AFTERWORD

TO THE 2020 EDITION

IT HAS been over two decades since the publication of Summer for the Gods and nearly a century since the Scopes trial. The underlying culture clash continues unabated with battles over the theory of evolution still at its core. Believers wedded to a literalistic reading of the Adamic account of creation, which includes many evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Muslims, utterly reject the idea of organic evolution and view its acceptance by others, including less literalistic theists, as a fundamental threat to religious faith and social order. In the beginning, God created the world and proclaimed it good. Any alterations, except by God’s hand, undermine that created goodness. Such changes could not happen under the watchful eye of a benevolent God, and trying to force them by human action violates God’s will. By extension of such thinking, humans simply cannot cause climate change, and abortion, human genetic engineering, and perhaps even the use of contraceptives are sinful. For some late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American creationists, Hitler became the personification of all such satanic efforts to remake the world, with the legalization of abortion compared to the Holocaust and human gene therapy equated with Nazi eugenics. Once Hitler is invoked, reasoned debates ends. Yet invoking Hitler here merely updates William Jennings Bryan’s claim that Darwinian thinking lay at the heart of German militarism and the Kaiser’s War.¹

The book’s final chapter closes with the Tennessee Senate defeating a 1996 bill authorizing local school districts to dismiss science teachers for teaching evolution as a fact. The loss came after the ACLU threatened an immediate legal challenge if the bill passed. In 1974, an ACLU-backed lawsuit had struck down a similar Tennessee statute, forbidding public-school biology textbooks from depicting human evolution as a fact and mandating that they give equal emphasis to creationist and evolutionary theories. Many foresaw the same fate for the new bill. Whether caused by the adverse legal environment or a change of heart by lawmakers, the bill’s defeat was hailed by some as a sign that the state was taking a new path after decades of attempting to restrict the teaching of evolution.

They were wrong. In 2011, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill designed to encourage teachers to take a skeptical approach to such allegedly controversial scientific theories as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, and global warming. Critics depicted this so-called Academic Freedom Statute as a second Scopes monkey law. Some supporters embraced the comparison. Testifying on the House floor, one such supporter railed against “the intellectual bullies” who had been allowed to “hijack our education system” and warned that in teaching evolution the state was “on a slippery slope” downward.² The Academic Freedom Statute would reverse the descent, he claimed, and return God to the classroom.

After the House vote drew protests from scientists at the University of Tennessee, Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the bill stalled in the Senate Education Committee for nearly a year before emerging in 2012 to pass the Senate by a three-to-one majority and become law. The new statute pushes public-school teachers and administrators to promote “critical thinking” among students about organic evolution. Despite the aroused in-state opposition, no one challenged the 2012 law in court. Something had changed since 1996.

In 1996, supporters of evolutionary instruction could credibly assert that courts would quickly overturn the proposed law. In 2012, they could not. Differences in the scope of the two proposals accounted, in part, for this change. Like earlier Tennessee antievolution laws, the 1996 bill applied only to purportedly anti-Christian Darwinian instruction, making it an easy target for an Establishment Clause challenge. The 2011 bill, in contrast, went after supposedly nonreligious topics as well, like climate change—which perhaps made it more difficult to portray the bill as simply favoring a specific religion. But there was another key factor at play as well.

In the intervening years, President George W. Bush had named two justices to the United States Supreme Court. They, along with three justices chosen earlier by either Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, created a conservative majority on the high court that opponents of the Academic Freedom Statute reasonably feared would uphold it. Years earlier, in 1986, Antonin Scalia, one of those Reagan judges, had written a blistering dissent when the court rejected state-mandated balanced treatment for creation science and Darwinism in public schools. The people of a state, Scalia asserted, “are quite entitled, as a secular matter, to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to present whatever scientific evidence there was for it.”³ Scalia’s equation of the actions of a state with those of a teacher was telling, but he went further. Rejecting the Warren Court–era analysis that had voided prior antievolution statutes, Scalia argued that the religious purposes of legislators backing the balanced-treatment law should not matter. Purpose alone should never be enough to void laws under the Establishment Clause, he maintained. Again in 2000, Scalia took much the same position in a dissent, arguing that public-school districts should be free to instruct students that evolution is a theory, not a fact.⁴ Other conservative justices seemed open enough to his approach that critics of the 2012 law decided not to risk challenging it.

The lessons of this most recent fight in Tennessee may have less to do with regional opposition to the teaching of evolution than with shifts in partisan politics and constitutional interpretation. Ever since Democratic president Lyndon Johnson backed civil rights and GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon adopted his southern strategy in the late sixties, Republican politicians sought ways to draw white evangelicals and southern Democrats into their camp. Nixon appealed to law and order, but Reagan turned to such constitutional concerns as abortion, prayer in school, and antievolutionism—each of which he raised in his 1980 campaign. “God never should have been expelled from America’s schools in the first place,” Reagan repeatedly declared.⁵ Abortion proved the most effective of these hot-button issues nationally, but opposition to teaching evolution became a key wedge issue for Republicans in the South. After all, it had been Democratic politicians like Bryan who pushed for Tennessee’s 1925 and 1974 antievolution laws; now the southern Democratic voters who had supported them appeared ripe for the picking.

Beginning with Clarence Darrow, opponents of antievolution restrictions have consistently sought to show that such laws promote particular sectarian beliefs and, thus, violate the separation of church and state. This, however, might not prove persuasive with the current Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, who joined Scalia’s dissent in the 2000 disclaimer case, has argued that the Establishment Clause simply does not apply to the states because, by its original terms, the Bill of Rights only limits federal action. Scalia, for his part, denied that religious purpose alone should ever be sufficient to strike antievolution laws. And he had a point. From Bryan on down, antievolutionists were never solely motivated by a desire to promote religious belief. They were also driven by social and cultural concerns. Teach children that they descended from apes, Bryan had argued, and they will act like monkeys. Rightly or wrongly, he equated Darwinism with social Darwinism, and thus with militarism, imperialism, and laissez faire capitalism—the three deadliest sins under his left-leaning political theology. Other antievolution crusaders of his day tied Darwinism to Bolshevism, sexual promiscuity, eugenics, and the jazz craze. Rightly or wrongly, many voters and lawmakers agreed.

In this respect, antievolutionism has remained fairly consistent since 1925. Henry M. Morris, who founded the modern creation-science movement and nurtured it through his Creation Research Institute (ICR), never tired of tying belief in evolution to all manner of alleged social ills from Nazism and racism to abortion and homosexuality. “Regardless of whether or not evolution has been misunderstood or misapplied, it really has been made the pseudo-scientific rationale for all kinds of evil doctrines and influences in the world,” Morris exclaimed in 1989. “And people need to know this!”⁶

Ken Ham, who picked up and popularized Morris’s so-called young earth creationism through his Answers in Genesis ministry and his Creation Museum beginning in the 1990s, doubled down on the social impact of teaching evolution. A two-page, centerfold magazine ad placed by Ham’s Answers in Genesis organization showed a distressed-looking young man standing on a deserted road pointing a handgun directly at the reader. “As a society, we reap the consequences of the unquestioned belief in evolution every day,” the caption read. “It diminishes our worth and reduces human beings from being ‘made in the image of God’ to being mere players in the game of the survival of the fittest. Find hope. Find truth. Find Answers in Genesis.” A walk-though exhibit at Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky presents a similarly dark picture of the social ills that belief in evolution causes. It features teenagers using illegal drugs, playing violent video games, and watching Internet pornography. A battered front door with multiple locks, deadbolts, and chains bears the scrawled warning “THE WORLD’S NOT SAFE ANYMORE.” Here was Bryan’s social message on steroids and updated for the twenty-first century.

Seeking to reason with Ham, Bill Nye, Public Broadcasting Service’s kid-friendly Science Guy, debated him in 2014, but to no avail. “I’ll tell you my biggest concern,” Ham told Nye, “you’re teaching generations of these young people that they’re just animals; that they come about by natural processes.”⁷ During the Scopes trial, Bryan leveled much the same complaint against science teachers generally. Waving the textbook at issue with disgust, he exclaimed, “There is that book! There is the book [from which] they were teaching your children that man was a mammal.”⁸ Darrow scarcely knew how to respond to Bryan’s objection to classifying humans as mammals, much as Nye was dumbfounded by Ham’s suggestion that humans were not animals.

“Are you teaching that we are animals?” Ham persisted. “Are we animals?” Nye finally stammered, “Yeah. We’re mammals. We breathe air. Isn’t that good?”⁹ To Ham and his followers, this was neither good nor true. Nye went on to say that humans are related to all living things. To him, these were simply facts of science—much as Darrow considered it as self-evident that humans were mammals. But these assertions only fed into the arguments that Bryan and Ham were making. Because, according to them, humans were specially created in God’s image rather than by natural processes, people are exempt from the law of the jungle. Among creationists, this point remains as critical today as in 1925. Then as now, creationists and evolutionists find themselves talking past each other as if in parallel universes, a condition ever more applicable to members of America’s two major political parties as well.

At the time of the Scopes trial, the Supreme Court’s cramped interpretation of the First Amendment left little hope for overturning the 1925 Tennessee antievolution law. The defense team, therefore, opted to use the trial as an opportunity to enlighten the public about the value of science education and the menace of speech-restricting laws rather than try to scratch out an acquittal by poking holes in the prosecution’s case. Its hope, the ACLU’s Arthur Garfield Hays explained, was to win widespread support for the cause of academic freedom, thereby making it “possible that laws of this kind will hereafter meet the opposition of an aroused public opinion.”¹⁰ Darrow recognized the high stakes involved. “This case is a difference of opinion of people upon a matter that affects life,” he said before the trial began.¹¹ Achieving the goal of public enlightenment may have been more difficult even than winning the court case, but if successful, the strategy promised to deliver a lasting effect.

Using the Constitution to quash antievolution measures, as the ACLU and its allies have done over the half century since the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Epperson v. Arkansas, risks reversal if a new court reinterprets the Establishment Clause to give states and school districts added leeway to accommodate religion in public education. As this becomes increasingly likely, winning over popular opinion may again become the best strategy for evolutionists. It always should have been.

It is certainly a strategy that creationists have embraced wholeheartedly. Morris launched ICR at a time when creationists mistakenly thought that the Supreme Court’s Epperson ruling had opened the door to teaching scientific evidence for creation (or creation science) in public schools. Operating on the assumption that it was only a matter of time before creation science was widely accepted, the institute began publishing nondevotional creation-science texts for public schools—only to have them effectively banned by the subsequent rulings against equal-emphasis and balanced-treatment laws. Nevertheless, ICR persisted in its work, focusing instead on producing educational materials for private Christian schools and homeschoolers. Morris joined other prominent evangelical leaders in urging Christian parents to forsake secularized public education for their school-aged children in favor of these creation-friendly alternatives, which many have done. Aiming at an even younger audience within the church, Ham’s Answers in Genesis focused on promoting creationism through stories about dinosaurs living with humans in Edenic times. In short, Morris and Ham turned more toward promoting a literal reading of the Genesis account among evangelical Christians than converting the general public to such a view—though they certainly prayed for both to happen.

Polling suggests that these efforts to sway opinion have worked. Roughly 40 percent of adult Americans affirm that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, recent surveys find, or about twice the percentage of those accepting naturalistic evolution. Most of the rest believe in God-guided evolution. In Europe, where little overt promotion of creation science occurs, belief in evolution is markedly higher than in the United States. With a creation-affirming promoter of private schools serving as secretary of education in the Trump administration and widespread Republican support for a policy of providing vouchers or tax credits for private and homeschooling, creation science stands poised to reach an even wider American audience in the future.

Opinion surveys have their limits, however. Response rates are notoriously low, skewing the sample, and the wording of questions tilts results. “Polling overrepresented churchgoing Americans, who, civic- and community-minded, were more likely than their fellow citizens to respond,” historian Jill Lepore writes.¹² If a respondent knows little or nothing about a topic, which is often the case when it comes to questions about the origins of humanity, research suggests that results are influenced by how the question is framed and biased toward what respondents think is the proper answer. These factors may inflate the number of pro-religious responses. Yet polling on such issues by some of the best survey organizations in the business—Gallup and the Pew Research Center—finds that the share of Americans holding a strictly creationist viewpoint consistently trails the proportion believing in God and consistently exceeds the portion affiliating itself with evangelicalism—with these ratios tracking with one another. Less than 10 percent of those expressing no religious preference affirm that God created humans in their present form, a 2017 Gallup survey reported, while only 1 percent of those who go to church weekly say that humans evolved without God at least having a part in the process.¹³ Over half of American evangelicals take the Bible literally, a 2014 Pew survey found, while less than a quarter of mainline American Protestants do.¹⁴ In short, these findings confirm that creationism is a religious belief with a substantial following in the United States.

Belief in creationism remains particularly strong in the South, these polls find, especially in Tennessee. The latest Pew survey of religious beliefs in the United States listed Tennessee as the only state where over half of the adult population identified with evangelical Protestantism. The fraction was somewhat smaller in other southern states and much smaller for those in the Northeast and far West.¹⁵ During the Scopes era, H. L. Mencken and other journalists with national platforms typically portrayed antievolutionism as a southern phenomenon. Judged by opinion polls and legislation, that characterization remains true. Bryan did not have polls to plot his speaking tours, but he could have used twenty-first century ones to show where his “Menace of Darwinism” speech would receive the warmest reception then as well as now. Of course, he might have to change his party affiliation to continue drawing crowds. In line with regional demographics, as it shifted its focus from trying to convert nonbelievers to building its evangelical base, ICR moved its headquarters in 2007 from San Diego to Texas. Ham’s center of operations has long been in Kentucky. Despite the emergence of the so-called New South and an influx of northern migrants to the Sun Belt, established patterns persisted. Antievolutionism remains a distinctly southern issue.

Even if culture-war fault lines have shifted little since 1925—old ways versus new ideas, the government versus the individual, majoritarian morality versus freedom of choice—the tone of the debate has become significantly more strident. This change, however, has been obscured somewhat by popular revisionist accounts of the Scopes trial that recast it as the sort of harsh, modern conflict that might happen today.

Inherit the Wind began this process, of course. The play and movie presented Dayton’s townspeople as behaving hatefully toward Scopes and his attorneys while in reality they treated both kindly. Inherit the Wind’s Bryan subjected Scopes’s fiancée to a McCarthyesque interrogation and railed against the penalty imposed on Scopes as too soft, while at trial no such questioning occurred, and the real Bryan offered to pay the defendant’s nominal $100 fine. “Where the issues are so titanic, the court must mete out more drastic punishment,” the play’s Bryan proclaims in a line more fitting for a modern cultural warrior than the aged Great Commoner, who had urged that the antievolution statute carry no penalty whatsoever.¹⁶

Reflecting the trench warfare of twenty-first century politics, few modern accounts recall the friendly banter among prosecutors and defense attorneys or Bryan’s son swimming with Scopes. Townspeople supplied Darrow with fresh fruit each morning, while Bryan received a limitless supply of his beloved radishes. But this is not what is remembered. Textbook accounts dwell instead on Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan. “The trial’s climax occurred when Bryan himself took the witness stand,” Mary Beth Norton and her coauthors write in A People and a Nation, their 2007 United States history textbook. “Spectators in Dayton cheered Bryan for his testimony, but the liberal press mocked him and his allies.”¹⁷ Here the divide hardened. In his 2005 textbook Give Me Liberty, Eric Foner writes that Bryan viewed the trial “as a ‘duel to the death’ between science and Christianity” but nevertheless “revealed an almost complete ignorance of modern science” on his own part.¹⁸ Combatants in and spectators of today’s culture wars may understand these conflicts as duels to the death, but neither the people of Dayton nor the American public saw the Scopes trial in that way at the time. They were mainly curious observers. Lepore recognized the amity in her 2018 text These Truths—but she added, “Darrow knew that, for all that Bryan’s campaign against the teaching of evolution was a campaign against social Darwinism, and a campaign for the underdog, it was also an assault on science. And Darrow couldn’t take that.” He would make it a bare-knuckle battle, she suggested, quoting his words as evidence: “I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism.”¹⁹

Americans often forget what divides them. Reading the bestsellers of David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Ron Chernow, we’ve all become patriots with John Adams, federalists with Alexander Hamilton, emancipators with Abraham Lincoln, and New Dealers with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The well-known story of Bryan and Darrow at Dayton stands in sharp contrast. There we remember their differences and make them our own. The Scopes narrative of fundamentalism versus modernity, majority rule versus individual rights, and science versus religion remains fresh not only because of the ongoing antievolution campaign, but also because of opposing demands for and against reproductive, LGBTQ+, and gun rights. Pitched battles over climate science compound the issue while partisan politics, conspiracy theories, fake news, and social media reinforce cultural divides.

Summer for the Gods concluded by noting that the Scopes trial led to the founding of a fundamentalist college in Dayton named for Bryan, which gave the town a more religious feel and influenced how the trial was remembered locally. An annual reenactment of the trial in the historic courtroom tilts toward Bryan’s side of the story. Indeed, the performance ends with a much-tempered Darrow accepting Bryan’s sincerity and good intentions. Since Bryan College’s founding in 1930, its statement of faith (which faculty must accept) includes the affirmation: “The origin of man was by fiat of God.” In response to heightened evangelical militancy on the issue of creationism and the efforts of groups like ICR and Answers in Genesis to sharpen the divide among Christians, the college clarified this statement in 2014 to read that Adam and Eve “are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life-forms.”²⁰ Several professors lost their jobs or resigned, and residential enrollment declined slightly. Yet the college persists, and its administrators hope for growth through online courses and degrees.

In 2005, Bryan College erected a larger-than-life statue of Bryan on the Rhea County Courthouse lawn. The statue shows a youthful Commoner standing at a podium as if preparing to speak. At the time, county commission chair Tom Davis suggested that Darrow would not receive similar recognition. But Davis failed to appreciate the enduring passions energizing both sides of this historic clash. The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) raised funds for a competing statute of Darrow, and in 2017, received the county’s permission to install it despite local opposition. It portrays the agnostic icon with one hand tugging at his trademark suspenders and the other pointing toward the Bryan statue as if beckoning to resume the cross-examination conducted some 90 years earlier and only a few yards away. Davis welcomed the new statue. “If I’m going to oppose a different belief,” he said, “I better understand it.”²¹ For the unveiling, someone hung a “Read Your Bible” banner on the courthouse wall akin to the one draped there during the trial. A silent Darrow could not object but the FFRF’s copresident did, and as occurred when the trial moved outside for Bryan’s cross-examination, the sign dropped from sight. The Scopes trial could have concluded only yesterday. Or it might commence tomorrow. For everyone there, and countless others, it still matters.