Post war America was a low time for the country. There was an economic depression, the working class went back to its old, poor conditions, and nativism was widespread. The country needed change and reform.
In class, we watched a documentary about how religion changed during this time. The reason vs. religion argument was a great ignition to democratic reform. With new scientific evidence that challenged traditional and literal Christianity, many people started to question it. The whole debate of religion during this video focused on traditional vs. modern religion. Challenging the traditional, fundamentalist religion created a whole new way of thinking, causing many people to adapt to these ideas. This created change, and lots of people were able to publicly support this change. This could pave the way to being more open about change and challenging tradition and the old ways of doing things try and create positive change, or reforms.
However, with any change there will always be those who oppose it. Many fundamentalists were very angry, and a conflict arose. So, the entire country was not in favor of modernizing and reforming. What are your thoughts on the video we watched today in class? How do you think religion helped lead to democratic reforms?
In my opinion, religion itself didn't necessarily cause democratic reforms, however the controversies sparked by social conflicts in the context of American Christianity definitely caused political changes during the 19th and 20th centuries. Because religion was such a big part of American culture at the time, it's clear that it had strong influences on the nation's society and politics which therefore caused it to impact legislation throughout the country. And as the documentary we watched in class showed, these conflicts did cause reforms throughout the country, from laws preventing evolutionism from being taught in schools to major court cases such as Scope v Tennessee regarding tensions between evangelists and evolutionists. In these cases, the law favored religion over science/reasoning because Christianity was such a big part of American culture at the time, which shows how to a certain extent, the religious beliefs of Americans impacted legislation and reforms. Schools couldn't teach evolutionism, and therefore, teachers such as John Scopes were prosecuted for doing so at the expense of evolutionists and there beliefs, so suffice to say, Christianity was a major contributor to such change. And to a certain extent, I think that the effects of overall social change regarding the emergence of evolutionism and reasoning in contrast to firmly believing in religion can be shown through the general views of the public towards religion, as people who heard about trials such as Scopes' were outraged by fundamentalism and wanted to create even more political change in order to promote modernist ideals. So at the same time as religion was influencing politics at the time, American society was changing to a great extent which caused new ideas such as evolutionism to become prominent in many areas over evangelism.
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