The Unheralded Growth of Prayer in Schools

Resurrecting the Scopes Trial

Good morning, subscriber!

Welcome to the end of another week. Of late, I’ve had the mixed pleasure of going on fruitless searches for morels. If you see me emerging from the woods with mud on my knees and tears in my eyes, you’ll know where I’ve been.

Speaking of kneeling in search of something holy, on Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. The case revolves around Joseph Kennedy, a former high school football coach who lost his job for praying at the 50-yard line and in the locker room after his team’s games. Personally, I don’t blame him: I would also want someone to turn my Gatorade into wine.

Alas, I do blame traditional media for making it seem like prayer in schools is a relic of the past. Article after article mentions that the conservative justices on the court lean toward ruling in favor of Kennedy, reversing the precedent set in Engel v. Vitale (1962) that outlawed prayer in public schools. But few journalists mention that in response to that decision, many members of the white evangelical communities whose roots and growth we explored a couple of weeks back simply put their kids in private Christian schools where prayer was permitted. Quietly, graduates of these schools have ever more influence today.

So, in a sequel of sorts, I’d like to explore the inception of fundamentalist schools, as well as the perilous tradition of ignoring fundamentalism’s reach. Both can be traced to the warped legacy of the famed Scopes Trial. 

To see what I mean, let’s get down with Darwinism.

Today’s story comes from Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson

Charlie boy published The Origin of Species in 1859, but it took a little longer for evolution to appear in US high schools. Finally, in the 1910s, students began reading George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology, the bestselling text in the field.

Hunter described how “simple forms of life on earth slowly and gradually gave rise to those more complex.” The appearance of his book in schools was a long-sought-after victory for secular scholars and scientists. The growing fundamentalist movement wasn’t as pleased. 

Drawn together across denominational lines to defend the so-called fundamentals of their traditional faith, Christian fundamentalists initiated an antievolution crusade in the 1920s. Ministers like Billy Sunday, whose pancake recipes we touched on in our last post, toured the country pronouncing Darwin as an “infidel.” On one occasion, Sunday worked himself into such a frenzy while stating there’s “no such thing as pre-historic man" that, according to one newspaper, “Mr. Sunday gagged as if about to vomit.”¹ His religious furball—excuse me, fervor—was matched by William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate turned public speaker.

William Jennings Bryan

Bryan, who believed “in Democracy as well as Christianity,” gave hundreds of speeches asking, “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain all the learning of the schools and lose his faith in God?” His words fell on devout ears, and in 1925, Tennesse lawmakers made it a crime “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of men.” This bill set the stage for the “trial of the century.”

Nominally the Scopes Trial revolved around John Scopes, a 24-year-old biology teacher who taught A Civic Biology at a high school in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. In reality, the case pitted Bryan, who joined the prosecution, against Clarence Darrow, who joined the ACLU-led defense. Darrow was the most famous trial lawyer in the country, and his stance was simple: "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.”² Toward the end of the 11-day trial, Darrow made the surprise move of calling Bryan to the stand. His goal? To publicly skewer the beliefs of “the greatest expert” on the Bible “in the world.”³

Clarence Darrow

In the now-famous, climactic moment, Darrow pushed Bryan to justify literal interpretations of the Bible and explain how, for example, Jonah could live inside a whale for three days (answer: he brought granola bars). Bryan shot back that it’s “just as easy to believe the miracle of Jonah as any other miracle in the Bible,” and as he lost his cool yelled that he was “simply trying to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States."⁴ Although the judge later told the jury to disregard the entire exchange, who then proceeded to hand down a guilty verdict following all of nine minutes of deliberation, newspapers throughout the country printed transcripts. Darrow may have lost the battle, but Bryan and fundamentalists had lost the war.

Or had they?

Because the Scopes Trial was not a victory for the defense. In 1992, historian Ronald Numbers “discovered not a single declaration of victory by the opponents of antievolutionism” in any newspaper or magazine.⁵ To the contrary, in 1925, liberal publications like the Nation described the antievolutionists’ “success at Dayton” and predicted an ensuing “flood” of fundamentalist lawmaking across the South.⁶ This warning proved prescient: a spate of southern states passed anti-evolution bills within just a few years, encouraged by Scopes’ guilty verdict. So why in popular retellings of the tale, like the film Inherit the Wind, is the case portrayed as a triumph over fundamentalism?