Early Monday morning, July 20, 1925, Judge John T. Raulston decided to move the trial outside to a makeshift platform on the courthouse lawn. The courtroom floor had begun to crack under the weight of the crowds. By this time, the legal aspect of the trial was over; John T. Scopes would be convicted of teaching Darwinism in the public school. Clarence Darrow, however, America’s premier defense attorney and proud agnostic, had one more hand to play. Having lost the litigious battle, he focused his attention to winning the culture war. In a move to discredit his enemies, he summoned numerous scientists to testify on behalf of the theory of evolution.1

When prosecutor William Jennings Bryan objected to the testimony, Darrow rose and called him to the stand. (Bryan, known as “the Great Commoner,” was the three-time presidential candidate, former Secretary of State, and trenchant critic of Darwinism.) For over two hours, the famous defense attorney peppered Bryan with barbed questions about the Bible’s most fantastic stories: the origin of Cain’s wife, the worldwide flood, a floating axehead, the sun standing still. How could one believe these accounts literally?

The “Scopes Monkey Trial,” as it came to be known, was contrived from the very beginning. At the instigation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a group of men approached Scopes as to whether he would allow himself to be charged with a new Tennessee law which forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. Actually, Scopes was not a biology teacher at all; he coached football. Having substituted for a sick biology teacher the last two weeks of the school year, however, he was perfectly situated to challenge the evolution statute. Scopes agreed, and the city of Dayton, Tennessee, began a publicity blitz to whip the nation into a frenzy about the trial. Wanting a prominent name for his case, the district attorney of Dayton invited Bryan to take part in the prosecution of John T. Scopes. With two of the most famous men in the country—Darrow and Bryan on board—newspapers dispatched reporters to cover the “trial of the century.”

A few days after the trial began, the outcome was becoming clear: Bryan’s argument that the state legislature had every right to determine the curriculum for its schools made sense to the court. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Bryan lost the wider debate that day under Darrow’s intense grilling. “The Great Commoner” was forced to agree that the Bible requires interpretation: after all, it was not actually the sun standing still, he admitted, but the earth. He confessed ignorance of non-Christian religions, the date of the earth, and the number of languages in the world. Darrow declared victory; Bryan and his ilk were not qualified to speak on matters of science.2

Darrow pressed his victory further by portraying Bible-believing Christians in the worst possible light. Historian George Marsden recounts the cultural results:

In the popular imagination, there were on the one side the small town, the backwoods, half-educated yokels, obscurantism, crackpot hawkers of religion, fundamentalism, the South, . . . William Jennings Bryan. Opposed to these were the city, the clique of New York-Chicago lawyers, intellectuals, journalists, wits, sophisticates, modernists, and the urbane agnostic Clarence Darrow.3

The Church responded to the Scopes trial—as well as to defeats in the struggle for control in the mainline denominations—by retreating into the shadows. The Fundamentalist movement, originally the champion of basic historic Christian truths, turned into an isolationist and socially disengaged enclave. Preachers such as William Bell Riley, J. Frank Norris, and Bob Jones simply abandoned the culture altogether, started their own schools, and nurtured a separatist agenda. If the world was going to be saved, they reasoned, it was somehow going to have to find the hidden, but pure, Church.

The Fundamentalist retreat from the public arena lasted nearly two decades while the nation grappled with Nazism, fascism, and the Second World War. Only in the late forties and fifties did Christianity again begin to address matters of social concern when figures such as Billy Graham, Carl F. H. Henry, and Harold John Ockenga challenged the Church to return from her self-imposed exile. Their effort has inspired a generation of cultural engagement. Evangelicals have made advances in the areas of politics, science, and education. Recently, for example, the intelligent design movement4 has placed traditional Darwinism on the defensive, thanks both to good science and a Church willing to think about the issues and support the cause. Momentum, however, can be a fleeting phenomenon. Mindful of the Scopes trial debacle and the ensuing failures, the leaders of the body of Christ must, in Winston Churchill’s words, “learn from misfortune the means of future strength.”5

Footnotes:
1
The most exhaustive account of the Scopes trial to date may be found in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer prize-winning history, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 170ff.

2
For details on this interchange, see Larson, 188-190. Theologian Millard Erickson summarized Bryan’s failure in this way: “the fundamentalist simply was not arguing adequately. As a result, his position was rejected or at least ignored by men of scholarly acumen in the various disciplines simply because it did not seem to be consistent with intellectual integrity.” See Millard Erickson, The New Evangelical Theology (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell Co., 1968), 27.

3
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 185.

4
William Dembski, “The Intelligent Design Movement,” Cosmic Pursuit, Spring 1998, http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idmovement.htm.

5
Winston Churchill, cited in Steven F. Hayward, Churchill on Leadership (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 1998), 27.

article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located one and a half miles east of Rt. 222.