​The Scopes Trial: The 100-Year Anniversary

​The Scopes Trial: The 100-Year Anniversary

Bodie Hodge, M.Sc., B.Sc., PEI

Biblical Authority Ministries, May 9, 2025 (Donate)

School teacher John T. Scopes was arrested on May 9, 1925—100 years ago today because he was teaching human evolution in a state school in Dayton, Tennessee. It turned out to be the “trial of the century”.

Many suggest it was the turning point that caused the Bible to be removed from schools and be replaced with secular humanism’s the evolution of man. Government schools in the USA have never been the same. It turned into a trial over the religion of Christianity vs. the religion of humanism. It had a profound effect on education.

John T. Scopes, 1925

Leading Up To The Scopes Trial

In the 1830s, Charles Lyell, a lawyer, denied the Flood of Noah’s day. Lyell argued that the rock layers produced during the Flood were evidence of long ages of slow gradual accumulations over millions of years (geological evolution).

This idea of long ages raged in the 1800s leading up to Charles Darwin who from 1859-1871 applied this same concept of slow changes over long ages to biology. Darwin, a theologian by training, reintroduced an evolutionary worldview (biological evolution). Throughout the 1870s, long ages and evolutionary ideas began permeating universities across the Western World who fell from a Christian standard and adopted secular humanistic ideas of origins.

In the by 1920, geological evolution was in state schools prominently and animal evolution was taught (subset of the religion of secular humanism), but the last holdout was against human evolution. This set the stage for the Scope’s Trial.

The Scopes Trial

The Scopes Trial, officially known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, took place in July 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. This landmark legal case centered on the Butler Act, a Tennessee law that prohibited public (i.e., state/government) school teachers from denying the biblical account of special human creation by God and teaching that humanity had evolved from a lower order of animals.

In the state, it was permissible to teach animal evolution, but not human evolution—particularly as a fact! John Scopes, a high school teacher with an undergraduate law degree and no education in science, was accused of violating this act by teaching human evolution in his classroom.​ He wanted to join the attack on the law by his own admission. Dr. David Menton, a renown biologist and anatomist who studied the Scopes Trial and had subsequently written and spoken on the subject stated,

“So John Scopes was not being attacked at all; rather it was he who was on the attack. Scopes willingly joined ranks with the ACLU in an attempt to repeal or nullify the Butler Act.”[1]

The trial featured prominent figures: William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, represented the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, a renowned defense attorney who was a skeptic and agnostic (a type of secular humanist/naturalism), represented Scopes.

William Bryan and Clarence Darrow, 1925

The courtroom battle was not just about Scopes’ guilt but oddly delved into whether evolution should be taught as fact in public schools. Darrow sought to introduce expert testimony from evolutionary scientists to promote evolution positions but this never happened.

Instead, Christianity was essentially put on trial. And Bryan, the Christian attorney, was put on the stand to defend Christianity. ​

Ultimately, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (maximum potential fine was $500), though the verdict was later overturned on a technicality. Despite the legal outcome, the trial had massive educational ramifications.

Public perception, influenced by highly inaccurate and biased portrayals like the play and film "Inherit the Wind," often viewed the trial as a defeat for creation and the Bible and a victory for the evolutionary religion. However, these dramatizations took considerable liberties and did not accurately represent the historical events.​

During the Scopes Trial in July 1925, Clarence Darrow, the defense attorney, called William Jennings Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible. Though it was an unusual legal move, Darrow used the opportunity to question Bryan on his interpretation of Scripture. This exchange revealed that Bryan did not fully uphold a literal, six-day creation as described in Genesis.

Discarded display formerly at the Creation Museum

In other words, Bryan had compromised Genesis with evolutionary ideas! Bryan was fine with geological evolution for instance.

One key question Darrow asked was whether the "days" of creation were literal 24-hour periods. Bryan admitted that he did not necessarily believe they were. He suggested that the days could have been long periods of time—ages rather than actual days.

This aligned more with old-earth views and attempts to reconcile Scripture with evolutionary beliefs of deep time (geological evolution). This is called “syncretism” or “compromise” by the way. It is an attempt to mix two different opposing religions. In this instance, it was mixing the secular humanistic origins accounts with Christianity. Bryan also conceded that he did not take all aspects of the Bible straightforward or natural fashion, depending on what he considered symbolic or poetic. In other words, passages like Genesis, which is written as a historical narrative, didn’t need to be interpreted as such according to Bryan.

Bryan was essentially mixing Christianity with the secular humanistic religion when it came to origins. This sent shockwaves to the masses! But what it showed was that Bryan, the professing Christian, didn’t believe the Bible in Genesis.

And this precedent set the stage for an entire educational system to begin removing what little influence the Bible still held. And little by little the remnant of Bible was removed from science, history, logic[2], literature, and so much more. Finally, the Bible itself was thrown out of schools in the 1960s.

Bryan also failed to answer the simple question “where did Cain get his wife?” because he had compromised Genesis. Of course, Cain married a sister or a niece, but either way, brothers and sister originally had to marry.

Bryan also struggled with answers to issues like miracles in the Bible. Bryan, to his defense, was struggling with health issues, but his position was simply not biblical. Menton writes,

“Once Darrow accomplished his purpose of ridiculing Bryan’s beliefs in Biblical miracles, he asked the judge to instruct the jury to find Scopes guilty, and in so doing, eliminated the need for closing arguments. Bryan had put great effort into preparing his closing statement. This maneuver by Darrow prevented Bryan from giving his well-supported scientific and religious argument against the theory of evolution.”[3]

Darrow got to critique Bryan’s version of compromised Christianity, but the evolutionary worldview did not get the opportunity to be scrutinized—which likely would have been devastating! No doubt, Darrow knew this.  

Bryan’s failures were a major issue from a biblical creationist standpoint because Bryan, though known as a Christian and anti-evolution advocate, undermined the authority of the Bible by compromising on its plain meaning. This opened the door to attack Christianity further.

Such compromise weakens the foundation of biblical authority in the eyes of the masses who were watching and listening across the country (and the world to a certain degree!). If Genesis is not taken as it is written, it calls into question the accuracy and trustworthiness of the rest of Scripture, including core doctrines such as sin, death, and redemption through Christ. Ken Ham and David Menton co-wrote,

“That’s when Darrow knew he had won, because he had managed to get the Christian to admit, in front of a worldwide audience, that he couldn’t defend the Bible’s history (e.g., Cain’s wife), and didn’t take the Bible as written (the days of creation), and instead accepted the world’s teaching (millions of years). Thus, Bryan (unwittingly) had undermined biblical authority and paved the way for secular philosophy to pervade the culture and education system.”[4]

The big deal, then, was not just that Bryan lost rhetorical ground to Darrow, but that his own inconsistencies made it harder to defend the Bible effectively. The Scopes Trial was a turning point where many Christians began to drift away from the plain and straightforward interpretation of Genesis, opening the door for evolutionary teaching in public schools and contributing to the cultural shift away from biblical authority.

Bryan’s answers revealed a compromised view of Scripture that, while intending to defend Christianity, actually weakened its foundation by allowing autonomous human reasoning (reasoning apart from God and His Word) to reinterpret God’s Word.

The Scopes Trial highlighted the debate between creation and evolution or more specifically Christianity vs. secular humanism (naturalism/materialism). It highlights tensions regarding secular humanistic educational content in government schools and the influence of religious beliefs on education. It serves as a reminder of the importance of basing the defense of faith on the authority of God's Word.​

Further reading:

·       The World’s Most Famous Court Trial, Word-for-word report from 1925, Second Reprint Edition, 1990, Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee, (particularly the Seventh Day’s Proceedings, p. 211-304).

 

---

[1] David Menton, Inherit the Wind: An Historical Analysis, Creation 19, no 1 (December 1996): 35-38. 

[2] Whole logic courses are removed—Logic is a Christian concept predicated on a logical God who uphold the universe in a logical way. And man is made in the image of a logical God, but due to sin we err on logic and must learn and study it. Students would go to a class on evolution, then they would go to a class on logic and see the fallacies in an evolutionary worldview; so something had to go. Logic was removed from most curriculum in the 1950s-1960s.

[3] David Menton, Inherit the Wind: An Historical Analysis, Creation 19, no 1 (December 1996): 35-38.

[4] Ken Ham and David Menton, Why Is the Scopes Trial Significant? In The New Answers Book 2, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 2008.

Religion in State Schools

 

How to Sneak Religion Into Government Schools?

Bodie Hodge, M.Sc., B.Sc., PEI

Biblical Authority Ministries, December 10, 2024 (Donate)

 

Teaching Religion in Schools: A Six-Step Procedure to Get Religion in State Schools

Teaching religion in schools can get a teacher or administration in trouble, especially in our current culture. “Religion” is seen as a bad word in state or government-run schools. Yet, religion gets inserted into school classrooms all the time in clever and hidden ways. Precious few are trained to spot it nowadays, and they just let it go.

Do you want to see how to sneak religion into state-sponsored schools? Let me show you.

A Six-Step Procedure to Get Religion in State Schools

Step 1: Don’t try to put religion in all at once. Instead, introduce it with little bits and pieces here and there. In some cases, do it slowly and subtly so that people don’t notice at first. Once these small points are taught, it becomes easier because you have already convinced unsuspecting people of certain tenets of your religion, and they don’t even realize it.

Step 2: Understand what your endgame really is. You are not merely inserting a few small pieces of religion into a local school or a particular classroom to influence a few students. Your goal should be to convert the entire system to your religious belief. This is a big goal but doable. By intertwining religion into the entire state school system, sweeping changes must occur, and it takes time. Religion still needs to be inserted slowly and subtly, not just in the classroom but in textbooks. You also need willing teachers to defend these small bits and pieces of your religion.

Step 3: This step is crucial. You need to actively convince people that what you are inserting into schools' textbooks and educational materials isn’t religious but another “respectable” subject. In fact, don’t even call it a “religion” to your colleagues so as not to draw attention to these religious beliefs and tenets. Instead, call these religious bits and pieces something else—like “history,” “science,” “models,” or “what the experts are saying.” Just never equate these religious tidbits with a religious position. If you do, chances are you’ll be caught quickly.

Step 4: Whenever someone challenges these religious positions, you need to turn it around on them. Point out that they are actually the ones promoting a religion and exclaim, “How dare they!” Draw attention away from your religious positions that you are inserting into the classroom and attack their position as religious.

Don’t hesitate to call out current beliefs that are already in the school and label them as religious positions, demanding their removal so the kids can have an “unbiased” education. Use phrases like “science vs. religion” or “real history vs. faith.”

Threaten lawsuits and even go to court offensively if necessary. In doing so, you deflect the attack on your religious position and put the onus on the school system to show how their views aren’t religious; otherwise, these opposing positions need to be removed from the curriculum. Few administrations have ever wanted to take up that fight, and they usually cave quickly. It’s a clever way to make your religion the standard while removing others’ beliefs without them even realizing it. Essentially, you are eliminating the competition.

Step 5: Once you have a strong foothold in the education system, you need to mobilize to defend it. Try to get elected officials who support your religion (in subtle ways, of course) onto school boards as leaders, teachers’ unions, and writers in textbook companies, and elect local and state officials who back your view. Even try to get people who you would think were on the opposite side of the fence from you to compromise what they believe and syncretize their beliefs with tenets of your religion. This causes confusion on their front and only helps you.

At the same time, remove any classes, edit textbooks, and courses that may go against your religion. Sanitize all other subjects as well to only have your religious belief presented in the school system. Again, remember to never reveal that what you are teaching is religion. Sometimes, this means to stop teaching people how to think and replacing that philosophy by telling students what to think. Then you are subtly discipling students to follow your religious view without question.

Now that you have the schools supporting you, continue getting teachers [who hold to your religion] into the unions and push more and more teachers who support your religion in the local classrooms, starving out those who have openly professed other beliefs.

Try to get people in positions that only give out grants and educational funding to schools, professors, and research projects that align with your religion, while continuing to attack any other belief system that doesn’t support your religion that may be entertained in the school system. But again, never call your religion a “religion.” This is very important.

Step 6: Once you have your religion firmly embedded in the culture of the school system, you can openly state what your goal has been all along. You can reveal that you have a faith, but by now it is so embedded that few have the resources and power to oppose you. It would be like your opposition fighting on every stairway up a tall building.

Does this really work?

Yes. This formula is exactly the tactic that evolutionists used to get their secular humanistic religion permeated into the school curriculum, textbooks, and overall education at all levels of state education. Let’s look at this historically.

Step 1: Evolutionary adherents never tried to insert their religion into the government school system all at once. It was done with little bits and pieces over long periods of time. They inserted tenets like geological evolution first (long ages—which began in the early 1800s in classrooms), then animal evolution (by the 1870s, this permeated universities), and then human evolution (by the 1920s, long ages, animal evolution, and now human evolution were being taught).

Step 2: The goal of the evolutionary religious camp was never to simply tell a few students about evolution. They wanted to take over the entire school system to teach their religion. By getting your tax dollars to support their religion, they made out well.

You need to understand that modern education was largely a Christian endeavor, being a Christian concept in the first place, going back to Robert Raikes’ Sunday School movement that then transformed in the public school system—an outreach of the church to teach and train. The results transformed society with so much good that the government began funding it.

As the government seized more control of the school systems it was easier for the secularists to gain access and control of it because it was no longer an outreach of the church. As they did, the focus shifted for their purposeless religion that teaches that everything came from nothing and that nothing matters. Teachers purposed themselves to openly teach and defend this purposeless religion in schools. Textbooks added these religious tidbits like millions of years and evolution. It was all going to plan.

Step 3: Did the evolutionists tell people they were being religious? Not at all! In fact, this was done so cleverly that people, for over century, didn’t realize this was a religious attack being imposed on the students. Some noticed, but largely, their sparks were snuffed out.

Cosmological evolution (the alleged evolutionary origin of the heavens, matter, space, etc.) and chemical evolution (life allegedly coming from non-life, which violated the Law of Biogenesis) now joined geological (alleged millions of years of geological rock layers slowly forming) and biological evolution (alleged changes from a single-celled organism to what we have today) as tenets openly taught in the classroom. Repeatedly, teachers and textbooks constantly called the religious tenets of evolution “history” or “science.”

This may sound strange to modern observers, but no ancient historians ever said or recorded any of the alleged evolutionary history that evolutionists say is history! For instance, the “Out of Africa” evolutionary religious position that Darwin taught originated with him; it doesn’t come from ancient historians, by the way. It’s just a modern religious belief imposed on people today who have been deceived into believing it.

The Big Bang (the most common form of cosmological evolution), millions of years, chemical evolution, and “changing of a single-celled organism into a human” cannot be observed and have never been observed or repeated. Thus, it is not science because science is observable and repeatable! And yet these evolutionary religious perspectives are commonly, yet erroneously, called “science” to this very day.

Step 4: A common tactic from evolutionists of the past (and even the present) is when evolution is questioned, they immediately turn it around and say that those questioning it are being religious and trying to insert or push religion. So, thinking logically about their false religion is somehow being “religious” from their perspective. It’s just a distraction to the fact that secular humanism is a religion—and many teachers were being convinced that secular humanism wasn’t a religion which made this so much easier.

But notice how few people point out the logical fallacies in the evolutionary religion.[1] Did you ever wonder why? In the 1950s, when evolution was being taught to students, those students would go into logic class and immediately see the fallacies of an evolutionary worldview. So, what happened? The evolutionary camp effectively removed logic from the curriculum and it only exists as a rare elective in some places to this day. Remember the tactic: "Remove that which opposes your religion.” Kids were now taught what to think, not how to think.

Evolutionists even went to court to defend their religion with the famous Scopes Trial in 1925. Though they lost the case, they cleverly set a precedent to remove God and the Bible from the classroom (education is a Christian concept, by the way) and slyly deceived people into believing their view wasn’t religious.

People didn’t realize that both views were religious—while Christianity is logical and sound (and the basis for education in the first place), the evolutionary position is illogical and unsound. For instance, in the evolutionary religion, which is based on naturalism and materialism, then logic—which isn’t material—can’t exist; but neither can knowledge, intelligence, truth, love, or science because none of these are material either!

Nevertheless, Christianity was slowly removed to the point that by the 1960s, the Bible, prayer, and hosts of Christian principles were removed from the classroom. However, not all of Christianity was removed—educational institutions still exist (again, education is a Christian concept), students and faculty still adhere to the Christian doctrine of clothing, and they regularly close for Christian holidays like Saturday (Sabbath) and Sunday (The Lord’s Day).

Interestingly, schools tend to like Christian morality—like not lying, cheating, raping, stealing, or murdering—but with the kids being taught contradictory secular morality at these institutions, there are immense problems in state classrooms all the time (school shootings, lack of effort, sexual attacks, child murder, etc.). State schools are almost an embarrassment in the Western world, where students struggle to discern basics like if they are male or female today.

Step 5: After the evolutionists took control of the education system in America (and elsewhere), they convinced textbook companies, politicians, teachers’ unions, and teachers to embrace this religion wholeheartedly. They have forced out Christian teachers one after another. They have been getting compromised Christians to sign off on evolutionary views—even Darwin did this in the late 1800s with Asa Gray, a Christian who he convinced to follow the evolutionary religion and just add God to it.

Today, hosts of evolutionary believers simply tack God onto their belief system. There are organizations that exist today that mix evolution and the Bible (i.e., syncretism), thinking this a good idea (e.g., mixing Christianity with tenets of the religion of secular humanism like evolution, big bang, etc.).

Government funding is almost exclusively given to evolutionary researchers, and tax dollars are regularly given to evolution-based schools. The evolutionary religion (various forms of secular humanism) has free rein at each level of education funded by the government as the state-established religion. And yet, few have any clue that it is a religion—even those who were taught it. They were convinced of this religion without ever being taught it was a religion. Maybe you have been as well.

Step 6: By the 1980s, the religion of humanism was dominant in education all across the Western world (and remains to this day). Popular evolutionists, like John Dunphy (an atheistic evolutionist), were bold enough to reveal the goal all along. The evolutionists had control of the classroom, education, textbooks, and government support, so now nothing could seemingly stop them from revealing their hand. Here is what evolutionist John Dunphy said in the 1980s:

“I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level—preschool, day care, or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”[2]  

Yes, he just put it right out there—the secular humanistic evolutionists were trying to remove the religion of Christianity and replace it with the faith and religion of humanism, and they cleverly did it. How many people reading this were influenced by the religion of humanism with tenets like millions of years, the Big Bang, and evolution? I was. I bet many of you were too.

Notice that the evolutionists cleverly convinced people that it was their view vs. religion—Yet it was religion vs. religion the whole time. The real question is which one is the true religion? Since materialistic religions can’t consistently (within their professed religion) explain immaterial concepts like truth, then it is false.

Conclusion

What we need to do, first and foremost, is to recognize that secular humanism (e.g., atheism, agnosticism, naturalism, evolutionism) is a religion with a lot of money and adherents permeated throughout the school system. Why is it that this religion gets free tax dollars and free rein in the government classroom that says they don’t promote religion?

The reason is simply that most people have been deceived into thinking it is not a religion. I feel sorry for people who were deceived in this way. Perhaps this short article (yeah, I could have written a whole book on this! 😊) will wake people up a little to “recognize” this religion in government schools.

If I can be bold, in many places around the USA, education today has become a bit of a joke. If you, your kids, and grandkids are in the secular education system, perhaps you need to reconsider that. It is failing because the religious tenets being taught in these secular institutions lead to hopelessness. If everything came from nothing (e.g., the Big Bang) and nothing matters, why do you think kids don’t care about their education?

Education is a biblical concept from the pages of Scripture (e.g., Exodus 18:20, Proverbs 22:6, etc.). Obviously, other religions can benefit by borrowing education, but it won’t do very well without God and His Word. It’s time to question the religion of evolutionary secular humanism and its many tenets that permeate our society. Now for the really big question—what can you do to help remove this religion that parasites your tax dollars to permeate the school system?

Images: Bodie Hodge, Presentation Library 1.2 

□

Bodie Hodge, Ken Ham's son in law, has been an apologist since 1998 helping out in various churches and running an apologetics website. He spent 21 years working at Answers in Genesis as a speaker, writer, and researcher as well as a founding news anchor for Answers News. He was also head of the Oversight Council.  

Bodie launched Biblical Authority Ministries in 2015 as a personal website and it was organized officially in 2025 as a 501(c)(3). He has spoken on multiple continents and hosts of US states in churches, colleges, and universities. He is married with four children. 

---

[1] See Jason Lisle’s book Discerning Truth (Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 2010) for a meticulous look at evolutionary fallacies.

[2] J. Dunphy, “A Religion for a New Age,” The Humanist, Jan.–Feb. 1983, 23, 26.