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This chapter considers the larger sectional conflict between the North and the South that has been largely ignored by scholarly assessments of the Scopes Trial. The somewhat insatiable and unprecedented media attention generated by the trial used regionalism to frame the anti-evolution movement in general and the events in Dayton, Tennessee, specifically. The scrutiny triggered a sense of inferiority among white southerners, reviving the sectional conflict and catalyzing a grand battle between science and religion.

This chapter describes how William Jennings Bryan’s embarrassment on the stand, his death five days after the trial, and the ensuing media criticism transformed the community in Dayton, Tennessee. A new type of religious fervor emerged—a reactionary southern evangelical fundamentalism that became devoted to a literal reading of the Bible, to a sense of textual authority that was not based on rationality or a logical theology but rather on passion and a personal relationship with a revelatory god. A group of Bryan’s closest political friends and followers also set out to raise funds to establish the William Jennings Bryan College.

This chapter focuses on journalist H. L. Mencken, attorney Clarence Darrow, and politician and activist William Jennings Bryan, whose interactions contributed to a collective regional identity for white southerners. The Scopes Evolution Trial transformed the three men into regional symbols of competing cultural and political values that remain relevant today. Darrow and Mencken (and the larger body of journalists that he represented) would be demonized as liberal skeptics, embracing modernism and the debauchery and chaos that would surely follow. Bryan would come to represent the cause of religious fundamentalism and states’ rights.

The epilogue focuses on the reception of William Jennings Bryan’s anti-evolution arguments in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, in contrast to his reputation as a progressive reformer at the turn of the century. Bryan’s objection to being characterized as an animal with “monkey” ancestors in the Scopes Trial reveals both the racist subtext of jungle discourse and the hegemony of that discourse by 1925. Ridiculed by writers such as H. L. Mencken, Joseph Wood Krutch, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bryan’s resistance to evolutionary theory is mocked in a way that signals a fracture between progressivism of various kinds and Christian fundamentalism: a fracture that was not nearly as evident at the turn of the century, but resonates today with debates over intelligent design, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology.

This chapter analyzes the ways in which antievolutionism led African Americans to examine more carefully the character and future of their race. It examines the impact of antievolutionism on African American pedagogues and preachers, the reaction and views of African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. Dubois and examples of black antievolutionism including Reverend Charles Satchell Morris Sr.'s well-publicized attacks on Darwinism before, during, and after the Scopes Trial. It also suggests that while the racial elements of the evolution dispute have become muted, evolution continues to highlight social conflicts within African America and highlights the rhetorical role of race in debates over Darwinism.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of antievolutionism in the U.S. It covers criticisms on Charles Darwin's “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” and discusses claims that his theory was a moral outrage. This opinion regarded natural selection was a cruel process and that it struck directly at certain foundational Judeo-Christian beliefs. It also explores the Scopes Trial of 1925, the role of militant Protestantism in the anti-evolution movement, the intersection of gender, race and regionalism with the antievolution impulse and the teaching of creationism in campus.

The introduction establishes the framework for the pages that follow by recalling how the infamous “Monkey Trial” of 1925 both symbolized and perpetuated the conflict thesis, the idea that science and religion are at war with each other. This chapter also introduces one of the landmark events in the effort to disprove this common misperception. The virtually unknown International Conference on Science and Christian Faith, held in Oxford in July 1965, was a gathering of thirty-six men from ten countries who sought to demonstrate the positive relationship between modern science and biblical Christianity. How this conference came about and the efforts is represented are the subject of the rest of this book.

This chapter examines the origins of the foundations of the fundamentalism and antievolutionism in the U.S. in a crisis over gender and sex roles in the years before the Scopes Trial. It discusses the role of women activists in the antievolutionism and the wide range of secular responses generated by the threat of feminization. It also suggests that the modern creation science movement has dropped the ideal of maternalism as thoroughly as Scopes' defenders ever could have hoped.

Many progressive historians and political commentators who celebrate William Jennings Bryan’s early populist crusade for economic justice lament his later decline into religious conservatism. However, Bryan’s views on the relationship between religion and economy remained consistent throughout his career. For Bryan, financial reform was grounded in the cultivation of sympathy with the plight of farmers and workers, and these sympathetic bonds in turn depended upon a shared spiritual sensibility. Without the bonds of sympathy and sentiment shaped by a pervasively Christian environment, social deterioration and degeneration were inevitable. The logic of Bryan’s populist rhetoric confounded secular liberal distinctions that divided religion, politics, science, and economy into discreet and autonomous spheres of social life. Rejecting abstract and quantifiable measures that reduced the economy to sets of technical problems, Bryan emphasized shared experience of human welfare and suffering that criticized individualism as the basis of social and economic life. However, this same emphasis on sympathetic attachments also animated racial and regional forms of identification that undermined the possibility of a broad populist coalition of farmers and workers.