ABSTRACT
The position of religion in America seems anomalous. Nowhere do educated people speak of religion with more general respect. The great diversity of sects in people's cities, and the fact that all are free and that no one is sufficiently powerful to have its church "established" and supported by direct taxation, remove most of the traditional sources of fear, irritation and conflict in regard to organized religion. The efforts on the part of Tennessee and other states to prohibit the teaching of evolution have seemed to some observers to be a recrudescence of an attitude generally supposed to have disappeared long ago. Few events are so characteristic of American intellectual life as the reply of the leaders of American science to the fundamentalists' attempt at prohibition of the teaching of evolution in schools supported by state funds. Reflective thought in country on nature and problems of religion does not seem to have been marked on whole by great vigor.
