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Tax-exempt? | Before Scopes Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870-1925 This study ranges over the fifty years preceding the trial to examine intertwined attitudes toward schooling and faith held by Tennessee's politically dominant white evangelical Protestants. Those decades saw accelerating social and economic change in the South, writes Charles A. Israel. Education, long the province of family and community, grew ever more centralized, professionalized, and isolated from the local values that first underpinned it. As Israel tells how parents and church, civic, and political leaders at first opposed public education, then endorsed it, and finally fought to control it, he reveals their deep ambivalence about the intangible costs of progress. Lessons that Evangelicals took away from failed adult temperance campaigns also prompted them to reexert control over who and what influenced their children. Evangelicals rallied behind a 1915 bill requiring the Bible to be read daily in public schools. The 1925 Butler bill criminalized the teaching of evolution, which had come to symbolize all that was threatening about theological liberalism and materialistic science. The stage for the Scopes trial had been set. Delving deeply into the collective mind of a people in an age of uncertainty, Before Scopes sheds new light on religious belief, ideology, and expression. Charles A. Israel is an assistant professor of history at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. December 2004 ISBN 0820326461 paper • $19.95 ISBN 0820326453 cloth • $49.95264 pp. • 6 x 9 in."Before Scopes is a worthy contribution to southern history. I am very impressed with Charles Israel's research, scholarship, and sophisticated arguments. This should become a standard reference point in works on southern religious and cultural history, standing with recent works by Ted Ownby and Beth Schweiger, among others." —Edward J. Larson, author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion"With the resurgence of evangelicalism in today's society and its concomitant influence on education, politics, and mores, Before Scopes has relevance to current differences and their repercussions." —Midwest Book Review"Before Scopes helps illuminate the issues that give the Scopes trial such lasting historiographical value: marjoritarianism, Southern distinctiveness, the rise of fundamentalism, and schooling in a pluralistic society."-Jeffrey P. Moran, University of Kansas, History: Reviews of New Books "studies such as Charles A. Israel's contribute an important historical perspective . While most examinations of the famous Scopes 'monkey trial' trace the consequences of that event, Israel has gone back in time to expose social, cultural, religious, and political roots of the Tennessee antievolution law that set the table for the highly publicized legal battles .The author brings a refreshing and much-needed understanding of southern religion to his work."-The Register of Kentucky Historical Society "Before Scopes offers an intriguing look at how a certain set of evangelicals in one southern state conceived of their own path of modernity."-Southern Historian"Before Scopes provides meaningful perspective ... by describing the background necessary for understanding the famous trial and its influence. The result is an informed study of the drive for education that continues to empower evangelicals in debates over evolution and the place of religious instruction in the classroom"-The Journal of American History "Before Scopes is gracefully written and thoroughly researched . This study deserves the attention of all who are interested in the role of religion in public education." -Journal of the American Academy of Religion |
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