In July of 1925, a 24-year-old high school teacher named John Scopes was arrested for teaching the theory of evolution through natural selection. At the time, Tennessee’s newly passed Butler Act made it illegal to teach anything in the classroom that contradicted the Bible. A century later, states are once again attempting to force the Bible into public education, this time not by banning evolution, but by promoting scripture as curriculum. Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint, proposes diverting taxpayer funds to private religious schools, to help promote “Christian” teachings favored by the religious right.
In a little-known twist, it was Scopes’ close friend, George Rappleyea, who urged him to violate the Butler Act. Rappleyea believed a legal challenge would draw national attention to the law’s absurdity. George Rappleyea, an engineer and Scopes’ close friend, saw the Butler Act as both unconstitutional and embarrassing. After some coffee, he persuaded Scopes to challenge the law by getting himself arrested, setting the stage for one of the most iconic courtroom battles in American history.
After Scope’s arrest, one of the nation’s most famous Biblical literalists, William Jennings Bryan, and the nation’s greatest lawyer, Clarence Darrow, squared off against each other in a Tennessee courtroom to decide the fate of Scopes, and potentially the freedom of a teacher to teach scientifically sound information in portions of the United States of America that valued false information about natural processes from the Bible.
An irony is that Bryan was, perhaps, not such a bad guy. Indeed, he and Darrow had been friends in the past and Darrow had supported Bryan’s presidential aspirations for a while. As a progressive and populist, Darrow was aligned with Bryan’s anti-corporate, pro-labor stance. William Jennings Bryan was known as “The Great Commoner” for his part in the reforms and proposed reforms that characterized the Progressive Era in American history.
Darrow was sometimes called “The Attorney for the Damned” because he often took cases of social victims, “underdogs” and the despised (like Leopold and Loeb, the child murderers who thought crime would allow them to become Nietzschean “supermen” – a misunderstanding of Nietzsche). He had been a lawyer for a wealthy and powerful Midwestern railroad until he learned that the railroad had falsified charges in order to arrest Eugene V. Debs, a union leader. Darrow quit his job at the railroad and successfully defended Debs. After that, there was no turning back. He continually distinguished himself as a person of integrity and principle in his future cases.
He was an ex-teacher and free-thinker who often took cases to “teach” the American public something new. He believed that people were not naturally “evil”, and that our environment shaped most of us into whatever we had become: a just society would produce good people if elements of society (e.g. poverty) causing crime were eliminated. Both Darrow and Bryan were nearing the end of illustrious and meaningful lives when they confronted each other in this courtroom spectacle.
The 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which is about the Scopes Trial, presents Darrow as the moral victor, even though he lost the immediate trial (he did overturn the verdict on appeal to a higher court – based on a technicality – although the Butler Act lasted until 1967). The character representing Bryan is depicted as acting deplorably in the trial and he experiences, at the end, what might be described as a mental collapse. Five days after the actual trial, Bryan, in fact, died, and it is often conjectured that his humiliation at the hands of Darrow may have caused his death. Darrow, however, claimed (probably with some malice) that the quite overweight Bryan ate himself to death by heart attack (he died after consuming a huge meaty meal).
A look at the trial transcript seems to reveal that both sides contributed to making this a virtual circus. That period of time was when journalism started to become more and more obsessed with the lurid and less and less obsessed with fulfilling a socially responsible function.
Scopes never sought publicity and after the trial was over he seemed happy to be without it. The town fathers of Dayton, Tennessee embraced Rappleyea’s idea and sought publicity by arresting Scopes. They also rigged the trial through their choice of judge. Scopes was never under any threat of incarceration; folks were eager to use him to promote their own agendas. When he was found guilty, he was merely fined $100.
Darrow described himself as an agnostic. He wasn’t sure whether there was a God or not, but he was pretty sure there wasn’t. He wanted to use the trial to attack Christian fundamentalism as much as Bryan and the town fathers wanted to exult Christian fundamentalism by attacking a seemingly powerless and obscure teacher.
As was depicted in the film, Darrow does try to make Bryan a fool, and, to a great extent, succeeds, but Bryan always sticks to his beliefs and often flusters Darrow. Darrow is never really able to crack the facade that he thinks Bryan presents. He continually appeals to Bryan’s common sense and reason but Bryan is often proudly evasive and continually salvages, at least for himself, stories and miracles from the Bible that defy reason and common sense.
Knowing of Bryan’s heartfelt, sincere and concerted efforts in fighting for the rights of the poor in America, for many years, makes it painful to read the court transcript. Bryan comes across as tragic in this spectacle.
Darrow, the ex-teacher, wanted to present some of the most brilliant scientists in America to show that the stories of the Bible cannot be believed on a literal basis. After Darrow presented a scientist from Johns Hopkins University as a witness, the Attorney General of Tennessee asserted that Darrow was in league with, “…that which strikes its fangs at the very bosom of Christianity.”
Judge John Raulston wasn’t chosen at random. Dayton’s civic leaders knew he would favor the prosecution. In effect, he was their ringer: a respectable figure meant to tip the scales. After the Johns Hopkins University witness, Raulston refused to allow Darrow to use a Tennessee courtroom to discredit a literal interpretation of the Bible with the aid of scientific experts.
Darrow, therefore, adopted a different strategy. He was, after all, one of the most brilliant lawyers in history. He called William Jennings Bryan, himself, to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. This, the judge allowed. This may, however, have been better for Darrow than calling expert scientific witnesses. Bryan showed himself, in regard to the Bible, to be quite narrow-minded. Portions from the transcript follow, with Darrow beginning:
Darrow: “You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?”
Bryan: “Yes I have, I have studied the Bible for about 50 years.”
Darrow: “Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?”
Bryan: “I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there…”
Darrow then shows that one story in the Bible is based on an incomplete and inaccurate knowledge of astronomy. Not until around the 17th century could it be shown without doubt that the sun was relatively stationary in its relationship to the earth and that the earth revolved around the sun. The story of Joshua stopping the sun in its path around the earth is, therefore, false according to scientific standards and reflects the misconception of that time that the earth was the center of the universe.
Darrow: “Do you believe that Joshua made the sun stand still?”
Bryan: “I believe what the Bible says.”
Darrow: “I suppose you mean that the earth stood still?”
Bryan: “I don’t know. I am talking about the Bible now. I accept the Bible absolutely.”
Darrow then goads Bryan into admitting a literal belief in Noah and the flood.
Darrow: “How long ago was the flood, Mr. Bryan?”
Bryan: “Two-thousand three-hundred and forty-eight years BC.”
Darrow: “You believe that all the living things that were not contained in the ark were destroyed?”
Bryan: “I think the fish may have lived.”
Darrow: “Don’t you know there are any number of civilizations that are traced back to more than five thousand years?”
Bryan: “I am not satisfied with any evidence I have seen.”
Darrow: “You believe that every civilization on earth and every living thing, except possibly the fishes, were wiped out by the flood?”
Bryan: “At that time.”
Again, it was Darrow’s assertion that actual scientific and historical evidence showed that no world-wide and devastating flood could have occurred.
Darrow: “Do you think the earth was made in six days?”
Bryan: “Not six days of twenty-four hours.”
Darrow: “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?”
Bryan: “No sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.”
Darrow: “Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?”
Bryan: “Yes.”
Darrow: “And they had evening and morning without the sun?”
Origen, a highly regarded “father” of the early Catholic Church once wrote in the 3rd Century: “What intelligent person can imagine that there was a first day, then a second and third day, evening and morning without the sun, moon and stars?…Who is foolish enough to believe that, like a human gardener, God planted a garden in Eden in the East and placed in it a tree of life, visible and physical, so that by biting into its fruit one would obtain life…I cannot imagine that anyone will doubt that these details point symbolically to spiritual meanings by using a historical narrative which did not literally happen.” (De Principis Book 4, Chapter 1)
Bryan never convinces Darrow and Darrow never convinces Bryan. Bryan can never show a compelling reason to adhere to stories that defy reason and Darrow can never crack an unquestioning faith. Darrow and Bryan represent two extremes that persist to this day. One extreme is that everything in the Bible is literally true. The other is that since little or nothing in the Bible is literally true it should be abandoned.
Perhaps the showdown at the Scopes Trial shows there is a third option: even though much of the Bible is not “true” literally, it does contain, among its many flaws, meaningful and transformative truth (as Origen pointed out). Nobody has yet “reinvented the wheel” and the Bible, especially the Gospels, still contains a moral challenge and message of hope which can still guide folks toward aspiring to better lives and a more humane society.
Perhaps this is the approach that will finally end an ideological battle between two factions that each embrace a doctrinaire position over the humane but ignored truth that the allegories, insights and symbolism of the book provide. Perhaps we need to stop fighting over whether we should keep or abandon the book and try to understand it better and glean the meaning and relevance that motivated such folks as St. Patrick, Francis of Assisi, Sojourner Truth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero and Desmond Tutu, among so many others.
Perhaps the real showdown has to be between the Christian Fundamentalists who do not interpret the Gospels, but instead impute their own politics into them, and those who want to take a real look at the Bible – the good, the bad and the ugly – and be moved by the beauty of the moral message that still resides there. Perhaps we need to keep working to promote the third option.
Indeed, after the Scopes Trial, where Christian fundamentalism was discredited by Darrow as the trial was covered daily by newspapers throughout America and parts of the proceedings were broadcast live by WGN of Chicago (which reached a huge swath of the US), he probably felt he had helped to rid the world of fundamentalism. The fundamentalists are, however, still here, as strong as ever. Until fundamentalists can be taught something more meaningful than fundamentalism, it will continue to remain.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: Wikimedia
