Adaptation of an article that first appeared in Prophecy in the News Magazine Issue #23 – July 2024.
July 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of one of the best-known court cases in American history. This landmark case is formally titled The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes, but is better known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The small town of Dayton, Tenn., became America’s focal point as a fiery debate raged there over the role of the Bible in public education.
In 2024, Louisiana mandated that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom in the state. The state of Texas recently passed a similar bill, now awaiting the governor’s signature. Also in 2024, Oklahoma public schools mandated the incorporation of the Bible and the Ten Commandments into their curriculum.
The ACLU is taking legal action to block these attempts. The ACLU was also at the forefront of the Scopes Monkey Trial, five short years after its founding in 1920. Will history repeat itself?
What Was the Scopes Monkey Trial?
The film Inherit the Wind debuted in 1960, based on a 1955 stage play by the same name. It popularized the 1925 Scopes Trial and was widely received as if it were a factually correct docudrama. Sadly, the facts of the landmark case faded into fiction when the film introduced its story to a new generation enthralled by emerging scientific frontiers.
In one scene, the film depicts a science teacher bravely standing in front of his classroom, beginning his lecture when his supervisors silently slip into the back of the classroom. The teacher boldly announces his intention to teach Charles Darwin’s theory on the origin of man. One of the supervisors puts a stop to his plan in front of the whole class.
While this makes for a dramatic scene, it is all fiction. John T. Scopes was not a science teacher. He was a football coach who was asked to substitute teach a biology class for the last couple of weeks of the school year. He did not boldly lecture a class about the evolution of man; rather, he expressed doubts about whether he taught evolution in the classroom at all.
The Butler Act Basis
Before getting too far ahead, journey back a few steps in history. What caused the Scopes Trial in the first place? In 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which made it illegal 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.”
When the ACLU caught wind of this new state law, they paid for advertisements in several Tennessee newspapers. An ad in the Chattanooga Daily Times read: “We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job.”
This ad caught the attention of George Washington Rappleyea, who lived about 40 miles from Chattanooga. He was a local businessman who saw an opportunity to bring attention and a business boom to Dayton and the surrounding Rhea County. Rappleyea talked a reluctant Scopes into participating, although Scopes was much more interested in football than in biology and evolutionary theory.
Dr. David Menton (1938-2021), who held a Ph.D. in biology and worked with Answers in Genesis after a remarkable academic career, wrote, “Although Scopes never taught evolution during his two weeks as a biology teacher, and thus really didn’t violate the Butler Act, it was considered sufficient that the class textbook, Hunter’s Civic Biology, did cover the evolution of man. For example, the Hunter textbook speculated that in his early history, ‘man must have been little better than one of the lower animals’ and concluded that, ‘At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man… the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.’”
This unbiblical, unscientific and disgusting racism undergirded the original teaching of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Sadly, this goes unnoticed by many people. The likes of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, bought into this kind of evolutionary theory as she coupled eugenics with white supremacy to popularize abortion in predominantly non-white neighborhoods.
Trying Times
The Scopes Trial battle lines were drawn as the prosecution hired popular lawyer, politician and Christian, William Jennings Bryan, and the ACLU hired the well-known criminal attorney and agnostic Clarence Darrow to help defend John T. Scopes.
If Rappleyea wanted attention, he got a circus. National media and people descended upon rural Rhea County, Tenn. The court’s central job was to decide whether Scopes broke the law by violating the Butler Act, but the high-profile lawyers focused more on whether evolution should be taught as fact in public schools. The large crowds were engulfed in this debate, and it quickly morphed into a public battle between biblical creation vs. natural evolution.
The trial was never about Scopes’ violation of the law. It was an attempt to test the law and force the legal system to decide what was permissible to teach in public schools. For the record, Scopes was found guilty, but both the prosecution and the defense offered to pay his $100 fine. The Butler Act was not repealed in Tennessee until 1967, just a few years after school-mandated prayer (1962) and Bible reading (1963) were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Trial’s Impact on American Education
John D. Morris (1946-2023), Ph.D. and former president of the Institute for Creation Research, noted the fallout from the Scopes Trial in the evangelical Christian community. “What did occur was a debilitating defeat for Christians in the public eye. Believers retreated into their churches, and abandoned the schools, media, and influence in the public arena to the secularists. We still suffer from this retreat today, as we find Christian principles systematically excluded. America, whose citizenry overwhelmingly identifies with Christianity, has become fully secularized. The Scopes Trial was the turning point.”
Inherit the Wind made evolution look brave, bold and intellectually astute while it portrayed Bible-believers as anti-intellectual, backward and blind followers of religion who ignored reason.
The 18th-century Enlightenment birthed the notion that faith and reason were opposites. As fields of science blossomed, a growing dichotomy between science and Scripture emerged. By the time Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, the scientific community was primed to accept a theory of origin that did not need a creator. Darwin’s theories found widespread acceptance among the scientific community and transformed academia from the top down, starting with universities and trickling its way to the youngest pupils. This opened the intellectual door to make God unnecessary for science and school.
In recent years, a growing number of scientists have observed fatal flaws in Darwin’s theories. For example, Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist who has researched a principle called irreducible complexity. At its core, this scientific principle states that all components necessary for function must be present and working at the same time. Behe uses an old-fashioned mousetrap as his illustration. Remove just one piece from it, and it will not function as a mousetrap. In the human body, we see this kind of irreducible complexity down to the cellular level. Take out just one microscopic component, and the cell will die. How could these irreducibly complex systems have evolved slowly over time? Impossible! This is just one in a growing list of scientific flaws with Darwinian evolution.
If evolutionary theory is anything but a proven fact, why is it taught as if it cannot be questioned? Ironically, the shoe is now on the other foot. One hundred years ago, evolutionists used the Scopes Trial to mock biblical creationists for clinging to their religion instead of looking at what they considered to be facts. Many of the so-called facts they used to make their argument back then have been proven false.
Now, biblical creationists are calling out adherents to the religion of scientism for closing their minds to mountains of evidence pointing to the necessity of an Intelligent Designer. It is past time to give the Creator King of the universe His rightful place in the study of science.
