The Scopes trial was not just a debate between science and religion

Thirty years ago, when I was in eighth grade at a small public school in central Pennsylvania, my biology teacher told us we were going to study the theory of evolution, which she described as “an alternative theory to the story of divine creation.” She was usually unflappable, but I remember noticing that for a moment her voice had a certain tone; her face a certain expression – an eerie mixture of anxiety, fear, and anger.

About a century ago, the trial of John T. Scopes marked a flashpoint in an American culture war – between religious belief and science – that continues in one form or another to this day. In her new book Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Divided a NationBrenda Wineapple offers a comprehensive account of the 1925 trial in which a small-town schoolteacher was put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution and accused of undermining Christian creationism. But more importantly, Wineapple's book offers a vivid account of how fear has always operated on our national consciousness—and a way to come to terms with our own fractured political present.

Scopes' “monkey trial,” as the journalist who covered the proceedings called it, HL Mencken, was never really about Scopes himself – the mild-mannered 24-year-old biology teacher accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibits the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. Rather, it was about the competing ambitions of the two men who fought a bitter battle for Scopes' fate: Clarence Darrow, who was the defense attorney, and William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, who was the state's prosecution.

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At the time of the trial, Darrow, a newly elected member of the ACLU's National Committee, was committed to academic freedom in elementary and secondary schools, including the right to teach Darwin's theory of evolution. But his ambition was much greater: He wanted to fight ignorance in all its forms, even if that meant questioning the Bible. Bryan, on the other hand, was committed to putting Christian conservatism at the center of American politics. He thought academic freedom was dangerously overrated, especially in difficult times. As Wineapple writes, Bryan believed that “Darwin's theory … allowed the strong to exploit the weak and, in the name of human perfection, created men without God who thought themselves gods.”

Wineapple's astute account of the trial reveals how opponents in a culture clash can be equally vulnerable and shortsighted. Throughout the book, she echoes the views of another reporter covering the proceedings, who wrote in a report that people on both sides of the debate were “equally baffled” “at heart, deep down in their hearts.” The whole country actually got a bit of an uproar over the monkey trial: Some supposedly enlightened intellectuals—today we would call them liberals—attacked everything spiritual and religious (Darrow, for example, simply laughed at the “amens” uttered in the courtroom). Many Christians invoked the value of unconditional faith and rejected critical discourse. The Ku Klux Klan, seeing Bryan as a champion, muttered “America Forever” among its growing ranks. Meanwhile, spectators on the streets of Dayton, Tennessee, where the trial was taking place, continued to buy monkey souvenirs.

Many people around the world watched with equal parts awe, embarrassment and disgust. It was a moment when a relatively young country proved itself tactless and uncaring.

What those outside the United States may have viewed with bewilderment is perfectly understandable to a historian like Wineapple. Modern notions of democracy and religious freedom were inscribed in the founding of the United States, and yet a segment of its population has always looked to God and the Bible in times of crisis. Even as the colonies struggled to survive in the 1740s, settlers turned to Scripture as part of a religious “awakening,” seeking the gospel for meaning in an uncertain world. The aftermath of World War I—marked by harsh economic conditions, worldwide grief, and the utter devastation of Europe—awakened a certain strand of Christian America, including people like Bryan, who believed that restoring religious notions of tradition, unity, and purity would save the country from unrest.

The United States was never as traditional, united, or pure as Bryan claimed, but that hardly mattered to him and his followers. What mattered was his fear that conservatives were losing their God-given place in the world. According to Wineapple, “underlying this fear of the origins of humanity was, of course, another fear: that the vaunted superiority of the so-called Northerners might be a fiction.” Evolution implied that life originated, in the words of one commentator, “in the jungles” of Africa, not in a divine paradise. Bryan's defense of creationism was also an endorsement of a subset of white America. Defender of Chicago wrote that evolution “is contrary to the South's conception of its own importance. It combats everything that tends to destroy its doctrine of white superiority.”

But the prosecution also had an existential fear that Darrow's snarky and caustic defense ignored. For Christians like Bryan, divine creation included the promise that human life was something valuable. For Bryan, Scopes' decision to teach Darwin was a deliberate affront to the moral order – and to any meaningful future for humanity. Bryan's fear, as Wineapple describes it, reflected “the fear of the new, the different, the fear that if knowledge or information were admitted, the world one knew would be unrecognizable, alien and frightening.”

Wineapple's account of the trial is a reminder that political polarization is often a result of fear. And when the fate of a nation seems to be at stake, there is little room for common ground. Bryan appealed to the Christian faith of his Southern audience, arguing that only by adhering to dogma could America be preserved. In the words of Mencken, “To call a man a doubter in these parts is tantamount to accusing him of cannibalism.” Darrow, on the other hand, feared being locked into a political and legal system that would hinder progress in all its forms. And in the tumult, something very important was lost. Wineapple writes, “For all their differences and animosities, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were in some ways more alike than either of them would admit. Journalist William Allen White … characterized them as equally passionate, emotional, and committed to the ideal of a better world.” Their visions of that world, however, were entirely different.

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It is not a spoiler, nor does it ruin the suspense of Wineapple's outstanding book, to reveal that the jury found Scopes guilty of violating the Butler Act, which would stand for another 42 years. Scopes was given the minimum fine of $100. Bryan, Christian fundamentalists and the anti-evolutionists declared themselves the winners. And two weeks after the trial ended, the Ku Klux Klan marched in droves on Washington, DC.

Yet, according to Wineapple, Darrow had the last word: “The way of the world is very, very strange… You can be sure that the forces of reaction and despotism never sleep… and in these days when conservatism is in the saddle, we must be very vigilant.” In 2024, most high school teachers in the United States teach evolutionary theory—even if some do so with the same reluctance I experienced in eighth grade. Darrow need not have been so afraid that the circumstances of the Scopes trial could permanently prevent social and political change. And yet he was right to warn Americans that progress is never guaranteed.