In 1925 the American State of Tennessee took a young biology teacher to court because he taught evolutionism. In this theory Darwin states that man was not created by God, as the Bible tells us, but that he descends from the ape. Teaching this was against the law as all subject matter had to respect biblical history. The case of the biology teacher became a clash of the titans between fundamentalism and modernism, religion and science, dogma and intellectual freedom. There was much ado about this court case, which was dubbed ‘The Monkey Trial’. The transcription of the proceedings makes for a fascinating, thrilling and still astonishingly topical read.

I believe God did create the world. And I think we’re finding out more and more and more as to how it actually happened.
George W. Bush, interview in U.S. News, 6 December 1999

After all, religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism.
George W. Bush, George Magazine, September 2000
Monkey Trial was the ‘trial of the century’
The Scopes Trial (also known as the Monkey Trial) began on July10th 1925 in the small town of Dayton in Tennessee.

This was no ordinary trial and that had to do with the paradoxical fact that it was the defence that instituted the legal proceedings. The ACLU, a pressure group for civil liberties, was in fact looking for a publicity stunt to put the theme of academic freedom back on the agenda and it needed a man of straw who would admit that he had clean ignored the statutory ban on teaching the theory of evolution. In exchange, the ACLU would bear the full costs of the trial. The small town of Dayton fell in with the idea because a controversial case would, it hoped, put it on the map and boost tourism. It chose the local temporary biology teacher John Scopes as its guinea-pig.

Things took an unexpected turn when none other than the religious fundamentalist and three times presidential candidate Williams Jennings Bryan offered to act as public prosecutor and the highly successful anticlerical attorney Clarence Darrow took on the defence. Suddenly the trial became an emotional confrontation between the theory of evolution and the story of the Creation.

But it was more than that. “It is not Scopes who is standing trial, but the whole of civilization”, Darrow declared on the opening day. After a few days the case was causing such a commotion that the judge moved the trial outside onto the lawn for fear the courtroom floor would give way. The Monkey Trial was also the first court case in America to be broadcast live on the radio.

The first few days of the trial saw the removal of various witnesses who threatened to damage the defence morally. On July 17th Darrow made a countermove which, according to the New York Times, resulted in “the most amazing court scene in Anglo-Saxon history”. He asked Bryan to come into the witness box and bombarded him with questions that tested the credibility of the Bible: “Was Jonah really inside the whale for three days? How could Noah’s ark accommodate all the animals in the world?” Bryan was forced to admit that the Bible was probably not a literal science.

In the end, Scopes was convicted. Bryan died six days later. Slanderers taunted that “God had wanted to hit Darrow, but just missed him”.

De Morgen, Wouter Hillaert, January 14th 2004