This ‘Trial of the Century’ Is 100. Its Lessons Could Save the Democrats.

Opinion|This ‘Trial of the Century’ Is 100. Its Lessons Could Save the Democrats.

In July 1925, John Scopes faced a jury in a stifling courtroom in Dayton, Tenn. A 24-year-old teacher, Scopes stood accused of violating the Butler Act, a recently enacted state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution because it contradicted the Bible. He was convicted, fined $100 and basked in the renown of the case for the rest of his life.

Despite its rather genial outcome (the Tennessee Supreme Court even overturned Mr. Scopes’s conviction on a technicality), echoes from the “trial of the century” still resound in American culture and politics a full century later. The Scopes trial was a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity, represented by two of the most famous attorneys in the country: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense. Broadcast on the radio, it exposed the horror many urban liberals felt toward people they deemed dogmatic and uneducated. H.L. Mencken, the eloquent if arrogant critic of unrefined America, attended the trial and hissed to his many readers that Bryan was “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning” — “a peasant come home to the barnyard.”

A hundred years on, many voters in rural areas still feel that the cosmopolitan politicians and advisers who run the Democratic Party look down on them. Because those voters have an outsize influence on the makeup of the Senate, Democrats will have to reckon with that perception, accurate or not, if they hope to dominate American politics again.

While teaching evolution has been legal in every state for decades, the larger antagonisms revealed by the Scopes trial persist. Americans in rural areas are more likely to identify as Christian than their urban counterparts. Those who are white overwhelmingly back politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who says he takes his “worldview” from the Bible, and President Trump, who claims he was “saved by God to make America great again.” Americans with a strong rural identity are also more likely to bear a grudge against experts and intellectuals, heirs of the evolutionists who came to Scopes’s defense.

Who should decide what schools teach remains as intensely disputed as a century ago. Bryan believed that “the people,” not teachers, had “the right to control the educational system which they have created and which they tax themselves to support.” If they wanted to ban the teaching of evolution with a bill like the Butler Act, they should be able to. A similar logic drives the contemporary crusade by Moms for Liberty and other right-wing groups to ban courses infected by D.E.I. and to toss books about L.G.B.T.Q. people out of school libraries.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s compendium of conservative ideas, called for parents to decide what students would learn. It even favored publicly funding private schools, including religious schools, that could teach children to doubt the existence of climate change, the persistence of racism and, yes, the theory of evolution.