The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
See also Slavery; Violence
For Reference and Further Reading
Brown, John. 1859. “A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” Digital History. www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/brown/planning3.cfm.
DeCaro, Louis A., Jr. 2002. “Fire from the Midst of you”: A Religious Life of John Brown. New York: New York University Press.
DeCaro, Louis A., Jr. 2007. “John Brown the Abolitionist—A Biographer’s Blog.” May 6. http ://abolitionist-john-brown.blogspot.com/.
Fellman, Michael. 2010. In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Fogleson, Robmer M ., and Richard E. Rubenstein. 1969. Mass Violence in America: Invasion at Harper’s Ferry. New York: Arno Press.
Gilpin, R. Balkeslee. 2013. “John Brown, Religion and Violent Abolition: ‘Choose You This Day Whom You Will Serve.’” HuffPost. January 22. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/john-brown-religion-and-violent-abolition_b_2527903.
Bryan, William Jennings
William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) was one of America’s most important progressive Democrats who was especially known for his oratory. After earning a degree at Illinois College, Bryan received a law degree from Northwestern University. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Nebraska in 1890, he garnered the Democratic nomination for president in 1896 after giving his “Cross of Gold” speech in which he argued for the freer coinage of money rather than following the existing gold standard, which he thought was hurting farmers. His most immortal lines, which drew directly from the gospel stories of the crucifixion of Jesus, were at the end of this speech in which he said, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” (quoted in Noll 2011, 256); in his keynote address to the Democrat National Convention in 1956, Tennessee governor Frank G. Clement would recycle the analogy in saying, “You will not crucify the American farmer on a Republican cross of gold” (Lawrence 1956). Bryan was renominated in both 1900 and 1908 but lost these elections as well.
Bryan opposed American foreign expansionism in the wake of the Spanish-American War. He later resigned as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state because Bryan wanted to maintain the policy of neutrality in World War I that Wilson had favored in his first term. In a speech marking the three hundredth anniversary of 74the King James Version of the Bible in 1911, Bryan had argued forcefully for the idea that the Bible was not the mere work of man but the inspired word of God. Mark Noll has observed that Bryan not only praised the Bible as “the foundation of our statute law,” the source of “the rules for spiritual growth” and the world’s best “code of morality,” but that he stressed that, above all, it presented “the story of him who is the growing figure of all time, whom the world is accepting as Saviour and as the perfect example” (2011, 255).
Bryan was a Cumberland Presbyterian and Congregationalist who believed strongly in the Bible and who thought that it was under attack by the theory of evolution, as advanced by Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley (Darwin’s so-called bull-dog), and others. He was even more concerned about the less scientific doctrine of social Darwinism that attempted to apply insights from biology to human social interactions. In explaining how he could combine what historian Willard Smith describes as “economic liberalism with religious liberalism,” Bryan explained, “People often ask me why I can be a progressive in politics and a fundamentalist in religion. The answer is easy. Government is man made and therefore imperfect. . . . If Christ is the final word, how may any one be progressive in religion? I am satisfied with the God we have, with the Bible and with Christ” (Smith 1966, 41–42). Explaining his earnestness for democracy, Bryan said that just as a good sermon stressed the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor, so too “a good democratic speech is built upon the doctrine of human brotherhood, equal rights, and self government” (Smith 1966, 43).
Although the grilling that Bryan received via attorney Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925 with regard to the state’s right to teach the theory of evolution in public schools suggested that he did not know the answer to many biblical conundrums (and that he did not equate the “days” in the Genesis account with actual physical days), the speech that Bryan prepared for trial as a closing argument, which was precluded from giving by Darrow’s decision to accept Scopes’s guilt, is far more nuanced. It shows that Bryan was deeply concerned about the social implications of the theory and that although he was not advocating the teaching of religion in public schools, he viewed the issue from the populist perspective as to whether citizens had the right to exclude what they considered to be anti-religious materials from public school classrooms.
Early in his speech, Bryan claimed that Christianity was a patron of learning but that Christians believed that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom [Proverbs 9:10]” and that “they therefore opposed the teaching of guesses that encourage godlessness among the students” (Bryan 1925). Believing that “divine truth . . . comes by inspiration from God Himself,” Bryan thought that it was superior to mere hypotheses that he thought the theory of evolution represented (Bryan 1925). Moreover, the law at issue did not prohibit the teaching of evolution per se, but only the teaching that such evolutionary processes had included mankind.
Bryan believed that, by omitting God, teaching evolution was equivalent to teaching an anti-religion, or what later evangelicals would refer to as “secular 75humanism.” Bryan thus said that “before accepting a new philosophy of life built upon a materialistic foundation, we have reason to remand something more than guesses: ‘we may well, suppose’ is not a sufficient substitute for ‘thus saith the Lord,’” a common biblical saying of the prophets (Bryan 1925).
Bryan broke his criticisms of evolution into several indictments. He argued first that “it disputes the truth of the bible account of man’s creation and shakes faith in the Bible as the word of God” (Bryan 1925). Tracing Darwin’s own journey from faith to skepticism, Bryan further argued that the theory of evolution, “carried to its logical conclusion, disputes every vital truth of the Bible” (Bryan 1925). In a somewhat circular argument, Bryan argued that miracles are possible and that “the same evidence that establishes the authority of the Bible establishes the truth of the record of miracles performed” (Bryan 1925). Quoting from Luke 17:1–2, which had been one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorites, Bryan observed, “It is impossible but that offenses will come; but woe unto him through whom they come. It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and be cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones” (Bryan 1925).
Prior to the Scopes Trial, Clarence Darrow had successfully defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb against the death penalty for the murder of a fellow teenager, Bobby Frank, partly on the basis that their prior education, including reading Frederick Nietzsche, had led to their crime. Tying this view to that of biological determinism (an interesting materialistic echo to Calvinistic predestination), Bryan argued that this was a “damnable philosophy,” similar in its materialistic emphasis to Darwinism. In a memorable, but sometimes mocked, line, Bryan said that he did not want students “to lose sight of the Rock of Ages [a reference to Christ] while they study the age of rocks” (Bryan 1925).
As a progressive reformer who shared some views with the social gospel movement, Bryan further argued that “by paralyzing the hope of reform,” the theory of evolution “discourages those who labor for the improvement