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you kids know what is good for you, you’ll move along. The Kluxers are patrolling this road tonight, and God knows what they’ll do to you if they catch you here.”
    The Klan monitored movie theaters in order to police “moral conditions” among loose high school students and burned down dance halls frequented by teenagers, since “most of the cases of assault between the sexes have followed dances where they got the inspiration for rash and immoral acts.” 9 In an almost pornographic ceremony that was repeated dozens if not hundreds of times, Klan members hauled “fallen women” to remote locations, stripped them naked, and flogged them.
    The Ku Klux Klan drew many—perhaps most—of its members from cities and metropolitan areas. 10 Its rosters included a fairly even mix of small-business men, professionals, and manual workers.Unlike the original Klan, which was a southern phenomenon, the new organization drew from a cross section of white Protestant America, and many of its members attended mainline churches. In effect, the Klan had broad appeal among different people who shared a profound sense of unease over social change and modernization.
    The Klan was only one manifestation of cultural reaction in the 1920s. Like no other event of the 1920s, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” burned itself into the national imagination.
    Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Americans remained firmly committed to evangelical Protestantism. They shared a general commitment to the doctrine of Christian salvation, personal conversion experience, and absolute biblical authority. Generations of public school pupils were raised on textbooks like McGuffey’s Readers , which drove home the interconnected virtues of Sabbath observance, frugality, hard work, and Bible reading.
    This evangelical consensus began to unravel in the late nineteenth century under the strains of scientific discovery. Scholars were simply discovering too much about matter, energy, and the cosmos to sanction literal readings of scripture. Such developments led Lyman Abbott, an outspoken modernist, to argue that “whether God made the animal man by a mechanical process in an hour or by a process of growth continuing through the centuries is quite immaterial to one who believes that into man God breathes a divine life.” 11
    Theologians like Abbott were raising the stakes high. If the Old Testament story of creation—of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden—was more allegory than straight history, then the entire Bible might very well be open to individual interpretation.
    Who could say with certainty what was and wasn’t the truth?
    In the absence of absolute truth, how could humans avoid slipping into an endless cycle of moral relativism?
    If biblical wisdom was fair game for interpretation, wasn’t the same true of other time-tested values and social codes?
    In 1910, traditionalists in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church identified five theological “fundamentals” that scientists and religious modernists could not challenge: absolute scriptural inerrancy,the virgin birth of Christ, personal salvation in Christ, Christ’s resurrection, and the authenticity of Christ’s earthly miracles. 12 Other defenders of evangelical orthodoxy turned to the same language when they published The Fundamentals , a series of twelve paperback volumes that answered Christian modernists with a ringing defense of biblical literalism. In 1919, some of the more conservative members of the traditional camp formed the World Christian Fundamentals Association; and in 1920, journalists began lumping most conservative Christians together as “fundamentalists.”
    People who were uneasy about the unraveling of Victorian culture—those who were unnerved by the religious and ethnic diversity that accompanied mass immigration, who feared the modern world’s celebration of personal choice and satisfaction, and who lamented the abandonment of old gender and sexual