ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, in July of 1925, a trial — the Scopes trial — captivated the nation. It was, in a sense, a shot heard round the world, for it too was delivered in defense of freedom. In this case, though, the freedom to worship and to learn was at stake.

A few months earlier, the Tennessee state legislature had passed the Butler Act, a law forbidding public schools to teach “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.”

The five-year-old American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) considered the Tennessee law to be a flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which stipulates the separation of church and state. It announced that it would defend a Tennessee public school teacher who would test the law in the courts by breaking it.

In Dayton, a town of no more than 2,000 in the eastern part of the state, a young substitute biology instructor named John Scopes stepped up. You can’t teach biology without teaching evolution, Scopes said, and he’d used the existing state-sponsored biology textbook in his class. This textbook included a short discussion of evolution, which by 1925 was considered settled and foundational scientific theory in both the scientific and academic communities.

Soon an international sensation, the Scopes trial — its implications — cut to the heart of democracy, for it asked who should determine what people should know or read or learn or worship and how that determination would be made. And the questions raised are as pertinent today as they were one hundred years ago.

The Butler Act 

IN 1925, THE key questions were brilliantly articulated by two celebrated orators.

William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket who had for decades spoken eloquently against corporate power and plunder, was prosecuting for the state of Tennessee against Scopes, who had been indicted for violating the Butler Act. In his long career as a progressive, Bryan had advocated such reforms as the government ownership of utilities, a graduated income tax, currency reform, woman’s suffrage and Prohibition — which, in his mind, would help purify the nation by abolishing alcoholism, child abuse, and violence against women.

Bryan was also a man of contradictions who more and more fell out of step with the freedoms that he once held dear: a nation born of comity, forbearance, and religious freedom. During the previous Democratic National Convention, he had refused to condemn the resurgent and powerful Ku Klux Klan, arguing that to do so would only publicize it, though in truth he just wanted to skirt the issue. Hoping to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Florida, Bryan didn’t wish to alienate his white constituents. He long believed, as he wrote in his memoirs, “I was born a member of the greatest of all the races, the Caucasian Race.” Bryan also defiantly believed that the Bible must be read literally. To him, his brand of Christianity, a fundamentalist Protestantism, was the one and only valid one.

The defense, arguing on behalf of Scopes, was led by the legendary Clarence Darrow. A longtime defender of freedom of thought and the right to worship (or not worship), Darrow had volunteered to defend Scopes. Not because Scopes was innocent — the science teacher had intentionally broken the law after all — and not because he disliked Bryan (which he did), but because Darrow firmly believed that the stakes were enormously high. “Nothing will satisfy us but broad victory,” Darrow explained, “to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.”

Of course, to some, even within the ACLU, Darrow was not the ideal person to defend Scopes. He was a controversial criminal lawyer and a confirmed agnostic. He did not deny the existence of God, but he’d not yet found any reason to believe, he said. Yet he too, like people of all different faiths, found in the Bible those parables and metaphors and poetry that console and offer spiritual sustenance.

The defense team also included Arthur Garfield Hays, a secular Jew, and Dudley Field Malone, a practicing Catholic. And as Hays demonstrated, reading from the statement of the Reverend W. C. Whitaker, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Knoxville, Tenn., “A man can be a Christian without taking every word of the Bible literally; not only so, but the man has never lived who took every word of the Bible literally,” wrote Whitaker. “When St. Paul said, ‘I am crucified with Christ,’ and when David said, ‘the little hills skipped like rams,’ neither expected that what he wrote would be taken literally.” Malone said that his very presence offered proof that one could believe in both God and science. He declared that the youth of the country should have both science and theology — let them love both, let them revere both.

But to Bryan, the trial would be a “duel to the death,” as he said, with his interpretation of Christianity pitted not just against evolution but against what he saw as a vast conspiracy of liberal Protestants and atheists and agnostics determined to destroy it.

A Scopes-like season?

WE HEAR ECHOES of Bryanism in some of today’s executive actions, proposed legislation, and threats to the rule of law and the integrity of education. This spring provided far too many examples.

The Department of the Navy leadership responded to a Trump administration order by removing nearly 400 books from the Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy. Mein Kampf remains on the shelves but not historian Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of PEN America and three public school students in Rutherford County, Tenn., challenging books removals and restrictions that violate the students’ First Amendment rights to receive information and that of authors to free expression. PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 books banned in public schools across the country since 2021, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Similarly, this spring, the ACLU sued the Department of Defense’s education agency, arguing that DOD’s order to ban certain novels, chapters in textbooks, topics of discussion, and student clubs denies students the opportunity to learn. “We think of the changes in these schools as the canary in the proverbial coal mine for the changes this administration would like to see throughout the country,” a lawyer with the ACLU explained.

The Trump administration also froze more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University when it refused to comply with such demands as allowing academic programs and departments to be “audited,” making the University’s hiring and admissions practices comply with government guidelines, and reporting international students if they broke rules. Harvard president Alan Garber responded to the demands by writing that “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

In addition, two evolutionary biologists decided not to submit their co-written paper to a special edition of a Royal Society journal out of fear that the publication of their research might cause them to be deported. Both are foreign-born academics with legal residency in the United States, but, “The incident seemed to capture the chill hanging over science in the U.S. at the moment,” concluded The Washington Post reporter.

And the Oklahoma legislature recently debated whether a resolution that declares “Christ is King” elevates one religion over another, which violates the Constitution. (It passed in the House along party lines in April and next moves to the state Senate.)

That is what the legendary Clarence Darrow had feared a century ago when he presciently declared that “no subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate and these fires are being lighted today in America.”

One constitution for all

AT ITS CORE, then, the Scopes trial wasn’t really about evolution — or not solely about that. Few people understood or even cared about it, and the scientists who had traveled to Dayton were not even allowed to testify. The lawyers defending John Scopes understood that behind the issue of what could or should be taught in the classroom, behind the question of separating church and state, lay a particularly American prejudice, xenophobia, and fanaticism.

In the 1920s, vibrant Black communities were being massacred. Congress passed laws restricting the immigration of people not considered “Nordic.” The Ku Klux Klan targeted, harassed, thrashed, and sometimes murdered Catholics, Jews, and Black Americans. And the American Eugenics Society, founded in 1921, called for the sterilization of 10 percent of the U.S. population to prevent “the suicide of the white race.” That’s why, in Darrow’s closing remarks, he was addressing the future as well as those Dayton jurors of 100 years ago. “I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft,” Darrow said, “because we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum.”

Clarence Darrow had chosen his words with care. Referring to Bryan’s desire to subordinate everyone and everything to Bryan’s narrow religious beliefs, Darrow was suggesting that the legacy of the Scopes trial would be the legacy of an America where the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution can never be taken for granted. To Darrow the issue was not whether a scientific theory was right or wrong — only science could determine that. The issue was democratic tolerance of diverse points of view. And as he implied, the U.S. Constitution protects both science and religion.

Though the Constitution demonstrably forbids the establishment of a state religion, Bryan aimed to create an avowedly Christian theocracy, with his literalist interpretation of the Bible made mandatory reading in the classroom — and with the teaching of science patently undercut. Had he lived, he might well have proposed and fought for a constitutional amendment demanding that the Bible (and only his fundamentalist interpretation of it) be taught in public schools in lieu of scientific textbooks.

Although the jury found Scopes guilty, which he was, and the defense team failed to get the Tennessee law argued before U.S. Supreme Court, the Scopes lawyers considered that they’d won a moral victory in the court of public opinion. In a stunning legal maneuver, Darrow had called Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and Bryan was only too happy to testify. But when Bryan denied that he was a mammal, when he claimed he wasn’t interested in geology, when he discredited all other religions and then, contradicting himself, said that maybe Creation took longer than six literal days, then Darrow demonstrated to the public that Tennessee’s anti-evolution law was, as Hays put it, “conceived in bigotry and born in ignorance — ignorance of the Bible, of religion, of history, and of science.”

As Darrow also observed, “Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. … Today, it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers.” After a while, he continued, “it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century,” when people lit torches to burn at the stake any and all “who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

One hundred years after the Scopes trial, the players and the context have changed. Yet, the trial itself reminds us, to quote Darrow again, that, alas, “no subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate.”