America, like the rest of the once “Christian” West, has morally and spiritually collapsed. The country is sharply divided about abortion, gay marriage, transgender issues, and racism. Twenty-five percent of Americans identify as “nones” (having no religious affiliation).[1] Sixty percent of young people raised in Christian homes are walking away from the church after high school and most will not return.[2] Barna Research indicates that only 4% of Americans have a biblical worldview.[3]
1. Jason DeRose, “Religious ‘Nones” are now the largest single group in the U.S.,” NPR, Jan. 24, 2024.
2. Ken Ham and Britt Beamer, Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2009).
3. Tracy F. Musil, “Biblical Worldview among US Adults drops 33% since start of Covid-19 Pandemic,” Arizona Christian University – Transforming Culture With Truth, Feb. 28, 2023.
Why has this collapse happened? And what connection does it bear to the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” in the small town (1,800 residents) of Dayton, Tennessee, a century ago?
The Scopes Trial
The bizarre and comical trial lasted just eight days during July 10-21, 1925.[4] It showcased two of the most well-known lawyers in America and was watched by several thousand spectators, broadcast on national radio, and reported to the Western world by about 200 journalists from across America. Why did it command such eager attention?
4. Two of the best sources of information about the trial are the word-for-word report of the proceedings in The World’s Most Famous Court Trial (published in 1925 and reprinted in 1990 by Bryan College) and L. Sprague de Camp, The Great Monkey Trial (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968).
During the early 1920s, twenty states were proposing laws to prohibit teaching evolution in schools. In March of 1925, the Tennessee governor signed into law the “Butler Act,” which stated that it was unlawful for any teacher in Tennessee public schools or universities “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.”
Wanting to challenge this law in court, the American Civil Liberties Union posted an ad in a Chattanooga newspaper seeking a willing teacher who would accept the ACLU’s free services as a client. A Dayton businessman saw the ad on May 5 and soon convinced several other businessmen and a lawyer (who would be part of the prosecution team) to take this as an opportunity to revitalize the town’s suffering economy by attracting visibility and new businesses. That group convinced John Scopes to stand trial for teaching evolution in violation of the law during the last two weeks of the school year when substituting for a sick biology teacher.
When William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) heard about the upcoming trial, he volunteered to be the main prosecutor. He was a lawyer, famous orator, and a three-time candidate for President of the United States. He was also very public about his fundamentalist Christian faith, was well informed and outspoken about evolution, and he encouraged many states, including Tennessee, to legislate against it in the schools.
Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) quickly offered his free services as the lead defense attorney for the ACLU. He was equally well known as a very successful criminal lawyer; he specialized in defending unpopular people and radical causes. As an agnostic and evolutionist, he had tried to arrange a debate with Bryan about science and religion. The Scopes trial finally gave him the perfect opportunity.
The Trial
Darrow and the ACLU defense team’s goal was clear: to get the Butler Act declared unconstitutional and thrown out by the Tennessee Supreme Court. To do that, Darrow and team had to lose the trial in Dayton and then appeal that guilty verdict to that court. Darrow also had the clear goal of disgracing Bryan and fundamentalist Christianity. To make matters more comical and bizarre, everyone including Scopes, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, the judge, and probably all the jurors and many townspeople, knew that Scopes never taught evolution and therefore never broke the law.
Very little of the 8-day trial dealt with the guilt or innocence of Scopes. The first three days covered the legal formalities. On Day 4, the prosecution demonstrated Scopes’ guilt by calling four witnesses (including two students) and using quotes from the course textbook, George Hunter’s A Civic Biology, which clearly taught evolution in violation of the law. The defense only briefly cross-examined because Darrow admitted that everything said against Scopes was true.
However, the defense had nine scientific experts (representing six branches of science) and four religious experts to testify that science overwhelmingly proves evolution and millions of years and that the Genesis account of the creation should not be interpreted as literal history. After two days of debate about the admissibility of the defense’s expert testimony, the judge decided to exclude it. But he allowed their written statements (which the jury didn’t see) to be entered into the court record so as to be presented in the later appeal to the state Supreme Court.
The Unprecedented Interrogation of Bryan
On Day seven, because of the heat and an estimated 3,000 spectators and journalists, the judge moved the proceedings outside. In a brilliant strategy, Darrow unexpectedly asked Bryan to take the witness stand as a Bible expert. Bryan foolishly agreed on the condition that Darrow would then be questioned by Bryan.
In response to Darrow’s questions, Bryan stood firm for the literal truth of the biblical accounts of Eve and the serpent, Jonah in the fish, Noah’s global flood, Joshua’s long day, and the Tower of Babel. But Darrow masterfully trapped Bryan in serious inconsistency when Bryan denied the literal days of creation and said creation might have happened over millions of years. Darrow had achieved his goal! He exposed for the world to see: the literalist, “Bible-believing” Bryan who opposed biological evolution was willing to reinterpret the Bible to accommodate geological and cosmological evolution over millions of years. He made Bryan and all other fundamentalists look like ignorant fools, bigots, and inconsistent science-deniers.
Bryan never got to question Darrow, because the next day Darrow urged the jury to find Scopes guilty, thus ending the trial.
On paper, the prosecution had won: Scopes was convicted. But Darrow and the ACLU were overwhelmingly victorious by 1) discrediting Bryan and fellow fundamentalists and 2) later appealing the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which in 1927 overturned Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. Though the Butler Act law remained on the books (without enforcement), it was repealed by the state legislature in 1967. The fundamentalists lost.
Bryan’s performance on the witness stand was nothing less than tragic. But, upon reflection, he was the product of 100 years of Christian compromise. The idea of millions of years of geological evolution was invented in the minds of atheist and deist geologists in the late 18th and early 19th century. At that time, the biblical chronology and global Flood of Noah were rather quickly abandoned by Christians so that by the 1840s most Bible-believers accepted the gap theory or day-age view and local flood view. Giants of the faith, including C.H. Spurgeon, Charles Hodge, C.I. Scofield, and B.B. Warfield, accepted the millions of years, though they opposed atheistic Darwinian evolution.[5] The highly influential 90 essays in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910-1915) were written by leading inerrantist Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, and Congregationalists to defend Christian orthodoxy in the face of theological liberalism. Six essays directly dealt with evolution, and all were compromised with the view that the earth is millions of years old.[6] With the writings of the early nineteenth century “scriptural geologists”[7] against the millions of years long forgotten, Bryan had no credible geological arguments to support belief in the biblical chronology and the Flood.
5. For a one-hour lecture documenting this historical development (based on my PhD research), see Terry Mortenson, “Millions of Years: The Idea’s Unscientific Origin and Catastrophic Consequences,” Answers in Genesis, Aug. 26, 2008. An article documenting the same history can be found here.
6. Terry Mortenson, “Exposing a Fundamental Compromise,” Answers in Genesis, July 1, 2010.
7. Discussed in my video lecture above (footnote 5) and more thoroughly in Terry Mortenson, The Great Turning Point: The Church’s Catastrophic Mistake on Geology—Before Darwin (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2004).
In the Wake of the Trial
With its vast publicity, the trial greatly fueled the public debate about the origin of the world. The scientific status of evolution was elevated in the minds of the public. Teaching creation was soon removed from the public schools, and evolution now wholly controls the curriculum. Fundamentalist (“Bible-believing”) Christianity and belief in creation (especially the supernatural creation of Adam and Eve) were discredited.
Fast-forward to the present, where recent Gallup poll indicates that 37% of Americans essentially believe the Genesis account of the creation of humans.[8] But the rest accept human evolution, and even the majority of Christians accept the millions of years view of the earth (although most don’t realize that this unacceptably involves animal disease, death and mass extinction and other natural evils before the Fall[9]).
8. Megan Brenan, “Majority still credits God for humankind, but not creationism,” Gallup, July 22, 2024.
9. Terry Mortenson, “The Fall and the Problem of Millions of Years of Natural Evil,” Answers in Genesis, July 18, 2012.
Today’s American culture has eroded much further since the disaster of the Scopes trial. Belief that humans evolved over millions of years undermines biblical authority and morality, resulting in a culture of increased heterosexual immorality, homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide. But if we’re just animals with no accountability to God, then there is no basis to say any of those things is wrong.
The last 100 years demonstrates a growing rejection of the gospel and mass exodus of young people from the church. And evangelicals are increasingly accepting theistic evolution (even denying a literal Adam and Fall). Philosophical naturalism (aka, atheism) is the worldview foundation of geological and cosmological evolution just as it is the foundation of biological and anthropological evolution.[10] To fight the latter, while compromising with the former (i.e., with millions of years), didn’t work for Spurgeon in the 1800s and for Bryan in 1925, and it doesn’t work today. This persistent and inconsistent compromise among evangelical leaders and scholars undermines the authority of God’s Word.
10. Terry Mortenson, “Philosophical Naturalism and the Age of the Earth: Are They Related?“, Answers in Genesis, Mar. 2, 2005.
For example, the wording of several points in the Chicago statements on inerrancy (in 1978) and hermeneutics (in 1982) produced by the International Council Biblical Inerrancy allowed most of the 300+ signers of those statements to also accept the big bang and millions of years.[11] And in his excellent critique of theistic evolution, old-earth proponent Wayne Grudem makes the essentially same mistakes as the Christians he opposes.[12]
11. Terry Mortenson, “Inerrancy and Biblical Authority: How and Why Old-Earth Inerrantists Are Unintentionally Undermining Inerrancy,” Answers Research Journal, Sep. 16, 2020.
12. Terry Mortenson, “Theistic Evolution: A Response to Wayne Grudem, Making the Same Errors He Opposes in Others,” Answers Research Journal, Feb. 17, 2021 (a 3500-word summary is here).
Unlike Bryan’s situation in 1925, there are now literally hundreds of PhD scientists (including physicists, geologists, and paleontologists) who hold to young-earth creation. Many are associated with Answers in Genesis, Institute for Creation Research, Creation Ministries International, and the Creation Research Society. Nearly all of them received their PhD at a secular, evolution-controlled university. These young-earth creationists have also produced an enormous amount of literature and DVDs and widely-accessed web sites, as well as the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum visited by over a million people each year. While we are grateful for such resources, these efforts cannot be contained to scientific literature. It must be cherished again in Christian spaces. For that to happen, pastors and scholars need to teach the literal truth of Genesis 1–11 and expose themselves and their congregations and students to the massive scientific evidence that confirms that truth.[13]
13. A helpful beginning are the answers to the 27 most-asked questions related to Genesis in Ken Ham, ed., The New Answers Book, Vol. 1 (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2006.)
Conclusion
The battle in 1925 and the battle today is not, as so many think, one between science and religion. It is rather a battle between the naturalistic dogma (i.e., religion) of the scientific majority and the plain teaching of Scripture. It is ultimately a battle between man’s fallible word and God’s inerrant Word. For 200 years Christians have creatively tried every conceivable way to fit millions of years into Genesis 1: either into “figurative” (or “mythological”) days, or between the literal days, or before the literal (or “figurative”) days. But it won’t fit. They have also argued that Noah’s Flood was either a localized flood in the Middle East or a mythological flood. But none of these interpretations stand up to sacred scrutiny of an open Bible, which is why there are so many different old-earth views. Despite their wide and growing number, none of them can harmonize the Bible with the evolution story.
Christians, and especially Christian leaders, need to undertake with serious concern the project of defending the authority and truth of God’s Word. Such a project then begins with the very first verse, demonstrating we have heard loud and clear the Scopes lesson.
