in human evolution in public classrooms. Their plan was to take up an offer from the American Civil Liberties Union to defend any teacher who violated such a law. The trial, held in a jovial atmosphere, turned serious when Bryan and Darrow faced off.
In popular culture like the film Inherit the Wind (1960), the older Bryan appears the loser in the debate with a Darrow at his peak.165 In fact, partisanship predicted reactions to that episode during the trial. Fundamentalists celebrated Bryan’s testimony as an unambiguous victory, while liberals extolled Darrow for unmasking Bryan as an ignoramus.166 Media sympathetic to Darrow fostered the stereotype of fundamentalist Christians as antiscience, even though Bryan himself was only nominally a fundamentalist. The disappointment to fundamentalists was the unexpected refusal of scientists believed to be anti-evolution to testify on behalf of the prosecution. The one scientist, George McCready Price, whom Bryan invoked as supporting his views, was absent and had his credentials credibly attacked. Darrow pointed out that Price, a Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist, had neither produced reputable scholarship nor attained a degree in science.
Coverage of the trial did not compel fundamentalists to go into hiding. As Matthew Sutton explains, Scopes “had little to do with the trajectory of fundamentalism proper at all.”167 The trial furnished a convenient caricature of fundamentalists to their opponents, but conservative evangelicals, including fundamentalists, continued to tackle political questions of the day. The 1920s and 1930s raised the specters of Communism and a Catholic president for conservative evangelicals, and they linked atheism to the former and the Antichrist to the latter. Their belief that Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency resembled the dictatorship of the Antichrist led to fervent opposition to the New Deal and pleas to vote Republican.168 Political failures, as with the repeal of Prohibition, easily fit into their prophetic belief that the world would only grow more sinful prior to the Rapture.
Like other Americans, conservative evangelicals still had faith in science, however. The Scopes trial suggested that the scientific establishment had sold out to evolution, but conservative evangelicals still respected scientific discoveries as a tool for biblical exegesis.169 Science and societal ills were not yet identical in their minds, and Scopes deterred no one from using science to support apocalyptic theories. In the 1930s, one such evangelical, Charles G. Trumball, the Presbyterian editor of Sunday School Times, reported on his notion that sunspots, the discovery of a possible new planet that was affecting the orbit of Uranus, and meteor showers were fulfilling the prediction that “the powers of heaven shall be shaken” prior to the Second Coming in Luke 21.170 For Trumbull and other Bible prophecy practitioners, the signs of the End were manifestations of known physical phenomena instead of mysterious supernatural events.
By this point, religious professionals were not the only ones publishing science-infused Bible prophecy. A Presbyterian lawyer from Illinois, Nathan Grier Moore, demonstrated the populist appeal of using science to explain Bible prophecy. Moore’s Man and His Manor (1934) analyzed potential ways the world could end from the perspective of science, and it attempted to reconcile science and religion in the area of end-times speculation. Moore offered a layman’s account of scientific conclusions about humanity’s and the Earth’s pasts as well as the likely future of both. Like scientific apocalypticists in Britain and Europe, Moore conceded that the end of life on Earth and the destruction of the world may occur separately or together, but, he asserted, “ultimately humanity will disappear.”171
Moore believed that the biblical account of the End was compatible with science: “on a scientific, as on a scriptural basis, the picture by St. Peter may describe it [the end of the world]. It deals rather with the fact than the method, but it is there assumed that it will be ‘burned with fervent heat.’ If so the last remnant of availing life, and the last world of matter, may break up together in a cataclysm of fire.”172 Moore’s invocation of the description of global fire in 2 Peter presaged the repeated use of that passage by premillennialists after World War II when applying science to biblical passages describing the apocalypse.173
A similar desire to incorporate technological advances and scientific knowledge into descriptions of the apocalypse was also present in premillennial fiction during the 1930s. Another American layperson, Eleanor De Forest, published Armageddon: A Tale of the Antichrist in 1938. Her novel found a home at William B. Eerdmans’s publishing company, founded in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after Eerdmans immigrated to the United States from Holland. Eerdmans was known at the time for its Calvinist publications. De Forest’s work foreshadowed future themes in Bible prophecy novels. The distinction that scientific apocalypticists made between the end of the world and the end of humanity informed her version of the Christian End. A character, in describing the End, says, “There will be profound changes in this earth as when the new heavens and new earth of Revelation materialize, but never total destruction.”174
De Forest’s novel centers in part on two scientists (a Russian and an American) who vie for the development of “the cathode ray,” described as “a terrible war weapon for aircraft use.”175 Just as after 1945 premillennialists would compare the effects of atomic weaponry to biblical passages that indicate destruction by fire, the fictional cathode ray’s effects resemble, according to the scientist that developed it, a prophetic passage in Zechariah: “And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord shall smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem, their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes and their tongues shall consume away in their mouths.”176 When the cathode ray is used in the novel, an observer exclaims: “There’s nothing left but skeletons—grinning, horrible skeletons! The others are going the same way. The flesh scabs, dries, falls off and disappears.”177 Though the cathode ray gun was a silly conception, the adoption of science fictional language indicates De Forest’s desire to place prophecy on a scientific footing. Far from God’s judgment being a supernatural event, humans could create the means by which God metes out punishment in De Forest’s novel.
De Forest is a notable exception in a field that white men mostly pioneered and dominated. Pentecostals and charismatics tended to be more inclusionary in practice than other evangelicals, taking the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ to its logical conclusion. The Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson spent the 1920s and 1930s warning her radio audience that doomsday was near, while also daring to hold integrated revivals, but she had no female counterparts in the older evangelical sects. McPherson personified the differences between Pentecostals and other evangelicals who believed women had no business preaching and who eschewed interracial cooperation. Though fundamentalists and Pentecostals could form an alliance regarding the evils of evolution or the necessity of salvation through Christ, the Pentecostal practices of faith healing and speaking in tongues resulted in doctrinal differences within dispensational premillennialism.178
The most common formulation of dispensationalist premillennialism describes miracles as gifts that ended on the Day of Pentecost when Christ’s apostles experienced a communion with the Holy Spirit, resulting in their speaking in tongues. Such miracles will only reappear during the Tribulation period in this interpretation. For Pentecostals and charismatics, speaking in tongues and faith healings were part of the spiritual life of modern believers, and that experience in the Holy Spirit was a necessary precondition for being Raptured.179 The rivalry among evangelical sects, evident in competing versions of dispensationalism, did not make a major appearance in general works of Bible prophecy until the new millennium.
Early Pentecostalism did not have a Scofield or Larkin of its own to popularize a Pentecostal version of dispensationalism; this may be because the movement in its infancy focused on differentiating itself from other evangelicals. The centrality of healings and glossolalia in charismatic faith may have also led to an emphasis of the supernatural over the scientific. Early Pentecostals believed prophesying the future was a spiritual gift that believers enjoyed, although many modern Pentecostals argue that prophesying is best understood as testifying to the power of the Lord. Access to prophecy
