Wineapple, the author, tries to parallel Bryan with today’s “Christian nationalists”… [she] stresses that southern segregationists opposed teaching evolution while also admitting that black Christians largely agreed. The Scopes Monkey Trial was about two opposing forms of progressivism. Both claimed to defend the vulnerable. Bryan and Darrow in the end were too absolutist to find common ground.

Supposedly the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, over whether evolution could be taught in public schools, embarrassed Christian “fundamentalists” out of public life until the 1970s. The reality is more complex.

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple tells the story of the trial but does not reflect deeply about its long-term impact on religious public witness. Instead, she focuses on the supposed similarities of the trial and its era to today, amid debates over populism, Christian nationalism, and race.

The trial was chiefly about the large personalities of perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who joined the prosecution, and famed trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, who joined the defense. In 1960, the trial was dramatized in the film “Inherit the Wind,” with Spencer Tracey portraying Darrow, Fredric March as Bryan, and Gene Kelly as cynical Baltimore reporter H.L. Mencken, who despised backcountry America. Of course, the film is not historically accurate. Defendant John Scopes was never jailed. The jail was never attacked by an angry mob. Scopes was not romantically involved with the daughter of the town’s fundamentalist “spiritual leader.” That fiery preacher, whose denomination is never cited, is sinisterly portrayed consigning a drowned unbaptized boy to hell in his funeral sermon, an odd teaching for any Protestant preacher, fundamentalist or not. The film portrays the town’s religious people as dangerously reactionary.

In reality, Dayton during the controversy was friendly and civil. It virtually invited national notoriety by staging the controversial trial for publicity and commerce. The American Civil Liberties Union publicly advertised for a schoolteacher to defy the law to precipitate a test trial, which the ACLU hoped would eventually overturn the Tennessee law as unconstitutional. John Scopes amiably agreed to cooperate as a defendant, although it’s unclear whether he ever taught evolution in the classroom. He persuaded students to testify against him. There was never any question that he would be found guilty, with hopes placed on higher court appeals.

Bryan eagerly volunteered to help the prosecution. He was a vociferous critic of Darwinian evolution as dehumanizing and immoral, a threat against the weak and vulnerable. He was the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1896, 1900 and 1908. Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, and he strove to be a political kingmaker at subsequent Democratic Party conventions. At the 1924 convention, he successfully denounced a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan. Although a self-styled friend of the commoner, he was not a friend to black people, whom he thought should passively accept subordination in a white-led society. Bryan rejoiced at the 1919 enactment of Prohibition. And like many others, he saw post World War I America, despite Prohibition, as morally degenerating, with divorce increasing, rising religious liberalism and secularism, permissive sexuality, debauched entertainment, and America losing its definitive Protestant character.

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