Religion Dispatches
…“ in which a teacher was charged with giving lessons on human evolution in Tennessee, where it remained illegal to do so until 1967. When the play was written, the nation was in the grip of a recession and a Red Scare; playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee presented Scopes’ call to teach evolution as a sly protest against McCarthyism and the culture of fearful conformity it had wrought. As in Dover, Inherit the Wind put Darwin in the he…
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…gram descriptions. Whatever his fate in these matters, Rapert epitomizes a number of trends on the Christian Right, here in the End Times. While the notion that the Christian Right is dead, diminished or in precipitous decline may never die, the movement nevertheless continues to grow and adapt to the ever-evolving religious and political landscape. Its strength has never been in the raw numbers of conservative evangelicals and conservative Cathol…
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…based on stories you have told me, maybe even more-so at the University of Tennessee—classes include quite a few conservative evangelicals who take very particular, even rigid, stances toward the subject. I imagine that it’s a bigger factor in the Bible Belt than in most other places. How do you deal with this? For example, my New Testament class heard a student presentation on “Eschatology and the Kingdom of God….” MH: Will RD readers know what t…
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…ob to stop and defeat some liberals. At the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jim Adkisson, a fan of yours, killed two people, wounded five others, and left an entire congregation and country shaken by his actions. Actions prompted, as he testified in his own written notes, by the ideas contained in your words. I don’t know if you remember me, Sean, but I worked with you in Atlanta in the early 1990s, right as you got your big break with F…
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…Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.” Graham’s decision to leave Tennessee for Tampa may have been motivated less by theological scruples than by the allure of sunshine, but that transition symbolized a larger movement from the starchy fundamentalism of his childhood, characterized by comprehensive behavioral standards and strict separation from theological liberalism and the perils of “worldliness,” toward a more inclusive evangelicalis…
Read More…ames’ Gang”: “Word was brought to the Fifth Police Station to-night that a number of boys were using the Concord-street School-house for some unknown purpose, and a posse of officers was sent to investigate. The gang scattered at the approach of the police, and in their flight on drew a revolver and fired at Officer Rowan, without effect, however. William Nangle, age 14, and Sidney Duncan, age 12, were captured, but the other five or six escaped,…
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…ic clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over whether a Tennessee high-school teacher could tell his students that humans had evolved (the jury ruled no). A couple of pages later, Coyne refers to “the persecutions of Galileo and John Scopes.” The conflation of the two is clumsy—and telling. Equating Scopes with Galileo is, at best, a display of historical ignorance; at worst, it’s an exercise in willful blindness. Galileo was an…
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…ajor university. When I told him that you taught religion at University of Tennessee, he scoffed, “Anthropology and religion? Those fields couldn’t be further apart!” M: At UT there is not any field closer to religious studies than cultural anthropology! Perhaps this guy was thinking about branches of anthropology like forensics. But the notion of an anthropologist who is not interested in religion is odd—even if he is not leading a faith-based or…
Read More…e, that’s 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in Missouri and 182,000 in Tennessee (a number greater than, for example, all African-American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state). • Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and ta…
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…y popular. Then in 1925, a young football coach was recruited to challenge Tennessee’s newly passed Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution. Scopes lost, and the Butler Act stayed on the books. Thanks to the dispatches of Baltimore Evening Sun columnist H.L. Mencken, much of the country viewed folks in Dayton, Tennessee, as backward hillbillies. However, even as many Americans were reveling in Mencken’s characterization of the “yoke…
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