Polls

HNN Poll: Are Evangelicals Winning the Culture War Over Religion?

In a recent issue of the Baltimore Sun the editors reviewed the history of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), which pitted William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow."At the time," they wrote,"the trial was seen as a monumental test for a changing America, with the 20th century, science and city ways challenging the 19th century, fundamentalist religious beliefs and rural mores." Today,"the trial serves to remind of other things as well: how Christian fundamentalism, ridiculed unmercifully then, has become an important part of America's religious and political life, and how U.S. newspaper writing has changed."

Our poll this week asks: Did evangelicals win the religious culture war? If so, how did this happen?

H.L. Mencken, July 9, 1925, in the Baltimore Sun

On the eve of the great contest Dayton is full of sickening surges and tremors of doubt. Five or six weeks ago, when the infidel Scopes was first laid by the heels, there was no uncertainty in all this smiling valley. The town boomers leaped to the assault as one man. Here was an unexampled, almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?

Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough. The getting there must be managed discreetly, adroitly, with careful regard to psychological niceties. ... Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.

I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson's drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans ... that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah.

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