This is a place to collect references and citations that document the various types of creationists and victorian naturalists as well as other evolutionary opponents (I.D.ers), and various examples.
Creationists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
By the early twentieth century, theologically conservative Protestants in the United States had splintered into various subgroups. Evangelicals proclaimed the traditional Protestant gospel of personal salvation through faith in Jesus and upheld the Bible as God's inspired word. In the 1920s, a subgroup of militant evangelicals began calling themselves "fundamentalists" to emphasize their commitment to what they saw as the fundamental tenets of biblical Christianity: the inerrancy of Scripture, the veracity of Old and New Testament miracles, and the trustworthiness of end-time prophecies. Pentecostals emerged as a separate subgroup claiming power through the Holy Spirit to heal, prophesy, and speak in tongues. The vast majority of Americans who identified with these subgroups shared to some degree Sunday's concerns about the theory of evolution. Indeed, most conservative Christian never warned to Darwinism.
Dwight L. Moody damned the "false doctrine" of materialistic evolution as one critical sin-inducing "temptation" afflicting modern life; after his death in 1899, his ongoing Bible Institute emerged as a center for anti-evolutionism...
...By the 1920s, many leading American evangelicals and fundamentalists had taken a public stand against the theory of evolution. Powerful Baptist and Presbyterian pastors launched drives to purge denominational colleges and seminaries of Darwinian influences. Among those responding to a 1927 survey of American Protestant ministers, a significant percentage of Lutherans (89), Baptists (63), Presbyterians (35), and Methodists (24) answered "yes" to the question, "Do you believe that the creation of the world occured in the manner and time recorded in Genesis?"
Notably, only about one in ten of the Episcopalian and Congregationalist ministers responding to this survey affirmed a belief in the Genesis account of creation. Because of their wealth and social standing, Episcopalians and Congregationalists tended to carry weight in elite culture, higher education, and state politics disproportionate to their numbers. Evolutionism often became part of the religious worldview of liberal theologians and ministers in these and other Protestant denominations. The renowned Congregational pastor Henry Ward Beecher blazed the trail in 1885 by publishing Evolution and Religion, in which he extolled evolution as "the method of God in the creation of the world" and in the development of human society, religion, and morality. "Evolution is accepted as the method of creation by the whole scientific world," Beecher wrote. "It is the duty of the friends of simple and unadulterated Christianity to hail the rising light and to uncover every element of religious teaching to its wholesome beams."
Billy Sunday is discussed in Larson 2004, p. 199-200 He "was not a doctrinaire fundamentalist; Sunday characterized his views as 'pure Americanism'" [5] He preached in his February 1925 Memphis rvival: "I don't believe the old bastard theory of evolution....I believe I am just as God Almighty made me."[6] Quoting from the book: "Theodore Roosevelt once joined Sunday onstage and Woodrow Wilson invited him to the Whitehouse."[7] Quoting from the book: "Sunday opposed evolutionary theories of both human origins and religious understanding. The two blurred in his mind. Embracing developments in biblical higher criticism, many theologically liberal Christians accepted the so-called "modernist" interpretation of the Bible as a collection of accounts about God written over time by various authors, with earlier accounts typically offering more primitive concepts than later ones. Both religious modernism and the scientific theory of evolution denied the literal truth of Genesis, Sunday argued."[8]
Sunday said (quoting from the book)"When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scolarship can go to hell."[9]
Quoting from the book:
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When Sunday peopled hell in his sermons, Charles Darwin inevitably failed in the fiery flames. Huxley and Spencer occasionally joined him. During World War One, German evolutionists, Social Darwinists, and expositors of biblical higher criticism bore the brunt of Sunday's venom. By the time of his 1925 Memphis revival, in the heat of battle over anti-evolution legislation, Sunday focused on evolutionary educators. "Teaching evolution. Teaching about pre-historic man. No such thing as pre-historic man. In the beginning God made man--and that's as far back as it runs," he declared. "A-a-ah! Pre-historic man. Pre-historic man. Ga-ga-ga-ga," at which point, Memphis's leading newspaper reported, "Mr. Sunday gagged as if about to vomit.[10]"[11]
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Even if evolution represented the best naturalistic explanation for the origin of species, anti-evolutionists like Sunday declared their intent to stick with a literal reading of God's word until science proved evolution by direct observation. Further, Sunday complained that Darwinism replaced the traditional Christian belief in a perfect original creation broken by human sinfulness with the image of humanity ascending through purely natural processes from savage origins to ever-higher levels of development. The fact that many liberal Christians, spiritual modernists, and agnostics welcomed this reversal of viewpoint made traditional Christians all the more wary. Finally, Sunday linked evolutionary biology to Social Darwinism, eugenics, and other forms of biological determinism that stood in opposition to his message of individual salvation and sanctification available through divine grace to all people regardless of their supposed genetic fitness.
Wills, Ridley (1925-02-18), Church School Today Hotbed of Infidelity, Billy Sunday Charges, Commercial Appeal (Memphis) {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)
