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Dissertation Information for Bernard Masan Myatt

NAME:
- Bernard Masan Myatt

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1996)

ADVISORS:
- Dan T. Carter

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: Culture wars: The Christian Right and the battle against evolution and secular humanism, 1980 to 1988

Abstract: In the 1980s a resurgence of the Christian fundamentalist movement resulted in several legislative and legal battles arising from fundamentalist efforts to influence the public schools in the United States. Specifically, the fundamentalists, or the Christian Right as they were often called in this modern resurgence, wanted to eradicate evolution from the science classrooms, reinstate state-sanctioned prayer and Bible reading, and remove "secular humanism" from the public schools.

The legislatures in Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws that mandated the teaching of "creation-science" in classrooms where the theory of evolution was taught. Creation-science proved to be a set of assumptions based on a fundamentalist reading of the creation story in the book of Genesis in the Bible. The debate centered on the fundamentalist assertion that evolution was not science and should not be taught as the only theory of origins. They offered creation-science as a viable "scientific" alternative that, they said, was as scientific as evolution and no more religious than evolution. Federal courts eventually declared the laws unconstitutional as violations of the First Amendment.

In Alabama, the legislature passed a law allowing state imposed prayer and Bible reading in the schools. The Governor had helped design the law to test earlier court decisions that had disallowed these activities. Christian fundamentalists provided the core constituency for the prayer law just as they had in Arkansas and Louisiana. The federal courts also declared the prayer law unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment.

Finally, in one last state-wide effort to introduce fundamentalist ideology, the Christian Right attempted to have the courts remove the "godless religion of secular humanism" from the schools in Alabama. The judge in the secular humanism trial had also presided at the school prayer case. He hoped to gain public support in his battle against the Federal Courts and for a more Christian America. The fundamentalists lost this battle also.

These cases all reflected the Manichean world-view of good versus evil--God versus Satan--that informed the fundamentalist cosmology. The fundamentalists saw themselves in a struggle with the devil to keep control of the souls of their children. Because many Americans shared the fundamentalist fears of an American culture that often seemed alien and without virtue, the fundamentalists received widespread attention and broader support than they had had in many years.

This study examines the reasons for this fundamentalist resurgence and the reasoning behind their assault on the modern world-view. Though the Christian Right lost each of these court battles, they reached a large audience of concerned citizens who sought desperately to regain a mythological America of goodness where the rugged individual lived a righteous life unencumbered by the incursions of minorities, modernists, and the Federal Government. These politicized Americans came to play a significant role in the politics of the 1990s.

MPACT Scores for Bernard Masan Myatt

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-03-31 11:36:55

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Students under Bernard Masan Myatt

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None