The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
by Edward A. Larson
336 pp.
Many of the books we recommend on our website are devoted to skeptically examining the conventional wisdom on a topic. We think that their facts are accurate, their reasoning is clear and sound, and that their conclusions are sober and solid. But we also encourage you to read them as a Berean would, testing their claims against what you know and what Scripture tells you, drawing your own conclusions, and drawing them cautiously.
A good place to begin practicing this sort of careful reading is Edward Larson’s book Summer For the Gods, a history of the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In one sense, it doesn’t matter much what you know or believe about the Scopes trial; in itself it was not a major event but a short-lived media circus, spanning two weeks in July 1925 and forgotten almost immediately afterward.
In another sense, what you know about the Scopes trial is very important—because what you know is almost certainly wrong, since it is almost certainly based on the play Inherit the Wind. That play that was openly a work of fiction, based very loosely on the Scopes trial, distorting the truth as needed to turn it into an attack on the McCarthy communist hunting of the 1950s. But time passes and memory fails, and what was once known to be fiction is now taken as accurate, unbiased history. Nobody remembers, for example, that this was a fight that the fundamentalists eagerly picked, expecting that it would deal a death blow to creeping agnosticism. Or that the trial turned out exactly as they had hoped.
Edward Larson is not a believer, but he writes a history that is meticulous and disinterested, symphathetic to all sides while not taking one himself. To him the Scopes Trial is a supreme example of the Law of Unintented Consequences, namely that one can never anticipate all the consequences of a course of action.
The genius of Larson’s book is that it centers on a small, well-documented event in which three developing cultural tensions converged—belief in a created order vs. scientific materialism; fundamentalism vs. modernism; activist government vs. individual liberty. The trial itself is brief, covered in two climactic chapters, leaving Larson ample space to explain the tensions, to show how they influenced events leading up to the trial, and to show how the trial affected subsequent history. Larson tells an engaging story, and gives the reader much to ponder about how the participants behaved, and what they did—and did not—accomplish.
This book won the Pulitzer Prize in History.
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