July 2025 was the centennial of the famous “monkey trial” of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes was on trial for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of any theory of the origin of man that contradicted the account in Genesis.
There is a preferred narrative for the Scopes trial, which goes something like this: Religious zealots who were threatened by science passed a law to suppress teaching about the truth of evolution. This violated the sacred principle of academic freedom, which John Scopes defended by defying the law. For that act of defiance, Scopes was prosecuted by the fundamentalist zealot William Jennings Bryan. Fortunately for Scopes, Clarence Darrow bravely stepped in to defend science and the principles of enlightenment. The dark forces of religious intolerance prevailed, making Scopes a martyr for all who stand ready to fight against the ever-looming threat of religious fundamentalism.
The plot for the preferred narrative was laid out and set mainly by the play and movie Inherit the Wind, which cast the Scopes trial as a latter-day Salem witch trial. Inherit the Wind remains popular, with several stage revivals and movie remakes of the play having been produced since the original production. The preferred narrative has also been at the heart of the ongoing legal efforts to purge religion from the public schools. Since 1925, ten high-profile court cases have been brought to overturn anti-evolution laws like Tennessee’s that had been enacted in several states. Like the Dayton case, all were framed in terms of Darwinism as unassailable scientific truth, with any attempts to teach students otherwise to be treated as an assault on academic freedom. Unlike the Dayton case, the ACLU and its allies prevailed in all cases, the latest victory coming in the 2005 case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which pretty much cemented the preferred narrative into settled law.
Like any anniversary, the Scopes trial centennial has been the occasion to celebrate the preferred narrative. Some of these have been churlish and ugly.
In July, for example, a group from the Freedom from Religion Foundation visited the site of the Scopes trial for a rally and to tour the Rhea County Courthouse and Scopes Trial Museum. Their visit was on a Sunday, when the courthouse and museum are usually closed. The town opened it for them anyway, a courtesy the FFRF repaid with insults about the stupidity and criminal tendencies of believing Christians. They’re entitled to express their opinions, of course, but one wonders, did they have to be such a**holes about it?
Other commentary was more measured, but still steeped in the warm bubble bath of the preferred narrative. John K Wilson, who makes a living off denigrating conservatives on campus, weighed in on the Scopes trial in the Chronicle of Higher Education. There, he warned ominously that pesky “religiosity” is once again “being imposed on education,” with transgender and queer ideology substituting for evolution as the current bogeyman stirring up the yokels. He reinforced the religiosity angle on the American Campus podcast, where the theme was John Scopes against the creationists. The academic freedom “discovered” in the Scopes trial is under renewed assault from—who else?—the “Trump regime,” which has “launched the worst assault on academic freedom by the government in the history of American higher education,” a massive “onslaught designed to micromanage all colleges, public and private, and to suppress speech using the threat of a total ban on federal funding.”
Frankly, American higher education should be so lucky.
Federal funding has left higher education at the mercy of whichever political party holds power in Washington, for their amusement or advantage.“Academic freedom” has now become a hollow joke, and has been for decades in fact. As long as political power was firmly entrenched in the warm embrace of progressive ideology, progressives were content to use their positions to purge academia of opposing views: academic freedom for me, but not for thee. Now that the political winds have shifted, crying “foul” rings a little hollow. For academic freedom to be truly free, American higher education should shed its utter dependence on federal funding. That would mean having to listen to the parents and communities. Being told to pay up and shut up no longer plays with the people who are paying the bills.
Which brings us back to the real legacy of the Scopes trial.
The Scopes trial was never about academic freedom, or the “truth” of evolution, or the supremacy of science over religion. Those were just the proxy issues for the deeper question in play: who gets to decide how we educate our children? The ACLU’s complaint against Tennessee, and every complaint since, has been predicated on the corrosive presumption that parents and communities are incompetent to answer that question for themselves. In 1925, parents and communities pushed back against that assumption through anti-evolution laws that spread throughout the rural, tradition-oriented South and remained in place for four decades following the Scopes trial.
Today, the issue is the same: parents and communities are pushing back against attempts to cut them out of life-changing decisions regarding their children—whether they have an abortion, the fantasy that boys can become girls, the reduced accountability for certain offenders deemed oppressed, and a host of other issues.
Scott Turner’s documentary, The Scopes Trial: 100 Years Later, premieres tomorrow, November 11, at 5:30 PM ET, in a livestreamed limited release. Registration for the livestream may be done here: EVENT: The Scopes Trial: 100 Years Later. The public premiere will be online on November 12, at 7:30 PM ET here: The Scopes Trial: 100 Years Later. A short trailer may be viewed here: The Scopes Trial: 100 years later. The trailer.
Image: “Scopes trial historical marker cropped” by Bneu2013 on Wikimedia Commons
