Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
Edward J. Larson. Basic Books, Rev. Ed. 2020. 330 pages.
Reviewed by Matthew D. Bates
Edward Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book offers an engaging and often entertaining account of what led to the Scopes trial, what happened during it, and the trial’s aftermath. The court case came about because of heightened tension in American life over the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools. At the heart of the conflict was the question of whether Darwin’s approach to evolution, as expressed in his 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, was compatible with belief in God.
As evolution was being introduced in US schools in the aftermath of WWI, William Jennings Bryan and other Christians believed that the German cause revealed the inevitable human outcome of natural selection and survival of the fittest: militarism, capitalism, imperialism, and nihilism. Proponents of evolutionary theory thought the discoveries of science since the time of Darwin had created, as Thomas Huxley claimed, an “impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined) of theology and the passionless impersonality … which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena” (18).
Competing visions of democracy – a simple system of majority rule or a polity that protected individual liberty – exacerbated the growing hostility between science and religion. The popularity of Bryan had risen through his majoritarian view of democracy. In contrast, the American Civil Liberties Union advocated the cause of individual liberty and sought a test case to challenge the antievolution statute Tennessee passed in 1925. Boosters from the small town of Dayton saw an opportunity to put it on the map and offered a young teacher and coach, John Scopes, as one willing to be charged with violating the statute that forbade the teaching of evolution theory in state schools.
Part II of the book focuses on the trial, which was a national spectacle. While both sides hoped to persuade the American public to embrace their perspective on evolution and implied views on the relation of science to religion, the prosecution’s strategy was to narrowly focus on the antievolution statute. For Bryan, it represented the will of the majority of Tennessee’s citizens who, he argued, had the right to determine what they wanted their children to learn.
Clarence Darrow, arguably the nation’s best-known defense attorney then, led the defense. His materialist worldview and passion for individual liberty contrasted with Bryan’s fundamentalism and majoritarianism: would teachers and professors be allowed to express their own beliefs about science and religion without fear? The heart of Darrow’s defense was to call leading scientists, ministers, and theologians to educate the public about evolution and its compatibility with religion. He concocted the strategy of calling Bryan to the stand only after the judge ruled against the use of expert witnesses. When Darrow got Bryan to concede that creation could have happened over a period of many years, fundamentalists were aghast. Nevertheless, Scopes was convicted and fined $100.
The drama did not end with the trial, whose aftereffects Part III describes. Bryan died five days after the trial’s conclusion. Both sides knew an appeal to the state Supreme Court was coming and when it did that court overturned the conviction on a technicality. Though Larson introduces many other colorful and important characters, Darrow and Bryan take center stage throughout.
Many of the questions that animated the turmoil of the 1920s are still front and center in American life today. Is democracy simply rule by the majority, or does it protect individual liberties? Should educators enjoy academic freedom to teach without fear? Will Christianity be open to critical reflection or adopt a defensive posture grounded in biblical literalism? A fundamental issue for fundamentalists and modernists also might be revisited: “the preoccupation of both sides with scientific evidence of humanity’s anthropoidal ancestry” (8). Could the church be a place where people freely inquire about creation and how we might understand the nature of human beings and their place in it, as well as the kind of divine presence, if any, related to that account?
