The Scopes Trial: The Day Faith and Science Went to Court

The town of Dayton, Tennessee had a population of about 1,800 people in the summer of 1925. It had a drugstore called Robinson's Drug Store. And it had a plan.

A group of local businessmen, reading that the ACLU had offered to defend any teacher willing to challenge Tennessee's new Butler Act — which made it illegal to teach "any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible" — decided that a trial in Dayton would put their town on the map.

They recruited John Scopes, a 24-year-old science teacher who had substituted in a biology class and may or may not have actually taught evolution. Whether he had was almost beside the point. He agreed to be arrested.

What followed was the most famous trial of the 20th century.

The Protagonists

Two giants came to Dayton.

William Jennings Bryan was 65 years old and one of the most famous men in America. Three-time Democratic presidential nominee. Secretary of State under Wilson. The greatest orator of his era. Bryan had spent decades as the champion of ordinary Americans against the elites — the banks, the railroads, the financiers of the Gilded Age. Now he had attached himself to another cause: protecting the faith of rural Americans against what he saw as the corrosive materialism of Darwinian evolution.

Bryan's opposition to evolution was not simply anti-intellectual. He believed — with some evidence — that Social Darwinism, the application of survival-of-the-fittest logic to human society, was being used to justify inequality, imperialism, and eugenics. He was not wrong about the misuse of Darwin. He was wrong about the solution.

Clarence Darrow was 68 and the most celebrated defense attorney in America. He had defended Eugene Debs, the labor leader. He had defended Leopold and Loeb, the thrill killers, in a case that had transfixed the nation the previous year. He was an agnostic who relished confrontation with what he saw as religious superstition. He volunteered to defend Scopes without fee.

The two men had been allies in the populist movement decades earlier. Now they were enemies, and Dayton was their arena.

The Trial

The trial opened on July 10, 1925, in a courthouse so packed that the judge eventually moved proceedings outside to prevent the floor from collapsing under the weight of spectators. WGN Radio broadcast it live — the first live broadcast of a trial in American history. H.L. Mencken, the most acerbic journalist in America, covered it for the Baltimore Sun and filed dispatches that savaged Bryan and Tennessee with equal contempt.

The legal issues were straightforward. Scopes had (probably) taught evolution. The Butler Act prohibited it. The jury convicted him in nine minutes and fined him $100.

The legal outcome was entirely irrelevant to what the trial actually was.

The Moment That Made History

On the trial's penultimate day, Darrow called Bryan himself as a witness — as an expert on the Bible. It was an extraordinary maneuver: the defense attorney interrogating the lead witness for the prosecution about his religious beliefs.

What followed was one of the most dramatic public examinations in American history. Darrow asked Bryan whether he believed the world was created in six literal 24-hour days. Bryan hedged. Darrow pressed. Bryan admitted that "day" might mean a period of time longer than 24 hours.

The exchange was devastating not because Darrow proved evolution true or Christianity false, but because he demonstrated that Bryan — who had come to Dayton as the defender of literal biblical truth — could not defend the literal interpretation of Genesis under sustained questioning.

Bryan died five days after the trial ended. He had never left Dayton.

The Mythology

The trial has been filtered through decades of mythology, much of it created by the 1955 play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which used the Scopes trial as an allegory for McCarthyism. The film's Bryan character (renamed Matthew Harrison Brady) is a buffoon; the Darrow character a hero; Dayton's townspeople a hostile mob.

Edward Larson's Summer for the Gods, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, demolishes the mythology with original research. Bryan was a more sophisticated thinker than the play suggests. Darrow's tactics were more manipulative. Dayton's townspeople were largely friendly to the defense and to Scopes personally — they had, after all, staged the whole thing as a publicity event. The town threw Bryan and Darrow a joint banquet.

The story as it actually happened is more interesting, and more American, than the legend.

The Question That Didn't End

The Butler Act was not repealed until 1967. Anti-evolution laws persisted in other states. The Supreme Court struck down Arkansas's ban on teaching evolution in 1968. Efforts to require "creation science" alongside evolution in public schools were struck down in 1987. "Intelligent design" as a curriculum requirement was struck down in 2005.

A century after Dayton, the underlying question — what is the relationship between religious faith and scientific knowledge, and how should public institutions navigate both — remains genuinely contested in American life.

The question deserves better than the caricatures that the Scopes trial mythology created. Bryan and Darrow were both more right and more wrong than the legend says. The tension between faith and science in a pluralistic democracy is real and permanent, not a problem to be solved by either side winning.

Francis Collins's The Language of God — written by the scientist who led the Human Genome Project and is an evangelical Christian — is the most credible modern argument that the tension is navigable. Whether you find it persuasive depends, as it always has, on what you already believe.

John Scopes was fined $100. The fine was later overturned on a technicality. He went on to earn a graduate degree in geology and spend his career in the oil industry.

He said in later years that the trial had made him something he had never intended to be: a symbol. He had simply agreed to get arrested.

America made the rest of it.