Back in Tennessee after a year’s teaching in Idaho, Sharon and I took a two-day, triangular road trip last week (Nashville to Nashville, via Chattanooga, Knoxville, Crossville, and Cookeville) to visit old friends. At our first stop, the couple suggested we’d find an easier drive on US-27 (up through Soddy Daisy—my favorite town name—Dayton, and Rockwood to I-40) than on I-75. Sure enough, it was a good, four-lane route, and we got to stop in Dayton, where I once spoke to a student-affairs conference at Bryan College. Sharon hadn’t seen Bryan (named for William Jennings Bryan, who pled the biblical case at the Scopes Trial in town), so we took a turn up through the lovely, hilltop school. 

Before that, we visited the courthouse, where the famous “Monkey Trial” was held in the hot July of 1925. Earlier that year, the Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act forbidding the teaching of any theory that conflicted with the biblical account of creation, and the ACLU wanted to confront that law. So, they offered to provide defense counsel for a test case, and, dreaming of massive publicity, some Dayton’s movers and shakers pressed local high school teacher, John Scopes, to be the defendant. And it worked. The town was swamped with a great audience for the contest, which pitted the agnostic Clarence Darrow against the Bible believer, Bryan, who was a national figure, esteemed as a great orator, one who’d served in Congress and as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. He’d also sought the presidency, having run three times to be the Democrats’ nominee. 

A carnival atmosphere permeated the town, with over a hundred journalists clustered there as well as vendors who made a killing. The nation at large got in on the excitement, hearing the country’s first radio broadcast of a trial. Today, a museum in the basement of the courthouse displays some photos from the event, including one of a monkey dressed up for golfing, with a bag bearing a club slung over his shoulder. The man at the museum desk told us about the big splash the original trial made, but said it got quiet again after the trial, to the dismay of the locals . . . until, that is, this year, the hundredth anniversary of the event. Now folks are coming from everywhere, including Europe and Asia, to have a look at the scene of the historic encounter.

Bryan won, and Scopes was fined $100. But it proved to be a Pyrrhic Victory. The decision was reversed on a technicality, and, decades later, the law was repealed. But, more than this, the trial was a PR disaster for young-earth creationism. Darrow was a slick, godless dude from Chicago, in tune with the science worship of the day (cf. the Fundamentalist-Modernist struggles); Bryan came off more as a Bible-thumpin’ good ole boy. The image was secured by the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, which plays “Give Me That Old-Time Religion” over the scene of Scopes’s arrest. 

One of our local rags, the Nashville Scene, gave the trial entennial a cover story. (It’s a free tabloid, found on library and restaurant racks, funded by what’s-happening-in-town ads nicely situated among features inimical to a Christian perspective.) They drew on an outside source, one that, of course, had commentary from a smug UNC, poli-sci professor. He explained, “Today evolution has been replaced by other topics that are worrisome to conservatives: gender studies; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and how history is taught, among others. And we see some college presidents are buckling today—think about Columbia for example—while others are resisting.” Whew! The horror of our parochial worrisomeness.

Of course, they offered not a word from philosophy professors, Thomas Nagel (at UC-Berkeley, Princeton, and NYU) and Jerry Fodor (at MIT, CUNY, and Rutgers), who’ve raised serious concerns over the standard evolutionary account of man. And you find nothing about the yeoman work of the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis, who hosted the Grand Canyon raft trip, where, along with two dozen other profs, I heard their account of a quick-cut for the Canyon. They presented what they held was evidence that it took only a few days to scour out the massive ditch, accomplished by a “dam break” of a huge lake held back by a mound of wet residue left in southern Utah, a deposit of the receding waters left by Noah’s flood. And I believed them.

Reading the Baptist & Reflector’s account of the event and its centennial observance, I see that the then-editor, John Freeman, wrote, “The struggle is in earnest and the only thing that will be pleasing in the sight of God is for his people to wage the battle with all the power they possess. If we compromise with the Amalekites, our doom is sealed.” A few weeks later, when Bryan died of a stroke five days after the trial, Freeman added, “And upon the records of eternity no name will be more resplendent than that of him who like the Apostle Paul was willing to be accursed for his own people’s sake.” Well, Bryan’s name is still accursed in the secular culture, but the records of eternity aren’t yet published. 

Reading through the Scene’s account, I saw that Scopes spoke at Peabody College in April of 1970, five months before I came to Vanderbilt for graduate study. (Peabody is across from VU and is now a part of the University.) Then, in October of that year, Scopes died. That was the same year that Sharon and I joined Belmont Heights Baptist Church, where John Freeman was an elderly, honored staff member. I had no idea he’d been such a bold supporter of Bryan, writing from Dayton in 1925.

Here you see the jury box, as preserved in the current court room. Yes, they rendered a decision against Scopes, but the cultural elites have ruled otherwise. They would have you believe that their ruling is settled. But no, in our fair land, Evangelicals in particular say that Darrow was the fool. And even though most of us think there’s a place to discuss Darwin’s theory in the classroom, we’re not amused by the snotty support he gets at every turn. They would have you believe that it’s a non-issue in favor of the ACLU’s golden boy. But I would argue, there are credentialed dissenters in current society’s jury room, well positioned to block the sweeping decision so thoroughly touted in society’s universities and museums. And, so, the deliberations continue.