A large fraction of American Christians, however, refused to move beyond the picture of human creation they’d had as children. “I don’t believe your own bastard theory of evolution,” Billy Sunday snarled. “I believe it’s pure jackass nonsense.” In the winter of 1925, he preached for two weeks in Memphis, where 250,000 people (in a city of 200,000) turned out to hear him rail against Darwin and godless biology.
