Darwinism and the Divine America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900

As Darwinian evolution filtered into American society in the late 1800s, denominations and people of faith were blindsided with ideas foreign to most of them, and the need to deal with this issue provoked various reactions from those affected. While it resonated with some (either overlooking or embracing Origin's racist pretext), it became a struggle for others to put organic evolution into a proper biblical context. Tracing the strain of evolutionary thought through the last decades of the 19th century and showing how it contributed to the denigrating of theological thought in social discourse, Jon Roberts, a professor of history at Boston University, shows how this secular theory impacted the realm of Christianity by examining the thoughts and writings of Darwin's religious contemporaries.