Fundamentalism and The Scopes Trials
Fundamentalism originally referred to an American Protestant movement however the term was meant to describe not evaluate and was mostly used for describing the many religious groups and their agendas. Many of the goals was to shoot down the idea of modernism and bring back the belief of basic religion and the strict beliefs that focused on the sacred text. Many fundamentalist took every word that was written in the Bible as the literal truth. They believed that the Holy Book was the answer to every question or problem. In the 1920’s, when a wide variety of the population was switching over to Christianity, Fundamentalism became very strong in the rural areas.
Fundamentalism worked against the ideas that modernism had brought out during the Scope Trials in 1925. Fundamentalist believed that God had created Adam and Eve to start out the Human race on the planet Earth. Charles Darwin believed that complex living things like humans were developed from other organisms that had gone through evolution to adapt. Darwin's theory was rejected by many people because they went against many of the points that the Bible described on how life was created. in 1925 it became illegal to teach Darwin's theory in schools. Later, John scopes taught this theory to his class at a high school in Tennessee and was arrested. The trails soon started being called the “Monkey Trials” because of how Charles believed that humans developed from monkeys.