Public fights over the role morality and churches should play in American life. Vocal evangelicals tripped by personal scandals. Heated debates over science versus religion, definitions of obscenity, a presidential candidate’s religious faith.

Welcome to — the Roaring Twenties?

As current as many of those topics seem today, they were equally vibrant in 1920s America, said Baylor University professor of history Barry Hankins in his new book, “Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars.” published this month by Palgrave McMillan.

Baylor University history professor and author Barry Hankins wrote “Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars,” published this month.
Duane A. Laverty/Waco Tribune-Herald

“After a period of about a half century, from the 1930s to the 1980s, when religion was viewed more as a private, individual concern, I wanted to show how similar the place of religion was in the public arena in both the ’20s and now,” he said.

Think 1980s televangelists like Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell pioneered a fusion of personality and religion?

Try former baseball player Billy Sunday, whose dynamic preaching style and pop culture sensibilities packed his revival tents and tabernacles in the 1910s and 1920s. Or female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose dramatic stage presence and radio preaching drew thousands each week to her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, including Hollywood actors and filmmakers seeking to learn from her style.

Black preachers Daddy Grace and Father Divine built sizable personal followings — and idiosyncratic theologies — during that decade from their home congregations in New York.

High-profile preachers in the 1920s weren’t above scandal, either. A supposed kidnapping of McPherson in 1926 evolved into accusations she had been with a married man during that time. Fort Worth pastor J. Frank Norris, a fundamentalist firebrand who often targeted Baylor University and Texas Baptists, went through a public murder trial for shooting to death a man in his church office, though he was found not guilty.

Today’s religious-flavored debates over abortion, science and intelligent design, homosexuality and morality in media had equally emotional counterparts in 1920s fights over Prohibition, the teaching of evolution, fundamentalism and book censorship.

As today, the clash between a corporate sense of morality and individual rights fueled many of those surface struggles, Hankins said, although readers might be surprised to see how fluid battlelines could be, with opponents in one fight joining in common cause in another.

Right to censor

Liberal Protestants fought openly with fundamentalists over evolution and the relation of science to religion, but the two agreed on a Boston controversy over a community’s right to censor books and the fear that the Catholicism of 1928 presidential candidate Al Smith would make him subservient to the Pope and not the American people, he noted.

Much of “Jesus and Gin” was familiar territory for Hankins. a scholar of the intersection of religion, politics and American culture, and author of such histories as “God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism” and “American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement.”

Hankins said a popular misconception of the 1920s is that fundamentalism and conservative Christianity were defeated in the public arena in controversies over Prohibition and the 1925 Scopes Trial concernng the teaching of evolution. “(Fundamentalists) didn’t disappear. They were vigorously building Bible colleges and mission programs in the time between the 1930s and 1980s,” he said.

As Hankins’ book points out, the popular memory of the Scopes trial, in which defense attorney Clarence Darrow attacked famed politician and preacher William Jennings Bryan over creationism and evolution, has been molded more by Jerome Lawrence’s and Robert E. Lee’s play “Inherit the Wind” than the actual trial. Similarly, Sinclair Lewis’ “Elmer Gantry” shaped public perception of 1920s evangelists Sunday and McPherson.

Contemporary political and religious filters sometimes skew views of history. Prohibition, which outlawed the sale but not consumption of alcoholic beverages, wasn’t an attempt by moralistic Protestants to control behavior they felt sinful or frivolous, but an attempt to address the corrosive effect of alcoholism on the workplace and the family, Hankins said.

Different type of battle

Its failure, marked by the repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933, could be attributed to a sizable unwillingness to help its enforcement, Hankins said. But alcohol-related deaths and conditions did decrease markedly during Prohibition, one of the effects sought by its supporters.

Likewise, viewing the Scopes trial as a fundamentalist-vs.-science battle overlooks the effort by liberal Protestants in that decade to discredit fundamentalism as preachers like Harry Emerson Fosdick argued faith and science could be reconciled.

Though clashes between communal values and individual rights characterize today as well as the 1920s, Hankins says it’s not a matter of repeating cycles. Hankins points to a recent resolution by the Southern Baptist Convention concerning the Gulf oil spill — one with an environmental sensitivity — as evidence that people and issues don’t remain static.

Rather than an America polarized into only two camps, the Baylor historian sees shifting alliances and social controversies resulting from the country’s diversity.

“I’m always careful to say culture wars rather than a Culture War,” he said. “The intensity of many of these issues waxes and wanes, and issues change. Really, culture wars are fought by the minority, maybe 20 percent on the far side of an issue against 20 percent on the other side with the great majority of people watching, trying to figure out what side to come down on.”

choover@wacotrib.com

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