period of time from other primates. In modern times the principal creation-science organization is the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, which has close ties to a prophetic movement. The founder of the group, Henry Morris, is author of a “literalist” commentary on the book of Revelation (3 p. 159). George McCready Price (1870-1963), who was a Seventh - day Adventist, was the main original source of Morris’s young-earth flood-geology approaches. Price’s whole career was dedicated principally to confirming the prophecies of Ellen G. White, who claimed divine inspiration for the view that the worldwide flood accounts for the geological evidence that geologists attribute to a much longer chain of natural events. (4 p. 159)

Fundamentalists contended that the Bible contained scientific statements of the same precision as might be found in twentieth-century scientific journals. Their reasoning being that God would not reveal himself any less accurately. In the seminal Genesis Flood, Morris and John C. Whitcomb affirm “the complete divine inspiration and perspicuity of Scripture, believing that a true exegesis thereof yields determinative Truth in all matters with which it deals” (4 pp. 163-4) The assumption that the Bible speaks with scientific accuracy is linked directly to the literalist hermeneutic that allows as few ambiguities as possible. For example, one of the most common arguments against evolution is Genesis 1 which repeatedly states that plants and animals should produce “after their kind.” This is interpreted as meaning that variations cannot yield one species from another although it may be interpreted to allow for minor adaptations within a species. Similarly, as cited by George Madsen in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, a well-known dispensationalist argues against any compatibility of evolution and the Bible by quoting Genesis 2:7, which states that man was created “out of the dust of the ground.”(4 pp. 164-5)

The anti-evolution campaign needed a well-known and charismatic leader to capture national attention and northern pietist William Jennings Bryan was uniquely qualified to fill this role. Personality and charisma are key to capturing public attention and Jennings was a remarkable orator, leader of the populace movement, former presidential candidate, former Secretary of State, and a (perhaps radical) political progressive. The battle to defend the Bible and Western Civilization was at hand and Bryan placed it deeply in the American collective memory (4 pp. 174-5). The impact of the fundamentalist position is that they could relate the abandonment of a literal interpretation of the Bible (as we have seen this was actually a new interpretation) to the decline and fall of the culture and the civilization. This linkage was most clear regarding the biological evolution of human beings. Moreover the significance could be quantitatively supported by statistical data that showed the future of America at a tipping point. American young people, especially those who were attending colleges, were forsaking the Bible and Christianity in large and increasing numbers. Bryan frequently referred to a 1916 study by Professor James H. Leuba which demonstrated the dramatic erosion of traditional beliefs among American college students from their freshmen to their senior years.(4 pp. 175-6)

All of this builds up to the Scopes Trial of July 1925 which, through the play Inherit the Wind and multiple Hollywood movie adaptations, has been established in the public perception as a case where a heroic high school biology teacher was stopped from teaching evolution to ignorant Southern children by backwards Southern laws and a general culture of ignorance.  He heroically held his ground in an attempt to bring enlightenment and exposed the ignorant Southerners as the hypocrites that were. The reality couldn’t hardly have been any more different as this whole affair was intended to be a show trial from the beginning which is retold in detail in the book Summer of the Gods by Edward Larson and humorously and satirically summarized by Ann Coulter in her book Godless.

The ACLU in New York developed an idea of an evolution show trial and the civic leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, accepted the proposal in order to promote commerce. Scopes was a young PE teacher who occasionally substituted in biology and was part of the stunt from the beginning.  He was never jailed or at risk of being jailed, was friends with the prosecutors (he went swimming with them throughout the trial) and was given a scholarship arranged by the expert witnesses in return for his role in the Monkey trial. When the trial was over, the school offered to renew his contract (5 pp. 255-7). The Tennessee governor had said as soon as the law was signed that it would never be enforced, and it wouldn’t have been except for George Rappleyea who was a native New Yorker who had recently moved to Dayton. When he read in a newspaper that the ACLU was offering to defend any Tennessee teacher who violated the law, he came up with the idea of a show trial to create publicity for Dayton as a nice place to live and work. Rappleyea took his idea to the town elders assembled in the local drugstore, telling them that a trial on evolution would put Dayton on the map and boasting of his connections with the New York ACLU. The idea was broadly supported even by the school superintendent, who had supported the law, and the ACLU signed on, agreeing to pay the costs of both the defense attorneys and the prosecutors.(6 pp. 200-01) (5 p. 257)

The pharmacist gave Scopes a book that he said mentioned evolution, Hunter’s Civic Biology, and Scopes agreed to say that he used it to prepare for class when he substituted for the regular biology teacher. Everyone agreed that this would be enough to create a trial.  The trial occurred during the height of the Eugenics movement and said, amongst other things, that Caucasians, “represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America,” are “the highest type of all.” The theory of natural selection was being used to justify beliefs in racial superiority and the expert witnesses called by the defense were all eugenics supporters. (5 p. 257) (6 p. 201)

Publicity flyers were sent to New York announcing a trial on evolution and both sides were anxious to get started with the trial as soon as possible to ensure another town didn’t beat them to it. Both sides enlisted famous attorneys with Democrat William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution (Ann Coulter referred to him as a “blowhard”) and Clarence Darrow for the defense. The city created a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee that planned special events around the trial. Tents were erected and train service increased to accommodate the hoped for crowds. Stores in Dayton displayed monkeys in windows and were selling “simian sodas.” The Sheriff’s motorcycles were labeled “Monkeyville Police.” The drugstore where the plan formed displayed a banner proudly proclaiming, “Where It Started.” Congressman Foster V. Brown from Chattanooga described the show by saying “not a fight for evolution or against evolution, but a fight against obscurity.” (5 p. 259)(6 p. 174)

An interesting and important note about the guest prosecutor Bryan is that he really had a moderate interpretation of Genesis 1 despite being the public face of the anti-evolution campaign. When questioned by Darrow during the trial, Bryan stated that he believed that Genesis 1 might allow for an old earth interpretation, which was a belief that was not unusual among fundamentalist leaders. Bryan even stated before the trial to Howard A. Kelly, a Johns Hopkins physician who was also a contributor to The Fundamentals periodical, that he didn’t object to “evolution before man.” The way the debate had been framed in the public mind however, left no room for compromise of discussion. It was all or nothing so in his public speeches Bryan contended, “The so-called theistic evolutionists refuse to admit that they are atheists”. He added, Theistic evolution was just “an anesthetic administered to young Christians to deaden the pain while their religion is being removed by the materialists.“ Bryan offered a more detailed explanation of this contradiction in a letter to Kelly saying: ”A concession as to the truth of evolution up to man furnishes our opponents with an argument which they are quick to use, namely, if evolution accounts for all the species up to man, does it not raise a presumption in behalf of evolution to include man?“ He never believed his public position in the first place but thought it to be necessary in order to win a public argument. (4 pp. 176-7)

The real legal issue was whether the local government representing the taxpayers supporting the school district could direct how those funds would be used within the public school system and the judge ultimately limited the decision to that point. The defense sought to portray the matter as a trial of God with Clarence Darrow comparing fundamentalists (or possibly Christians in general) to dogs, stating, “To strangle puppies is good when they grow up into mad dogs.” Darrow was allowed one day, without the jury present, to question Bryan mainly regarding his personal interpretation of the book of Genesis. The entertainment went on but had no impact on the trial. Bryan was anticipating being able to question Darrow the next day the prosecutors forbid it. The judge ruled that the misdemeanor law was an attempt by the state to determine the use of state funds and not a violation of the first amendment. (5 pp. 260-2)

With the passing of time the literalist’s young earth creation defense would become more elaborate and would maintain a populace appeal with limited academic or denominational support. Yet the tide of scientific discovery was starting to turn.

Here is a video compiled from film footage taken during the Scopes Trial that depicts the carnival atmosphere surrounding the trial. It includes most or all of the primary figures associated with the trial that national and even global attention to Dayton, Tennessee.  It was a show trial in every sense of the word.

Scopes.jpg

To the left is a picture of the young PE teacher and occasional substitute science teacher Jon Scopes during the trial.  The image above is of renowned attorneys Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan during the trial.  Note the fan and how both men and the audience seem to be effected by the heat in the peak of summer before air conditioning.

Scopes, Modernism, and the New South

The Scopes trial and the rise of fundamentalism in the South was in many ways representative of ongoing struggle with modernism and cultural preservation in the South in the decades following the failed war for independence.  It would probably be surprising to most today that the militant antievolutionists were almost all Northern Protestants who were trying to emphasize and defend America’s Christian Protestant heritage. To them this time represented a cultural crisis as the country turned from a Christian to secular civilization which raised the stakes of the antievolution effort and reduced any likelihood of compromise. The war was to be won or lost on this front (4 p. 168). Apart from the leaders of the movement, Antievolution legislation and the related creation laws were more common and more successful in the states of the former Confederacy than in other regions.  Darwinists frequently were intensely anti-religious and held leftists political positions making this not so much a scientific debate but a culture war. The irreconcilability of random evolution and the Bible was a widely popular belief in the South that had deep cultural origins which did not rest on arguments associated with the developing, at the time, creation-science movement, but predated these. As described by noted historian Forrest McDonald:

What is there about us that has made us so offensive to them? Or, conversely, what is there about them that has compelled them to meddle in our affairs? The late great Richard M. Weaver, in The Southern Tradition at Bay, addressed himself to analyzing the qualities that distinguish the South from North, and for the nineteenth century he was perfectly on target. “The North had Tom Paine and his postulates assuming the virtuous inclinations of man,” Weaver wrote; “the South had Burke and his doctrine of human fallibility and of the organic nature of society.” The North embraced rationalism and egalitarianism; the South had a “deep suspicion of all theory, perhaps of intellect,” and clung to a hierarchical and deferential social order. The North bowed down before science and material progress; the South “persisted in regarding science as a false messiah,” and remained into “our own time” (the 1940s) “the last non-materialist civilization in the Western World.” (7)

The South had been defeated, subjugated, and impoverished and remained under a cultural and religious assault. Many in the South would see the evolution/origins debate as a form of resistance to Yankee secularism that sought to erase the Southern culture but it was really more of a quarrel between two northern factions that was largely played out in the South. The struggle with modernism is generally lost to history except for those who specifically study Southern cultural history but it was very real as the South struggled with the loss of an agrarian society and the effect of this on the culture which was, and largely remains, distinctly different from other regions.  In 1930 there was a historically significant book published that was written by 12 Southern academics titled “I’ll Take My Stand – The South and the Agrarian Tradition” (Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H Lanier, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Donald Wade, Robert Penn Warren, Stark Young). The authors, apart from having some sort of tie to Vanderbilt University, were fairly diverse in many respects and the Scopes trial for several of them led them to rally around Southern Cultural Conservatism (8).  While culture is difficult to quantify, the following excerpt from a modern introduction to a recent publication of the Book, written by Susan V. Donaldson, gives a glimpse into the thoughts of Southerners during this time period with regard to the cultural threat to religion:

“Allen Tate, who quickly joined their circle as a precocious avant-garde-minded undergraduate, was even more rancorous in his opposition to everything Mims seemed to represent, But what seemed to serve as a catalyzing moment for men whose chief concern had hitherto been poetry, literary criticism, and the publication of their widely proclaimed poetry journal, The Fugitive was an argument that Mims and the usually mild-mannered Ransom had about the 1925 Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution in Dayton Tennessee. Mims had approached Ransom about contributing to a manifesto denouncing the forces of fundamentalism backing the state’s prohibition against teaching evolution in public schools and had been astounded by Ransom’s vehement opposition to the proposal and his loudly voiced support for the forces of fundamentalism and reaction. Years later Davidson would argue that the Scopes trial had emerged as the turning point for all three Fugitive poets in their journey toward conservatism and their championing of white southern tradition. But Ransom also had on his mind as a poet and critic the increasingly weighty presence of scientism and reason in a world that threatened to bypass the arts all together, and it was as much Mims’s affiliation with progressivism and the triumphs of science as his dismissal of southern religious fundamentalism that unsettled and angered the poet.” (8)

Ransom, Davidson, and Tate were the three writers specifically referred to in the passage and Edwin Mims was the head of the English department at Vanderbilt who was a leading promoter of the vision of a “New South” ; “an advocate of economic progress and social engineering”, advancing all the “worst characteristics of the Industrial North – scientism, materialism, endless economic expansion, dissolving communities, and social fluidity” (8).  Note here that the word “fundamentalism” is used repeatedly and it poses an interesting question as to whether this referred to Protestant Religious Orthodoxy or to the New Fundamentalism or perhaps the terms had effectively merged by 1930 that the distinction between the two was becoming lost.  In the next two references, religion and modernity are perceived as adversarial concepts if not inherently incompatible.

“Turning to consumption as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed.  But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man does not permit his to shorten his labor time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness. The modern man has lost his sense of vocation.” (9 p. xlvi)

“Religion can hardly be expected to flourish in an industrial society.  Religion is our submission to the general intention of a nature that is fairly inscrutable; it is the sense of our role as creature within in. But nature industrialized, transformed into cities and artificial habitations, manufactured into commodities, is no longer nature but a highly simplified view of nature. We receive the illusion of having power over nature, and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent.  The God of nature under these conditions is merely an amiable expression, a superfluity, and the philosophical understanding ordinarily carried in the religious experience is not there for us to have.”(9 p. xlvi)

In the first reference there is a rejection of the Yankee elevation of the concepts of work and consumption that was a distinctive conflict between Puritanism and Cavalier and Borderlander cultures from the beginning of colonization and even before. The second links the very concept of religion to man having a position in creation as part of nature and not the master of it and honoring the concept of the unknown, the unknowable, and the human relation with the land. In a modern context these ideas are easy enough to argue against but most would probably concede they have some merits as well.  At a minimum they represent a perspective that is being lost to time and a full understanding of both the defense and assault on religion that occurred during this time frame cannot be approached by simply projecting a modern perspective back in time. 

In 1945 a book was published by Henry Miller titled The Air-conditioned Nightmare which is a similar critique of modernism.  Unlike the twelve agrarians, Miller was a northerner from New York who had spent significant time abroad.  Miller had an idea in the late 30’s of traveling around America documenting American life in the different regions of the country beginning with the South. The essays were assimilated into The Air-conditioned Nightmare that was largely critical of modern society but also builds on the observations of I’ll Take My Stand as the triumph of industrialization had become even clearer.  The following are two passages linked specifically to the South and Southern culture.

“We have degenerated; we have degraded the life which we sought to establish on this continent. The most productive nation in the world, yet unable to properly feed, clothe, and shelter over a third of the population. Vast areas of valuable soil turning to wasteland under neglect, indifference, greed and vandalism. Torn some eighty years ago by the bloodiest civil war in the history of man and yet to this day unable to convince the defeated section of our country of the righteousness of our cause nor able, as liberators and emancipators of the slaves, to give them true freedom and equality, but instead enslaving and degrading our own white brothers. Yes, the industrialized North defeated the aristocratic South – the fruits of that victory are now apparent. Wherever there is industry there is ugliness, oppression, gloom, and despair.”(10 p. 30)

“I suppose there is no region in America like the old South for good conversation.  Here men talk rather than argue and dispute. Here there are more eccentric, bizarre characters, I imagine, than in any other part of the United States.  The South breeds character, not sterile intellectualism.  With certain individuals the fact that they are shut off from the world tends to bring about a forced bloom; they radiate power and magnetism, their talk is scintillating and stimulating.  They live a rich, quiet life of their own, in harmony with their environment and free from the petty ambitions and rivalries of the man of the world.” (10 p. 108)

In the years following World War II the debate on the origins of the universe and man along with the defense of scripture would become more academic and less cultural but the cultural aspects of the conflict were highly significant and in many respects remain so today.

The video is based off the themes of "I'll Take My Stand" but calls on earlier historical comparisons as well as topics from after the time frame of the book.  It relates to a awareness of Southern character that has largely been extinguished in urban areas of the South and tenuously hangs on in rural areas having been under assault by the forces of postmodernism ("wokism") as well as the modern economy

Airconditioned_Nightmare.webp

This is the cover to "Air Conditioned Nightmare" and is one of those cases where a picture speaks volumes in this case representing the rising modern world (at the time) and the agrarian past tied to the land. This again represents a lost history or heritage and it is uncertain if even an awareness of the topics it highlights will survive.

Einstein, Hubble, Discovering a Beginning – and an Opportunity Lost

Evolution was an extremely important subject for the atheists, socialists, and free thinkers of all sorts but one might reasonably wonder why, in that simply coming up with a plausible biological path leading to man leaves so many more fundamental questions unanswered. The answer to this is relatively simple but has been somewhat intentionally forgotten within academia. Prior to the 20th century atheistic science and philosophy across time had consistently held that the universe was static and eternal. Aristotle and Plato taught 2400 years ago that the universe is eternal.  Moving forward to 1959, a survey was taken of leading American scientists. Among the many questions asked was, "What is your estimate of the age of the universe?" In 1959, astronomy was popular, but cosmology, the deep physics of understanding the universe was just developing. The response to that question published in Scientific American was that two-thirds of the scientists stated there was no beginning (11).  Because there was no beginning, the key problem to explain away God was simply the presence of people. In the eyes of Karl Marx, Darwin had provided the solution to this singular problem by proposing a theory where random mutations would, over an extended period of time, create new life forms eventually culminating in man.  Darwin actually seemed to have other ideas on the subject stating, “its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator in a few (life) forms or into one” in the closing lines of his book (2 p. 8).  In the early 20th century, that fundamental atheistic assumptions surrounding the universe itself started to fall apart.

In 1917 Albert Einstein, using the laws of general relativity he published two years earlier, developed a series of equations describing the condition of the universe showing that the universe was dynamic. It further expressed matter in terms of energy and the seemingly unnatural observation that the rate at which time passes is not constant.  It varies, potentially dramatically, based on gravity and velocity. At first this was presented as a theory and was somewhat speculative but in subsequent decades has been validated thousands of times and is a law (2 p. 49).   Vesto Slipher of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona had already reported measurements indicating the universe was expanding which were based on Einstein’s laws of relativity (2 p. 24). Einstein’s desire to support the idea of a static universe and avoid going against academic orthodoxy, however, was so strong that he changed his own equation to describe a static universe using what has come to be known as the cosmological constant. As data accumulated supporting his initial conclusion as opposed to his “politically correct” revision Einstein wrote to his colleague and Nobel laureate, Max Born, describing his denial of his own theory as the “biggest blunder of my life.” (2 p. 24)

In the 1920’s Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was not static but was expanding based on a relationship between redshift and radial distances. Yet, Hubble himself had a difficult time coming to grips with his own findings and remained open to the idea of a static universe throughout the remainder of his life. While Hubble initially remained somewhat unclear on the reason for the redshift. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest and physicist, predicted based on Einstein’s general relativity, that there was a redshift to distance relationship. He published observational support for this two years before the formulation of Hubble’s Law. Many astronomers, including Hubble, failed to recognize Lemaitre’s work and doubted his interpretation. (11) 

The philosophical implications of the rejection of the static universe doctrine were so fundamentally repulsive to the academic community of that time period that the widely read and respected journal Nature, described the big bang as simply “philosophically unacceptable”. Yet science over several decades eventually recognized the truth even if it did so very reluctantly (“kicking and screaming”).

Even operating under the static universe assumption, Darwin’s theory had some fairly severe constraints.  He acknowledged for complex life to develop based on randomness alone, the basic components or building blocks of life would have to be relatively simple and the fossil record would need to be steady and not abrupt. Darwin said several times in Origin of the Species, “nature does not make jumps or natura non facit saltum” (2 p. 9). The nature of the cell couldn’t be analyzed at the time and would have to await the invention of the electron microscope.  The fossil record, on the other hand was just starting to become known and it showed drastic changes in what was, from the perspective of geological time, very short periods of time.  This too was hidden or suppressed as described by Physicist Gerald Schroeder:

The reality of this explosion of life was discovered long before it was revealed. In 1909, Charles D. Walcott, while searching for fossils in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, came upon a strata of shale near the Burgess Pass, rich in that for which he had been seeking, fossils from the era known as the Cambrian. Over the following four years Walcott collected between 60,000 and 80,000 fossils from the Burgess Shale. These fossils contained representatives from every phylum except one of the phyla that exist today. Walcott recorded his findings meticulously in his notebooks. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion. These fossils could have changed the entire concept of evolution from a tree of life to a bush of life. And they did, but not in 1909. Walcott knew he had discovered something very important. That is why he collected the vast number of samples. But he could not believe that evolution could have occurred in such a burst of life forms, “simultaneously” to use the words of Scientific American. This was totally against the theory of Darwin in which he and his colleagues were steeped. And so Walcott reburied the fossils, all 60,000 of them, this time in the drawers of his laboratory. Walcott was the director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., the largest array of museums in the world. It was not until 1985 that they were rediscovered (in the draws of the Smithsonian). Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported. It is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, but an example for which we have all paid a severe price (12).

So as early as the 1920’s, the general time period of the Scopes trial, there is clear evidence of scientific bias against anything that would tend to support the concept of creation or a Biblically based world view. Science, even when heavily politicized, has a tendency to eventually reach the correct conclusion although it may take a fairly extended period of time to do so.

The tide of discovery was changing. It would seem for someone attempting to make a defense of orthodox Christianity these scientific developments would be very welcome and could be used to turn the tide of secularism that was threatening the faith.  That, however, wasn’t what happened. Fundamentalism had defined a very specific and far reaching set of doctrines to defend and simply establishing that the atheistic foundations were wrong did not serve to support the fundamentalist tenants of Biblical literalism. In terms of logical argumentation, it is always far easier to attack the adversaries positions especially if the arguments are clear and conclusive as these points were. Rather than attack the foundations of historic atheism, the scientific observations that were gradually but steadily tearing it down were not simply overlooked but were rather perceived as attacks on Christianity. The discovery of a beginning point instead of being a fundamental victory became associated in many believers’ minds as a concept as threatening as biological evolution.  

Bibliography

1. Glynn, Patrick. God The Evidence. Rockland, Ca. : Prima Publishing, 1997.

2. Schroedar, Gerald L. The Science of God. New York, New York : The Free Press, 2009.

3. Marsden, George M. Religion & American Culture. Grand Rapids Michigan : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990.

4. —. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids Michigan : Wm. B Erdmens Publishing Co., 1991.

5. Coulter, Ann. Godless. New York, New York : Three River Press, 2007.

6. Larson, Edward J. Summer of the Gods. New York, New York : Basic Books, 1996.

7. McDonald, Forrest. Abbeville Institute. The Abbeville Institute. [Online] August 6, 2015. https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/why-yankees-wont-and-cant-leave-the-south-alone/.

8. Donaldson, Susan V. The Southern Agrarians and their Cultural Wars. [book auth.] Donald Davidson, et al. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Banton Rouge Louisiana : Louisiana State University Press, 2006, pp. xx - xxv.

9. Davidson, Donald, et al. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. USA : Harper and Brothers, 1930.

10. Miller, Henry. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York, New York : New Direstions Publishing Co., 1945.

11. Schroeder, Gerald. Gerald Schroder.com. [Online] 2010. http://www.geraldschroeder.com/AgeUniverse.aspx.

12. —. Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness. [Online] 2004. http://geraldschroeder.com/wordpress/?page_id=56.

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