In 1925, a small town became the center of national attention. It housed the court case John Thomas Scopes vs the State of Tennessee that addressed the teaching of the Bible in science education. In 2014, this same small town of Dayton, Tennessee is undergoing a similar controversy where science and religion meet in the realm of education.
| Image retrieved from Biologos |
Bryan College, founded in memory of Williams Jennings Bryan after the Scopes Trial, has issued a new statement of faith that faculty must sign. This clarification in BC policy is receiving heated backlash from faculty and students. Due to the stricter statement, BC may lose 25% of its faculty. BC students have released a petition against the new statement and BC faculty has voted no confidence on the school’s administrators. This new statement of faith is not changing the stance of BC, which aligns with its namesake’s opinion on the immorality of evolution and the truth of biblical creationism. Instead, this change highlights the literalism of the Bible by further polarizing acceptable belief systems. This article will explore these changes in light of the ever-present dichotomy of science and religion, with the context of the Scopes trial, and the actual teachings of Bryan. In short, BC is working against two of the characteristics of Bryan’s teachings (the potential for interpretation and the importance of populism) and in essence, abandoning its namesake.
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| Clarence Darrow (left) sitting with William Jennings Bryan (right) before Scopes Trial. Retrieved from this site. |
Bryan was the prosecutor in the famous 1925 trial, arguing in favor of fining Scopes for teaching that humanity descended from a lower order of animals. The Butler Act, which Scopes was tried for violating, declared the immutability of the Bible and the inerrancy of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve. This was and still is an important element of fundamentalism, the values on which BC was founded. In the cross-examination day of the trial, however, Bryan compromised literalism but noting that “I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there: some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.” Bryan also said that the six days of creation were “not six days of twenty-four hours.” For Bryan, the statements in the Bible were accurate descriptions, but what was more important was not individual interpretations but the values that the Bible upheld.
In Bryan’s summation of the trial, he proposed a strict dichotomy between religion and science, saying that one was the path to Christ and the other would crucify Him. In the 1920’s, and perhaps not until the intelligent design movement of the 1990’s, the idea that evolution and creationism could be rectified was perhaps outside of the purview of many Americans. But, many faculty members at BC do ascribe to labels such as “progressive evolutionists and theistic evolutionists and old-Earth creationists.” The previous BC statement of faith noted that “the origin of man was by fiat of God.” Interpreting fiat to be an all-encompassing act of creating the world, some professors at BC married religion and science and incorporating evolutionary theory into their personal beliefs and classroom teachings. They have taken the words of the Bible illustratively, so they are able to stay in line with the statement of faith.
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| Different forms of creationism. Retrieved from this site. |
The new statement of faith, however, undermines these creative interpretations. Now, faculty must agree that “all humanity is descended from Adam and Eve. They are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life forms.” This statement puts many jobs at risk because it removes faculty that believe in any evolutionary history of humanity or of Adam and Eve as symbolic placeholders.
Upon a recent trip to Dayton in March, I had a conversation with a priest and an archivist at BC’s library. We were all reading through documents about Bryan, the trial, and the founding of the college. The priest was in the archive reading for clarification on Bryan’s teachings about biblical literalism. He was concerned that many of his closest friends, the best faculty at the school, and devout, loyal Christians would be unable to sign the new, stricter, and, at this point only proposed, new statement of faith. The priest was concerned that many great, Christian teachers would be lost and hard to replace. Although they may have had more creative interpretations of some biblical phrases, the priest considered their marrying of physical observation with biblical teachings as in line with Bryan’s teachings.
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| Logo of BC student newspaper. Retrieved from the Brian Triangle website. |
BC students are also in agreement. They noted in their petition that they are saddened that BC “will alienate faculty, our brothers and sisters in Christ, by requiring them to affirm a negative on an ancillary matter of faith.” For the populous of BC, the tightening of the statement of faith only serves to divide rather than unite people of faith that have the common goal of teaching Bryan’s creationist values.
The archivist gave me a card for her husband’s creationist non-profit and seemed unconcerned with the changes. Although she said that some faculty taught evolution or believed in it, what was important was that the Genesis story was still taught at BC and the values of it were fully ingrained in all parts of its curriculum. She noted that if students had issues with particular professors and their more creative interpretations, they could easily take classes with a more fundamentalist professor. The campus was an open place where at least variations on creationism were discussed freely. The new clarification would place this openness in jeopardy. BC is surely staying within its rights to clarify its statement and to fight for literalism, especially within a threatening, secular environment. This statement is adopted, however, against the wishes of its students and faculty, making the authorities at BC domineering and elite over the wants of its people. Bryan’s values of populism, the will of the people over the elites, were once in opposition to the elitism of science that would remove all mention of Christ from classrooms. Now, BC wishes to do the same, but to strip its students of all access to evolution, despite that it awards biology and environmental science degrees.
What is at issue here is the extreme polarization of science and religion that is shrinking the opportunity for middle ground, mutual respect, and open deliberation. I do not mean to argue that creationism is a valid scientific explanation, but simply that people should not be so quick to judge people for staying true to religious ideals while incorporating scientific and material evidence in their belief systems. As more and more people take note of scientific evidence for evolution, there is more vocal push back from religious fundamentalists that distance themselves from intelligent design perspectives. Adopting new frameworks and stretching current ones is incredibly difficult. Attempts at marrying them and making sense of one’s religious convictions in light of science is something to be valued, not disdained.
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| BC student protest image. #hearmyvoiceBC. Retrieved from this site. |
BC cannot avoid the protests and disagreement from their own students and faculty, nor from the general public about the favoring of religion over science. As the students said themselves, “the clarification promotes factionalism at the cost of honest debate and discussion.” This decision, perhaps in response to more prominent attention to the issue, is minimizing the space for education about scientific explanation for origins. BC was created when creationism and evolution simply could not be rectified. But, now, it is clear that BC is isolating itself from its students, faculty, the potential partnership of science and religion, and illustrative biblical teachings, in contrast to the teachings of its namesake. We will never know what Bryan would say about this iteration of the human origins controversy. But, I would put money on the will of the people over the BC elites that work risk compromise and biblical values in favor of fervent literalism.
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