100 Years Since The Scopes Trial: Evolution, Religion and America’s Classroom Conflicts
(ANALYSIS) One hundred years ago this month, Americans were transfixed as a Tennessee courtroom hosted challenge to the state’s new law barring “the teaching of the Evolution Theory” in public schools, including colleges. The prohibition covered “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
That’s why the spectacle was called the “Monkey Trial,” as well as the “Trial of the Century” or the “Scopes Trial” after defendant John Scopes, a high school science teacher. The local economy of Dayton boomed briefly and a carnival atmosphere developed. More than 100 newspaper reporters flocked to the city and Chicago’s WGN transmitted the first live radio broadcast of a trial. Thousands observed one trial session held on the courthouse lawn.
There were several vital issues at play: Academic freedom for teachers, citizens’ role in what schools teach, how public schools should treat sensitive religious/cultural disputes and whether the Book of Genesis is threatened by Charles Darwin’s 1859 classic “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
READ: Most Americans Believe God Played A Role In Human Origins
Outsize personalities enhanced the hubbub. The prosecutors were joined by William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ 1896 presidential nominee, who won 47% of the vote against fierce Wall Street opposition and was again the 1900 and 1908 nominee. Bryan was later a dovish Secretary of State who quit to protest President Woodrow Wilson’s policy toward Germany as World War I escalated.
Though politically quite radical, Bryan was a fundamentalist on the Bible and on evolution. Depictions often omit his populist alarm about “social Darwinism” that applied “survival of the fittest” to human politics and economics. In a planned trial speech he never got to make, Bryan said Darwinism undergirds “the savage custom of eliminating the weak so that only the strong will survive,” a “loathsome” and “inhuman” doctrine that “drags mankind down to the level of the brute.”
The Scopes legend grew when Bryan died days after the trial. Admirers later founded Bryan College in Dayton to permanently honor the pious Presbyterian. The school requires teachers and staff to affirm annually that Adam and Eve “are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life forms.” The college and local county have been jointly marking the Scopes Centennial with trial re-enactments, debates and panel discussions.
Another Scopes star was defense attorney Clarence Darrow, who the year before had won life sentences instead of execution for notorious thrill killers Leopold and Loeb. The young American Civil Liberties Union originated the Tennessee test case by literally advertising for its defendant. Pioneer ACLU lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays and famed society divorce attorney Dudley Field Malone rounded out the defense team.
Talk about odd trials! The judge ruled out all testimony from the defense’s scientific experts. The jurors were excluded from most court sessions. Witnesses never established that Scopes actually taught Darwinism, but he admitted this anyway, making the guilty verdict automatic. The ACLU then lost its hoped-for appeal to promote academic freedom because the conviction was overturned on a technicality. Tennessee’s law remained on the books until 1967. In Epperson v. Arkansas from 1968, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court abolished anti-evolution laws as an unconstitutional “establishment of religion” by government.
Protestant fundamentalists won the trial (Catholics were not central to the ruckus), but suffered cultural ridicule. Interpretations were shaped by the third star at Dayton, caustic Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken. He despised Bryan and small-town Bible believers, depicted as ignorant bigots, “rustic japes” and “yokels” whose “buffoonery” proved them to be “among the inferior orders of men.”
Longer-term opinions are influenced by the 1955 Broadway play “Inherit the Wind” (a title taken from biblical Proverbs 11:29), and 1960 film with Spencer Tracy as the heroic “Drummond” (Darrow) and Fredric March as a befuddled “Brady” (Bryan). This fictionalized McCarthy Era drama was not intended to be factual and conflicts with some history.
The climax of the actual trial, followed by the play and film, was Darrow’s theatrical gambit of calling Bryan as an expert witness on the Bible (transcript of that confrontation here). Some questions imitated college dorm bull sessions (like where did Cain get his wife? Did serpents only crawl on the ground after Eve was tempted?). Regarding evolution, Bryan testified that the six “days” of creation need not be taken literally, and Earth may have existed “for millions of years.”
Those views are rejected by the Bible literalists known as “creationists.” Last year, a Gallup poll reported that a 37% plurality affirmed this view, by which “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Another 34% were believers who thought “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Only 24% said “God had no part in this process,” though that group has been growing.
With the end of anti-evolution laws, the “creation science” movement urged schools to give “equal time” to its arguments against Darwinism. But in 1987, the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard outlawed such a program in Louisiana, also citing “establishment of religion.”
Next, the “intelligent design” movement bypassed “young earth” literalism, but questioned Darwinian proofs and contended that only a superior entity (implicitly God) could create nature’s evidence. Law professor Phillip Johnson’s “Darwin on Trial” (1991) was followed by Ph.D. holders associated with Seattle’s Discovery Institute such as microbiologist Michael Behe, mathematical logician William Dembski and Stephen Meyer, a philosophy of science specialist. In 2005, a Pennsylvania federal court barred “intelligent design” in science classes, again on “establishment” grounds.
The ongoing debate includes the analysis of eminent Protestant philosopher Alvin Plantinga in “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.” Faith can uphold science and vice versa, he insisted, and trouble arises if teaching assumes that evolution is “unguided” and without “purpose.” He also said schools should make clear that such secular philosophizing exceeds what scientific evidence can ever prove.
Of related interest is the centennial reflection in Christianity Today by S. Joshua Swamidass, a “computational biology” and genetics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He said a growing number of evangelicals think current evolutionary science can be “entirely compatible with even a very literalistic reading of Genesis — including a historical Adam and Eve from whom we all descend,” created “directly by God.”
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.