Protestant Modernist Pamphlets : Science and Religion in the Scopes Era

In the years surrounding the Scopes trial in 1925, liberal Protestant scientists, theologians, and clergy sought to diminish opposition to evolution and to persuade American Christians to adopt more positive attitudes toward modern science. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and many leading scientists, the University of Chicago Divinity School published a series of ten pamphlets on science and religion to counter William Jennings Bryan’s efforts to ban evolution in public schools.

In Protestant Modernist Pamphlets, historian Edward B. Davis, who discovered these pamphlets, reprints them with extensive editorial comments, annotations, and introductions to each. Based on unpublished correspondence and internal Divinity School documents, these introductions narrate the origin of the pamphlets, as well as their funding sources and how readers reacted to them. Letters from dozens of top scientists at the time reveal their previously unknown views on God and the relationship between science and religion. Viewed together, the pamphlets and Davis’s critical assessment of their historical importance provide an intriguing perspective on Protestant modernist encounters with science in the early twentieth century.