Christianity
in America

This is a short, printable magazine article about the observations of an English clergyman found in The Christian World (London) as to that distinct brand of Christianity practiced in the United States in the early Twentieth Century:

“…Christianity in America is divided into two camps. The one is orthodox. Its orthodoxy is apt to degenerate into the senile attachment to the letter of Scripture…There is a lack of mental breadth, of intellectual enlightenment, about the members of this school which is a little disheartening to one who is in agreement with them on the central matters…The other school seems to have sacrificed almost everything which makes Christianity distinct from a temporary philosophy. It’s members have the bad habit of preaching eugenics or sociology in place of the Gospel. They appear to be afraid of the great epistles and the nobler passages of the Gospels, and are apt to speak in terms which would suggest that there was nothing distinctive in Christianity which can make it an absolute and universal faith.”

In 1925 these two groups would go head to head in a Tennessee courtroom debating Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and its place in the schoolroom.