Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America

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This book offers stunning new depth to a relatively familiar tale: the 1925 Scopes monkey trial and the campaign of some evangelical Christians to publicly castigate evolutionary science and propagate their own views of creationism. Launching with the undertold labor backgrounds of John Scopes himself and of Dayton, Tennessee, the book examines the vicissitudes of the antievolution movement throughout the twentieth century and into the present. Red Dynamite includes the role of well-known figures (J. Frank Norris, Aimee McPherson, Ronald Reagan, Ken Ham and his Kentucky Noah's Ark), as well as their captivatingly more obscure comrades (George McCready Price, Gerald Winrod, Fred C. Schwarz). Creationism, argues Carl R. Weinberg, was never just about narrowly scientific models, ideological technicalities, or biblical hermeneutics. It was deeply, and intentionally, embedded in broader American cultural contestations over capitalism's sacrosanctity, skepticism of labor unions, changing gender roles, evolving sexual morality, social power, and America's status as a perceived Christian nation. Antievolutionists mobilized politically to respond to all of these as a cluster of concerns. The interconnections forged between these issues Weinberg monikers the “Red Dynamite” tradition. Such an account further demonstrates continuity between the old and new Christian Right and the persistence of conservative evangelical quests to shape the culture. It also reveals how the latter tradition never honestly reckoned with the blatantly anti-Semitic and segregationist legacy of earlier antievolutionists.