Although the debate about how to teach about the world’s origins seems to never end, the terms of the debate have shifted considerably during the past century.
The headlines about American creationism can seem like an endless and distressing Groundhog Day-style loop. After all, almost a century since the infamous Scopes Trial, creationism is still part of public education, making appearances in local school districts and potentially at the U.S. Department of Education (Jones, 2019; Waldman, 2017). Indeed, a recent poll found that creationism remains a commonly held belief among Americans, with 4 in 10 agreeing with the statement that God created humans “in their present form” at some point in the last 10,000 years and another 3 in 10 agreeing that “God guided” the long evolution of humanity (Brenan, 2019).
Back in 1925, the world’s attention was centered on the town of Dayton, Tennessee, for what was supposed to be the “trial of the century,” in which both sides jockeyed for the right to define what American schools could teach as science. At issue was a new Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools — a law that substitute science teacher John Scopes agreed to test in court. In the end, the trial did not solve anything. The anti-evolution law remained on the books, but creationists embarrassed themselves on the world stage by showing how clueless they were about the emerging discoveries of evolutionary science.
Understandably, every new trial that pits creationism against the teaching of evolution has been called a mere repetition of the drama in Dayton. In 1968, for instance, science teacher Susan Epperson challenged Arkansas’ Scopes-era law before the U.S. Supreme Court. The following year, she met with John Scopes, and the two teachers agreed that little had changed — Epperson was persecuted and reviled in 1968 just as Scopes had been in 1925 (American Civil Liberties Union, 2010). And in 1981, when a new creationist law wended its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, journalists were quick to label it “Scopes 2” (Katz, 2005). In the 21st century, a federal case about creationism made headlines in Pennsylvania — and was dubbed “Scopes, 2005” in the Wall Street Journal (Sataline, 2005).
In reality, however, the nation’s thinking about the proper role of religion in science class has changed dramatically since 1925. Far from having to relitigate the Scopes Trial over and over again — as the headlines would seem to imply — those who advocate for the teaching of evolution have won a steady string of victories, some minor and some revolutionary, and those victories have played a decisive role in shaping science education in our public schools.
Scopes in context
It becomes easier to see how the debate has shifted if we remind ourselves what was at stake in the original Scopes Trial. During the 1920s, many observers considered Tennessee’s anti-evolution law to be the tip of a creationist iceberg. Anxious science educators watched as lawmakers all around the country considered laws banning or regulating the teaching of evolutionary science. Between 1922 and 1929, 21 state legislatures considered a total of 53 anti-evolution bills or resolutions, and the U.S. Congress also considered two laws that would have stifled the teaching of evolution in the Washington, D.C., schools.
In the end, five states (Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas) passed laws or resolutions against the teaching of evolution (Laats, 2010, p. 4). These laws and bills differed slightly in their wording, but their goals were the same: to ban the discussion of evolution entirely from public schools and colleges. Perhaps the best example of this sweeping ambition came from the first proposed law in Kentucky, in 1922. Their bill would have prevented not just the teaching of evolution, but also teaching about atheism or agnosticism. Moreover, an amendment by the state senate would have banned Kentucky’s public libraries from owning any books that “directly or indirectly attack or assail or seek to undermine or weaken or destroy the religious beliefs and convictions of the children of Kentucky” (Kentucky General Assembly, 1922a, 1922b). It’s hard to imagine what Kentucky’s schools and libraries might have looked like if that bill had become law. What books would remain on the shelves if libraries eliminated any book that — even “indirectly” — might weaken religious beliefs?
Kentucky’s bill failed by only one vote, and even lawmakers who planned to vote against it told the bill’s author that they shared his aversion to the teaching of evolution. In backroom political deals, legislators had been promised that even if the bill failed, Kentucky’s public schools would “IMMEDIATELY” dump all “infidel textbooks” and fire all “infidel teachers.” If the legislators weren’t satisfied with the schools’ course of action, they promised to reintroduce the bill and ban evolution by state law (Ellis, 1922).
By the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925, evolution education certainly seemed to be on the defensive nationwide. As one alarmed observer warned at the time, anti-evolution activists wanted nothing less than to “dominate our public institutions” (Shipley, 1927, p. 3). And, throughout the 1920s, it seemed likely that they would be able to do so. When the world’s attention turned to Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925, it was not only John Scopes who was on trial. The authority of mainstream science itself was being judged, and Scopes’ defenders pleaded with the jury to allow evolution to be included in public schools.
Instead of resolving the issue of evolution education, the Scopes Trial only added a great deal more culture-war angst to the ongoing debate.
One of the lawyers on the defense team, Dudley Field Malone, earned the respect of all by keeping his suit coat on despite the scorching Tennessee heat, and on the fifth day, he impressed the crowd even more when he made the most electrifying speech of the entire trial. He did not argue against traditional religion. He did not try to prove that Scopes had not broken the law. Malone only pleaded that evolution be part of a well-rounded education. As Malone put it, “For God’s sake let the children have their minds kept open” (World’s Most Famous Court Trial, 1925, p. 187). The theory of evolution, Malone insisted, was not trying to edge religion out of public schools. It only wanted to make its case to the children of America. In 1925, even the most ambitious hope of liberals like Malone was that children across the country would have access to evolutionary theory, even if it had to be taught alongside creationism.
In the end, despite Malone’s rousing argument, Scopes was found guilty. Although the trial had been touted as the final word on evolution education, it was anything but. The defenders of science viewed the trial as a huge success because they thought Malone had won the day in the court of public opinion. In America’s public school science classes, however, the trial had mixed results. Ever cautious about their marketing appeal, textbook publishers cut the word “evolution” from leading textbooks, but they often left the science content the same (Shapiro, 2013, p. 151). Instead of resolving the issue of evolution education, the Scopes Trial only added a great deal more culture-war angst to the ongoing debate.
Deflated goals
Since the Scopes Trial, creationism has gradually lost its power over American minds and in American classrooms. At least in part, creationism’s decline has been the result of dramatic improvements in science. In 1925, at the time of the Scopes Trial, mainstream scientists still had not figured out some of the mechanisms of evolutionary theory. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, however, they worked out the main questions (Larson, 2006, pp. 223-237). By 1968, when Susan Epperson took her case against Arkansas’ 1920s-era anti-evolution law to the U.S. Supreme Court, the teaching of evolution had the backing of the entire edifice of mainstream scientific thinking. In her support, the National Science Teachers Association offered a statement signed by a who’s-who of leading biologists. There was no longer any question of the importance of evolutionary theory, they told the Court, and all “scientists and other reasonable persons” agreed that evolution was a vital building block of modern knowledge (Hirschkop, 1968, p. 4).
The Supreme Court agreed. In striking language, Justice Abe Fortas captured the dramatic shift in mainstream thinking about science and religion. Back in the 1920s, state lawmakers and judges alike had seriously considered banning a scientific idea in order to protect a religious one. Such thinking, Fortas wrote in striking down Arkansas’s anti-evolution law, went profoundly against the thinking of “the modern mind” (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968).
By the end of the 20th century, the position of creationists and evolution education had reached a complete reversal from the days of the Scopes Trial. In 1925, Dudley Field Malone had pleaded for evolution to have a place alongside creationism; by 1995, one of the nation’s leading creationists, Duane Gish, begged instead for creationism to be allowed a place in U.S. public school classrooms alongside evolution.
Gish had become famous for his highly effective debate technique, the “Gish Gallop,” in which he rattled off facts in such quick succession that scientists were left floundering, unable to keep up. Yet, in spite of his success on the debate stage, even Gish could not ignore the new dominance of evolutionary science and the waning political clout of creationism. He never tried to ban evolution; instead, and stealing Malone’s line from 70 years earlier, he argued that creationism should receive a fair shake, if only so that children’s minds could be kept open (Gish, 1995, p. v; McIver, 1988).
In the 21st century, the teaching of evolutionary science has only become even more dominant, with one leading creationist organization, Answers In Genesis (AIG), acknowledging that not even Gish’s desperate plea for inclusion is realistic today. As AIG leader Ken Ham put it, unequivocally, “We do not believe that creation should be mandated in public school science classrooms” (Ham & Patterson, 2013). In today’s skeptical environment, Ham worried, public school teachers would likely just mock creationist ideas if they were forced to teach them. This deflation of creationist ambitions doesn’t receive nearly as many headlines as AIG’s 2016 reconstruction of Noah’s Ark in Grant County, Kentucky (Goodstein, 2016), but the shift has been dramatic all the same.
Other types of creationism have experienced similarly dizzying declines. Some creationists have tried stripping creationism of its overt religious content in order to seem more palatable to public schools. For example, institutions such as the Discovery Institute (DI) have promoted theories of “intelligent design.” They have insisted that their ideas were not religious, but merely represented scientific objections to mainstream ideas about evolution (Branch, 2020). As did more traditional creationism, intelligent design had its day in court. In 2005, federal Judge John E. Jones decisively rejected such arguments (Goodstein, 2005). Intelligent design, Jones ruled, was not science, but only warmed-over religion.
Viewed in historical perspective, everything about the teaching of creationism and evolution in public schools has changed since the 1920s. Then, wedging evolutionary science into public schools was seen as a fond, if impractical, hope. But now, even the most ardent creationist activists no longer bother to fight for their cause.
Long shadows
Certainly, not all public school science teachers are optimistic about the larger trend. A decade ago, for example, one middle school teacher told of introducing the theory of evolution to his class, only to have a student leap from his seat and shout, “I didn’t come from no stinkin’ monkey!” (Long, 2011, p. 13). From inside such a classroom, the long-term decline of creationism’s power can be hard to see.
In state and federal politics, too, while creationists’ ambitions have shrunk, they’ve hardly disappeared. In recent years, for example, state lawmakers have introduced dozens of “academic freedom” bills (Berbeco, 2016; Ross, 2017), which aim to protect the “right” of science teachers to present critiques of the scientific consensus of such topics as evolution and climate change (Berbeco, 2016), even though those critiques have no credibility among mainstream scientists and science educators.
Bills such as these represent the durable power of creationist thinking in American society, and, taken alone, they justifiably raise concerns about the quality of American science education and the overweening influence of politics in America’s classrooms. In historical perspective, however, these bills do not represent the enduring power of creationism so much as its remarkable decline. Just as Duane Gish’s creationist arguments of the 1990s echoed Dudley Field Malone’s pro-evolution line from the Scopes Trial, these “academic freedom” bills demonstrate the ultimate weakness of the anti-evolution movement today. They can only repeat the successful language of their opposition, seemingly unaware that they are simply proving the weakness of their own ideas. Creationists today who plead for the “academic freedom” to teach creationism-friendly science are fighting a desperate last-ditch campaign; they no longer hope to “dominate our public institutions” as their forebears did in the 1920s, they can only plead to squeeze bad science into public school science classes alongside better science. Evolution educators are right to look askance at any attempt to water down good science education, but they should also feel reassured that a full century of science activism has led to successes that would be hard to predict from the overheated Rhea County Courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, circa 1925.
References
American Civil Liberties Union. (2010). Reconciling faith and evolution in the classroom: A conversation with Susan Epperson, 42 years later. New York, NY: Author.
Berbeco, M. (2016, March 16). Anti-science education legislation. Oakland, CA: National Center for Science Education.
Branch, G. (2020). Anti-intellectualism and anti-evolutionism: Lessons from Hofstadter. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (7), 22-27.
Brenan, M. (2019, July 26). 40% of Americans believe in creationism. Gallup News.
Ellis, G.W. (1922, March 13). Letter to William J. Bryan and J.W. Porter. William Jennings Bryan Papers, Library of Congress (Box 35, File 1922 Mar 1-13).
Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 US 97 (1968).
Gish, D.T. (1995). Teaching creation science in public schools. Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research.
Goodstein, L. (2005, December 21). Issuing rebuke, Judge rejects teaching of intelligent design. New York Times.
Goodstein, L. (2016, June 26). A Noah’s ark in Kentucky, Dinosaurs included. New York Times.
Ham, K. & Patterson, R. (2013, September 17). Should Christians be pushing to have creation taught in government schools? Answers in Genesis.
Hirschkop, P.J. (1968). Brief of the National Education Association of the United States and the National Science Teachers Association as Amici Curiae, Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 US 97.
Jones, H. (2019, September 13). Brainerd schools boss questions why they’re teaching “unproven” theory of evolution. City Pages.
Katz, J. (2005, July 5). Scopes 2: Arkansas’ creationism trial. NPR.
Kentucky General Assembly. (1922a). Amendment to Kentucky Senate Bill 136. Journal of the Kentucky Senate 1922, p. 1062.
Kentucky General Assembly. (1922b). Kentucky House Bill 191. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Kentucky 1922, pp. 1668–1669.
Laats, A. (2010). Fundamentalism and education in the Scopes era: God, Darwin, and the roots of America’s culture wars. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.
Larson, E.J. (2006). Evolution: The remarkable history of a scientific theory. New York, NY: Modern Library.
Long, D.E. (2011). Evolution and religion in American education: An ethnography. Valdosta, GA: Springer.
McIver, I. (1988). Creationist misquotation of Darrow. Creation/Evolution, 8 (2), 1-13.
Ross, E. (2017, May 12). Revamped “anti-science” education bills in United States find success. Nature.
Sataline, S. (2005, September 22). Scopes, 2005: “Design” theory faces legal test. Wall Street Journal.
Shapiro, A.R. (2013). Trying biology: The Scopes Trial, textbooks, and the antievolution movement in American schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shipley, M. (1927). The war on modern science: A short history of the fundamentalist attacks on evolution and modernism. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Waldman, A. (2017, January 29). DeVos’ code words for creationism raise concerns about “junk science.” ProPublica.
World’s Most Famous Court Trial, 3rd ed. (1925). National Book Company.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Laats
ADAM LAATS is a professor of education and history at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution .