Still persecuted after all these years?

William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner

Many people familiar with the political career of William Jennings Bryan, the "Great Commoner," have been puzzled how he could go from being the fiery leader of the Populist Party who captured the 1896 Democratic Party presidential nomination after his Cross of Gold speech, to being the most famous opponent of the teaching of evolution in the public schools, facing off against Clarence Darrow in the legendary "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925.

But there is some internal logic to his position. There seems to be no reason to believe that his religious beliefs were cynical rather than sincere. And a big part of the logic was Bryan's solidarity with the disinherited and the disadvantaged. Paolo Coletta wrote in William Jennings Bryan: Political Puritan, 1915-1925 (1969):

As the political scene passed him by - cynics said he had nothing left but his real estate [business] and his God - Bryan appeared to be a religious anachronism to those satisfied with the status of the Protestant churches in the 1920's, "corpulent and contented" in an "Age of the Babbitonian Captivity," in which Christ appeared as a glorified Rotarian and the business of the church was to sell the church. To those unhappy with the materialism and commercialism of their church, however, he was a marvelous exponent of the belief that the reformation of the social order as well as that of the individual was within the province of the church and that reform action could proceed only after agreement was reached upon ethical premises which in turn rested upon theological principles. For his defense of the old-time religion he became a hero to rural America, in most of the evangelical press, and also in some of the secular press not only because he had a message but because he was "brilliant in championship of his Christian ideals." [my emphasis]

The combination of a real estate business and God seems like the California ideal of 2005. But apart from that, Bryan's simplistic and reactionary view of evolution in the context of the Christian religion did not lead him to embrace the Gospel of Wealth.

In fact, one of the reasons he was so opposed to what he understood to be the Darwininian doctrine was his opposition to the Social Darwinism that had become so popular among America's robber barons in the late 19th century. The British scientist Herbert Spencer had popularized the doctrine through his book Social Statics. But when Spencer visited the United States and heard first-hand to what extremes his American acolytes had taken his doctrine to justify an obscence maldistribution of wealth, even he was apalled.

John Kenneth Galbraith gave an account of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous American advocate of Social Darwinism in religion of his day in The Age of Uncertainty (1977) in his own distinctive style:

His reconciliation [of Christianity and Darwinism] involved a distinction between theology and religion. Theology, like the animal kingdom, was evolutionary. Such change did not contradict the Holy Writ. Religion was enduring. Its truths did not change. Darwin and Spencer belonged to theology; the Bible was religion. So there was no conflict between natural selection and the Holy Scripture. I do not understand this distinction, and it is fairly certain that neither Beecher nor his congregation did either. But it sounded exceptionally good.

Beecher had other good news for his affluent flock. God particularly loved sinners, for He greatly enjoyed redeeming them. So, by implication, one could go out of an occasional evening and sin. The ensuing repentance and redemption would then do wonders for God's morale. Beecher thereupon proceeded to follow his own advice. Robert Shaplen, the author of the definitive study of Beecher's private and litigious life and later one of the most authoritative reporters on Vietnam and the Vietnam war, has shown how faithful he was in this regard. Besides comforting his rich parishioners on the legitimacy of their wealth, Beecher comforted their wives - some of them at least - by taking them to bed. Eventually one, Elizabeth Tilton, was assailed by the thought that even though Beecher was being redeemed, her case was not so clear. So she confessed not to God as intended but to her husband, and he sued Beecher. The jury disagreed on Beecher's guilt. No one who has since looked at the evidence has had any similar doubt.

Earlier on, I mentioned that Beecher had told Spencer of his hope that they would meet again in heaven. There must be many, and I am one, who would prefer not to meet either.

One certainly doesn't have to be a flat-earther to see the problematic nature of this application of Darwinism.

In the following description by Coletta, we see how Bryan positioned his anti-evolution position as a defense of the poor against the powerful:

Bryan's religious belief was simple, sincere, courageous, and anti-intellectual in the tradition of such evangelical preachers as Theodore Frelinghuysen and George Whitefield in the eighteenth century; Charles Grandison Finney and Dwight L. Moody in the nineteenth; and Billy Sunday and Billy Graham in the twentieth. He appealed to the disinherited in religion as well as in politics, with his support coming from the southern parts of the country, which showed the greatest amount of illiteracy among whites. Conversely, to much of the North and East he was a straightlaced moralist and Fundamentalist who wonderfully exemplified persistent intolerance to new intellectual currents.

"I have linked my life with principles that will never die," said Bryan. He defined religion as "the relation which man fixed between himself and his God," and morality as "the outward manifestation of this inward relation." The relation between man and his God, he alleged, was "the most potent influence that acts upon a human life." The "cultured crowd" that looked down contemptuously upon religion as fit only for the ignorant and uneducated assumed an unwarranted intellectual superiority, for religion rested not upon superstitious fear of the invisible forces of nature but upon man's consciousness of his finiteness and sinfulness. God was so self-evident that no proof of his existence was needed. Moreover, "It is easier for the human man to believe in ... God [as the Creator] than to believe in any other theory of creation."

The comment about how the "cultured crowd" looked with contempt on fundamentalists echoes complaints today about "elitism" that have become a stock component of the Republicans' efforts to persuade the public that the party of Wall Street is actually interested in protecting the ordinary voter against a snobbish "elite."

This pitch appeals with particular success with white Protestant fundamentalists. But in Bryan's day, there was a much more obvious reality-based reason to see fundamentalists as deprived and abused by the rich and powerful. But the notion that they were being persecuted for their religion was about as fanciful then as it is today.

Do I need to add that William Jennings Bryan would find himself more than a little uncomfortable in company with the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells and James Dobsons of today?

Tags: christian fundamentalism, populism, william jennings bryan