BORN AGAIN

The past and future of Christian fundamentalism.

-  MICHAEL LUO

The Scopes trial, a century ago, seemed to break the movement's hold on America.

It was an age of wonder. Young, free-spirited women in feathery dresses smoked in jazz clubs. Families gathered around big radio cabinets in their living rooms. The marvel of mass production enabled millions of automobiles to roll off assembly lines each year. In the nineteen-twenties, modernity was transforming America, ushering in prosperity, polyglot metropolises, and new norms around gender and sexuality. Perhaps most significantly, doubt was creeping into the citadel of religion. A crisis of belief, brought on by social and technological change, and by growing acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution, threatened Protestant Christianity, the dominant American creed. Fierce fights over the authority of Scripture divided denominations. A backlash was inevitable. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a renaissance, expanding beyond the rural South and into Northern cities, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, under the banner of white Protestantism. A loose coalition of Protestant ministers began to style themselves as "fundamentalists"-defenders of Christian orthodoxy and foes of modernism. Their aim was to return the nation to God.