Encyclopedia of Science and Religion | Scopes Trial

Perhaps the most famous symbol of the science-religion clash, the Scopes Trial took place during July 1925 in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. On trial for teaching evolution was high school teacher John Thomas Scopes, who agreed to serve as defendant in a case to challenge Tennessee's recently-passed Butler Act (Public Acts of the State of Tennessee, 1925, Chapter 27). This statute was the first effective legislation that emerged from the anti-evolution crusade, the most dramatic manifestation of the religious movement known as Protestant Fundamentalism. The Butler Act prohibited the teaching in public schools of "any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The Scopes Trial was precipitated by citizens of Dayton, who hoped to use the resulting publicity to boost their community, and by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which hoped to secure a judicial ruling that such anti-evolution laws were unconstitutional. The trial attracted worldwide attention, in part because noted attorney Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) was a member of the defense team, while famous politician and anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) assisted the prosecution.

The Scopes Trial generated significant media comment, virtually all of it negative. Writers such as H. L. Mencken portrayed Bryan and his supporters as buffoons and dismissed the rural South as a backward region. Although the trial produced a few dramatic moments, such as Darrow's examination of Bryan as a Biblical expert, the courtroom activity proved relatively inconsequential. The ACLU was unable to use the trial as a forum to discuss evolutionary concepts because the judge had prohibited expert testimony as irrelevant. Assuming that Scopes would be convicted, the defense planned an extensive appeal leading to the U. S. Supreme Court and thus took the Dayton proceedings somewhat casually. The local jury had little trouble finding Scopes guilty, after which the defense appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Although this court affirmed that the Butler Act was legitimate, it overturned Scopes's conviction on a technicality and urged the state to drop the matter. This decision ended all appeals and left the constitutional status of the Butler Act undecided.

Although the Scopes Trial is often seen as a defeat for the anti-evolution forces, it actually served to stimulate the movement. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in adopting anti-evolution statutes, all of which remained in place until the late 1960s. After the Scopes Trial, evolutionary concepts largely disappeared from the nation's public school science curriculum, as textbook publishers ignored the topic to maintain sales. During the final third of the twentieth century, new anti-evolution campaigns emerged in the form of "creation-science" and "intelligent design" arguments, which sought to convince the public that evolution was bad science and that there existed scientific evidence for the literal interpretation of the Genesis account of creation. Among the states that attempted to compromise the teaching of evolution in this fashion were Arkansas, Arizona, California, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Tennessee. Although efforts to enact state legislation to mandate the inclusion of these concepts in the science curriculum failed to survive constitutional analysis, the place of evolution in American public schools remained nebulous in the early years of the twenty-first century.

See also CREATION; CREATION SCIENCE; CREATIONISM; DARWIN, CHARLES; DESIGN; EVOLUTION; FUNDAMENTALISM; INTELLIGENT DESIGN

GEORGE E. WEBB