Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and academic Edward J. Larson is a work of historical non-fiction first published in 1997 that discusses the history of the Scopes trial, the events surrounding it, and the aftermath. The 2006 edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Larson begins by describing the geopolitical environment in the United States at the time of the 1925 Scopes trial. Evolutionary theories had been introduced for some time before the Scopes trial, beginning with the work of the Chevalier de Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Many Christian scientists at the time were open to ways of accommodating both science and religion. However, with the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his concept of natural selection, the Piltdown man and other fossil discoveries, and increased enrollment in public secondary education, more families were exposed to Darwinian concepts. This development, in addition to the rise in religious fundamentalism and the association of natural selection as a justification of laissez-faire doctrines contributed to the rise of the antievolution movement. The author describes the role of William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and renowned orator who led the antievolution crusade. Larson also describes the rise of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, and how the group came to defend individual liberties through the use of the First Amendment.

The author delves into arguments made on both sides and details how the clash over teaching evolution in public high schools came to a head in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. The case formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes centered on the Butler Act, a Tennessee bill that had been recently signed into law. This law prohibited educators from teaching human evolution in public schools. The ACLU sought to challenge the constitutionality of the Butler Act and issued a press release in the Chattanooga Times offering financing and legal assistance to any Tennessee teacher willing to be its test case. A few enterprising businessmen seeking to increase Dayton’s profile and exposure approached John Scopes to act as the defendant. At the time, Scopes was a football coach and general science instructor at the local Rhea County High School and occasionally filled in for the biology teacher.

The high-profile case pitted two of the most famous legal minds of the time against one another. Bryan volunteered to work on the side of the prosecution. For the defense, there was the esteemed criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, who also championed anticlericalism. Scopes was largely forgotten during the trial, as the case was seen as a vehicle to debate much larger issues that had been simmering beneath the public consciousness. Ultimately, the prosecution prevailed, and John Scopes was found guilty and fined.

Both sides claimed victory at the end of the trial. The prosecution declared its triumph in upholding the Tennessee statute. However, the defense claimed that the court of public opinion was on its side, with Bryan humiliated and defeated by Darrow on the witness stand. Bryan died days after the trial ended, but the antievolution crusaders raged on in his stead. The defense team appealed the decision before the Tennessee Supreme Court on the grounds that the statute was overly vague, that it violated Scopes’s constitutional right to free speech, and that the Butler Act violated the Tennessee Constitution. While the court rejected the defense’s arguments and upheld the statute, it overturned the conviction on a technicality: The jury, not the judge, should have decided the fine.

Larson details the aftermath of the trial and the effect it had on the antievolution movement. Many authors who wrote about the trial made reductive arguments about how the “trial of the century” marked a watershed moment for the antievolution movement and forced its decline. Larson argues that rather than declining, the fundamentalists withdrew and formed their own independent religious, educational, and social institutions. By the 1960s, antievolution statutes were made to seem “virtually un-American.” The tables were turned on the fundamentalists, who were now on the defensive to include creationist theories in school curricula.