Abstract
In June of 1925, as Tennesseeans braced for the showdown over the teaching of evolution in Dayton’s upcoming Scopes trial, the state board of education quietly strengthened the state’s existing law about mandatory Bible reading in public school classrooms.1 Since 1915, Tennessee law required public school children to read from the Bible every day in class.2 In addition to requiring public school students to hear passages from the King James Bible, the new law offered school credit for Bible study. Not only would every student hear the Bible, but some students could earn school credit in Tennessee schools for studying the Word of God.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Ward W. Keesecker, Legal Status of Bible Reading and Religious Instruction in Public Schools (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1930), 2.
Lloyd P. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 1825–1925 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1987).
See also David B. Tyack, “Onward Christian Soldiers: Religion in the American Common School,” in History and Education: The Educational Uses of the Past, ed. Paul Nash (New York: Random House, 1970), 212–55;
Joan DelFatorre, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 12–66.
James C. Carper and Thomas C. Hunt, The Dissenting Tradition in American Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 121–57;
Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), 93, 98–99.
Horace Mann, “Letter to Mr. Smith,” in The Bible, the Rod, and Religion in Common Schools, Matthew Hale Smith (Boston: Redding & Co., 1847), 24.
See Donald E. Boles, The Bible, Religion, and the Public Schools (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1963); Keesecker, Legal Status of Bible Reading and Religious Instruction in Public Schools;
R. Freeman Butts, The American Tradition in Religion and Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950);
J. E. Wood, “Religion and Public Education in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Church and State 14 (1972): 397–414. The following states (with the year the law passed) required daily Bible reading: Massachusetts (1826), Pennsylvania (1913), Tennessee (1915), New Jersey (1916), Alabama (1919), Georgia (1921), Delaware (1923), Maine (1923), Kentucky (1924), Florida (1925), Idaho (1925), Arkansas (1930). In Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, Bible reading was permitted but not required. In Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming, and New York Bible reading was allowed in practice. In California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington, the reading of the Bible in public schools was not allowed, due either to state court decisions, state attorney general decisions, state superintendent of education decisions, or simply to the “general consent of implied prohibition.” See Keesecker, Legal Status of Bible Reading and Religious Instruction in Public Schools, 3.
In many places, the reading of the Bible in public school continued long after the Supreme Court’s decision. See Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Phillip E. Hammond, The School Prayer Decisions: From Court Policy to Local Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
Clarence Benson, Moody Bible Institute Monthly [Moody Monthly] 26 (January 1926): 223–24.
William Jennings Bryan, “The Menace of Darwinism,” The Commoner 21 (April 1921): 5–8.
Harbor Allen, “Supreme Kingdom’s Campaign,” CFSC 8 (October–December 1926): 53.
David M. Hovde, “Sea Colportage: The Loan Library System of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, 1859–1967” Libraries & Culture 29 (1994): 409.
Arno C. Gaebelein, “Editorial Notes,” Our Hope 34 (September 1927): 143.
Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 32–33;
Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994);
Kenneth Scott Latourette, “The American Bible Society: A Century and a Half of Global Adventure,” Religion in Life 35 (1966): 450–56.
Michael H. Harris and Gerard Spiegler, “The Fear of Societal Instability as the Motivation for the Founding of the Boston Public Library,” Libri 24 (1927): 249–75.
Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansman: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 41–43.
Quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (Chicago, IL: Elephant Paperbacks, 1992), 205.
Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 145.
Christopher N. Cocoltchos, “The Invisible Empire and the Search for the Orderly Community: The Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, ed. Shawn Lay, 104 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
J. W. Northrup, “The Little Red Schoolhouse is One of the Most Sacred of American Institutions,” Imperial Nighthawk 1 (22 August, 1923): 3.
W. S. Fleming. God in Our Public Schools, 3rd ed. (1942; repr., Pittsburgh: National Reform Association, 1947), 17.
S. Charles Bolton and Cal Ledbetter Jr., “Compulsory Bible Reading in Arkansas and the Culture of Southern Fundamentalism,” Social Science Quarterly 64 (September 1983): 670–76.
Pat Ledbetter, “Texas Fundamentalism: Secular Phases of a Religious Conflict, 1920–1929,” Red River Valley Historical Review 6 (Fall 1981): 38–52. Italics in the original title.
Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Preachers, Pedagogues and Politicians: The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 101–5.
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 159.
M. H. Duncan, Modern Education at the Cross-Roads (Chicago, IL: Bible Institute Colportage Association, 1925), 32.
Cortland Myers, “The Crime of Our Godless Schools,” King’s Business 15 (May 1924): 270.
John Murdock MacInnis, “We Are Debtors to the Boys and Girls of America,” King’s Business 17 (April 1926): 188.
S. M. Ellis, “Secularized Public Schools—The Nation’s Menace,” King’s Business 15 (October 1924): 623, 624.
T. C. Horton, “Perplexing Problems Confronting our Country,” King’s Business 15 (August 1924): 478.
D. C. Smith, “Problems in Christian Education,” Moody Monthly 30 (January 1930): 234.
Johannes G. Vos, “The School-Bag Gospel League,” Moody Monthly 27 (February 1927): 289.
“The Million Testaments Campaign for Students,” Moody Monthly 31 (June 1931): 501; Rollin T. Chafer, “Editorial Comment: Superiority Complex of Teachers of Naturalism,” Evangelical Theological College Bulletin 7 (June 1931): 4.
Ibid. See also Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 88;
and Bendroth, Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 168.
Bertram J. Youde, ed., The Biolan 1928 (Los Angeles, CA: Bible Institute, 1928), 59. “The Euodia Conference,” King’s Business 15 (July 1924): 419;
Eugene Riddle, ed., The Biolan 1930 (Los Angeles, CA: The Associated Students of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1930), 44–46. See also Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 84.
Sophie Shaw Meader, “The Children’s Garden,” King’s Business 15 (July 1924): 429; 15 (August 1924): 495; 15 (September 1924): 567.
Edgar McAllister, ed., The Biolan 1927 (Los Angeles, CA: Bible Institute, 1927), 56, 58.
Earl F. Morgan, ed., Biola Alumni Annual (Los Angeles, CA: Bible Institute, 1923), 42.
Quoted in Kenneth Taylor [Head of the Colportage Department, 1948–1957], “Gold Behind the Ranges,” Christian Life (June 1948): 26, clipping in the Moody Literature Mission File, Moody Bible Institute archive. For an expanded study of the mission to Appalachia, see Adam Laats “The Quiet Crusade: The Moody Bible Institute and the Mainstreaming of Appalachia, 1921–1966,” Church History 75 (September 2006): 565–93.
Arline Harris, “Free Print for the Hungry,” typewritten report, Moody Literature Mission file, Moody Bible Institute archive, 1949, 9; “The Plan of Working,” in Where Hungry Souls Await the Bread of Life (Chicago, IL: Bible Institute Colportage Department, n.d.); Gene Getz, MBI: The Story of the Moody Bible Institute (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1969), 247.
Clarence Benson, “Our Monthly Potpourri,” Moody Monthly 29 (January 1929): 247.
T. C. Horton, ed., The Gospel of John (Chicago, IL: Bible Institute Colportage Association, 1922), 69, 79.
Copyright information
© 2010 Adam Laats
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Laats, A. (2010). Fundamentalists, Bibles, and Schooling in the 1920s. In: Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106796_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106796_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38507-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10679-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)