RELS 161 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill, Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Religious Studies
• Course: RELS 161
• Professor: Ian Alexander Cuthbertson

Document Summary

The growth of new protestant churches (denominations) threatened the idea of a single, universal christian truth. Darwin"s (1809-1882) theory of evolution challenged biblical accounts of creation. Genesis: god created humans "in his own image" Darwin: humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. Genesis: god created the world in six days. Darwin: evolution took place over billions of years. These challenges inspired two responses within mainstream protestant christianity in the. Modernists saw christianity as capable of adaptive growth. Modernists were willing to discard or re-interpret christian doctrine that disagreed with modern science. Some modernists doubted jesus" apparent virgin birth or a literal second coming: this could be seen as "progressive" from a modernist perspective or "regressive" from a fundamentalist perspective, slippery slope argument from fundamentalists. Fundamentalists wanted to defend certain fundamental (basic and necessary) elements of the protestant faith. The term fundamentalism became popular in the 1920s.