Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation
Brenda Wineapple. Random House, 2025. 544 pages.
Reviewed by Bill Galloway
The Scopes Trial Revisited
It was inevitable that the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial would produce a new book or two. My last read about the trial and its history was the 2006 book Summer for the Gods, by Edward Larson. I recall it as being a thorough reportage and analysis of the history, drama, and impact of the trial that satisfied my personal and professional interests. Nonetheless, I could not resist the centennial arrival of a new book on the subject: Keeping the Faith, by Brenda Wineapple. For starters, the book is nearly twice the length of Larson’s. I was curious as to what new information or thinking might have emerged regarding this very public and nationally chronicled “trial of the century.” Furthermore, the book received favorable reviews for content and readability.
I found it to be an engaging read that incorporated the broader early twentieth century cultural, political, and religious dynamics that combined and clashed for eleven days in the small Tennessee hamlet. The book likewise introduced and examined the nationally known participants, both major and minor, providing understanding of their decisions, words, and actions during and after the trial itself.
Anatomy of the Text
Keeping the Faith is as much about multiple threads in American political and cultural history that set the stage for the Scopes trial as about the trial itself. The text contains 25 chapters, in 7 parts, and an epilogue.
The first four parts, containing a bit over half of the text, introduce the dramatis personae: lawyer, political liberal, agnostic Darrow; agrarian populist, politician, fundamentalist Bryan; acerbic, nationally followed commentator, iconoclast Menken; and less well known but nationally prominent participants, including judge Raulston, leading prosecuting attorney Stewart, and defense leads Neal and Malone. And of course, a young Kentuckian recently hired as a coach, drafted to teach biology, who then volunteered to serve as a test subject for the Tennessee Butler Act “prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of Tennessee.” With actors in place, several chapters then summarize various elements that converged in the early years of the twentieth century to create a time of national angst and unrest. Among others, these included the first world war, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and attendant national racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, the rise of women’s suffrage and temperance movements, and increase of competing liberal vs. conservative factions within US Christianity. Adding to this fraught mix, scientists, including biologists, paleontologists, and geologists, were increasingly accepting and teaching the concepts of the theory of Darwinian evolution. Like most science, those concepts readily morphed into misconceptions and falsehoods that spread through the popular culture, thus the early and forever label: “The Scopes Monkey Trial.” Darwin’s theory had also been appropriated as scientific justification for euthanasia.
Parts 5 and 6 detail the trial itself. Much of this is well documented, although I was unaware that the several early days of the trial were spent in off-the-record arguments among the prosecution, defense, and judge, with the jury excluded. The remaining 4 chapters and epilogue complete the history with the subsequent death of Bryan, the later life of Scopes as a world-traveled petroleum geologist, and follow-up legal appeal. I recommend the book to anyone interested in the origins, history, and consequences of the Scopes trial. Those familiar with the events of the trial will find the expanded overview of this complicated time in American history and culture thought provoking. Enduring themes of racism, immigrant bias, disparate wealth, media influence, education, and religious conflict, both within American Christianity and in the broader culture and body politic, may have evolved, but remain current and familiar.
