Dr. Gary North concludes this talk about the importance and historic significance of the Scopes Trial and William Jennings Bryan.
Christians do not object to freedom of speech; they believe that Biblical truth can hold its own in a fair field. They concede the right of ministers to pass from belief to agnosticism or atheism, but they contend that they should be honest enough to separate themselves from the ministry and not attempt to debase the religion they profess… It is time for Christians to protect religion from its most insidious enemy. —William Jennings Bryan (1922)
With these words, the Great Commoner, three times the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States, former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, and the most famous ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., launched in the New York Times an attack on Darwinism and on the liberal clergymen who held Darwin’s views on human evolution.
Bryan’s New York Times article was a warning shot to Presbyterian liberals, although he did not identify his own denomination as a source of the problem. Over two decades of relative public peace within the Church were about to be brought to a close. A new era of doctrinal, personal, and rhetorical confrontation was about to begin. It would last for a decade and a half, and would end with the exodus of the most doctrinally Calvinistic members of the denomination and the creation of two new ecclesiastical organizations by those members: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936 and the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1938.
However, Bryan’s challenge to theological liberals was peripheral to his challenge to the American Establishment in the broadest sense. This battle would soon extend far beyond the narrow confines of the institutional Church.
Crossed Fingers
Crossed Fingers is the first book to identify and discuss in detail the five points of liberalism and the rival theological positions. It is also the first published book that "follows the money" by tracing the sources of the funding of theological liberalism in twentieth-century America. It serves as a handbook for the diagnosis and defeat of the same liberal forces that have captured American Christianity.
Buy NowDr. Gary North concludes this talk about the importance and historic significance of the Scopes Trial and William Jennings Bryan. A committed anti-Darwinist, Bryan saw the implications of Darwinism for culture and society and recognized its attack on Christianity, both implicitly and explicitly. (Part Two of Two)