Science has become a political rallying cry in modern America, with liberals declaring “Science is real” and conservatives of various persuasions critical not only, as in the past, of evolutionary teaching that contradicts the Bible but also of new scientific claims linked to public policy, including assertions regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines and the potential dire consequences of human-caused climate change. Many scientists appeal to empiricism, experiment, and expert review. Others see belief in science as a matter of faith, even a competing faith, often to the discomfort of scientists.

This situation is not new. The proposed roundtable addresses the tensions between science and religion in the early twentieth century, highlighting an overlooked front in the culture wars of the 1920s. The Scopes anti-evolution trial of 1925 represented the culmination of almost two decades of conflict within Protestant denominations, in which “fundamentalism” emerged to challenge liberal Protestantism, but also an emerging division between religious conservatives and newly professionalized scientists and educators.

Between 1922 and 1931, the University of Chicago Divinity School’s American Institute of Sacred Literature published a series of ten pamphlets on “Science and Religion” written by the leading Protestant liberal spokesmen Shailer Mathews and Harry Emerson Fosdick as well as seven notable scientists, including Nobel physicists Robert Millikan and Arthur Holly Compton, biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, and geologist Kirtley Mather. Financially supported by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the university distributed the pocket-sized pamphlets widely, mailing them to every legislator and public school principal in the country and thousands of ministers.

Widely distributed at the time, they became difficult to find. Historians have hitherto overlooked this ambitious counterpart to the well-known Fundamentals, but Edward Davis has produced a scholarly edition of the pamphlets (Protestant Modernist Pamphlets: Science and Religion in the Scopes Era [Johns Hopkins, 2024]), with a lengthy introduction narrating their story and reassessing the Protestant modernist encounter with science.

This roundtable considers the significance of these pamphlets, now widely available for the first time in generations, and fosters a conversation about the way in which scientists and religious liberals negotiated an early moment in a conflict that continues to shape American society and politics.