Was This the Greatest Trial on Earth? Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: We have a special guest today! Dr. Josh Swamidass joins us to talk about his article for Christianity Today on the infamous Scopes trial.^[1] This summer marked the 100th anniversary of that very significant event. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that this was the OJ trial of the time. In fact, it probably surpassed the OJ Simpson trial as far as impact. And, as Josh points out in his article, it still echoes today and in many ways parallels the times in which we're living. So, Bill, if you would do the honors and introduce Josh, we'll dive into this article.

DR. CRAIG: Joshua Swamidass is an information biologist and physician at Washington University in St. Louis. He's also the author of a book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve, which has served to spark a great deal of contemporary discussion about the historicity of Adam and Eve and the character of the Genesis narratives concerning this couple. I first met Josh several years ago at a conference at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I was struck by both his presence as well as what he was saying, and that was the beginning of a wonderful friendship that has continued right up to the present time.

DR. SWAMIDASS: It's amazing how far we've come. That was in 2017 that we met, Bill. I remember as clear as day the way we met and what we talked about. And man, so much has happened since then, hasn't it?

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Well, Josh, on the topic today, how about giving us an overview of the Scopes trial for anyone who might be unfamiliar with it?

DR. SWAMIDASS: That's a great place to start. There's a lot that I can say. You mentioned the OJ Simpson trial, and that's a good comparison in some important ways. The OJ Simpson trial was in the '90s. That was the first trial that was televised live across the country, and it had a huge cultural impact. Even though the legal questions being addressed weren't really that pressing, it became a topic of a shared experience that we all had, just looking at this trial, thinking about it, trying to understand how this impacted how we think about a whole bunch of big cultural issues. Something similar was going on with the Scopes trial. In a similar way, it was really the first trial ever that was broadcast live by radio every single step of the way through for the entire week and a half that it happened. And at that point in 1925, most families actually had a radio, and they would be gathering around. Most of the country, and even people outside the country – they would be reading about this. There were hundreds of reporters there, and it just captured the country and much of the world's attention for about a week and a half. Once again, another similarity is at the center of it were celebrities. So there's OJ Simpson who was a movie star at the time and an NFL star. In this case, actually I think it's fair to say that Williams Jenning Bryan, who was the head of the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, who was the head of the defense, were far more famous even than OJ was. And these two were really almost mythological figures, just very, very famous people. William Jennings Bryan was kind of at the end of his career; he'd run for president three times. He didn't get elected any time. But then what happened is during the decade of the 1910s he was just off a string of major political successes in women's suffrage and in the temperance movement, too. He was a key person arguing for the right of women to vote – this is in the post-war period, World War I, where they're really wondering maybe there needs to be more Christian women being able to vote, and they would have held back all these testosterone-filled men from a world war. And so he was arguing for that. Then also temperance – of trying to deal with this vice of alcohol and really making that illegal. That became a constitutional amendment. And then the last thing he kind of turns to in this last act of his life really is looking at the nefarious impact of evolution in public school education which is interesting because the public school movement was just starting then. At that time only a minority people actually went to high school. Public high schools here in the United States started as a very local grassroots thing. Initially that movement was starting. It wasn't the same as it is today. But that's really where he really starts to find his voice and stride – as not just a person making these arguments for policy now, but he's really this public Christian. He's identifying as a conservative, a fundamentalist literalist Christian, really trying to fight against the encroaches of liberalism and seeing evolution as this really core thing. So that's kind of his public personality and what he's doing. And it comes into direct clash with this other force, Clarence Darrow. Clarence Darrow, he called himself an agnostic. Definitely wouldn't call himself an atheist, but in many ways he's similar to the New Atheists of the 90s like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and – who's the other guy? Dawkins, right? Dawkins. Just a very large media presence, highly skeptical, and it's fair to call him anti-Christian. Even if he is an agnostic and you take him at his word on that, he's definitely leaning towards atheism and he's very anti-Christian. And the two of them had been dueling in newspaper articles back and forth. Bryan was thinking he was being evasive as to these questions about Christianity. So they both agreed to do this trial. And this trial is about actually something called the Butler Act in Tennessee. It's held in Dayton, which is a small town there. It's about whether or not evolution can be taught in a public high school. There's a Tennessee law that Bryan had been a part of that tried to outlaw it. But John T. Scopes was a test case of a teacher who claimed to have actually taught evolution and violating the act, and he was a test case that the nascent ACLU – this ends up being the very first case that the ACLU wins. The American Civil Liberties Union. Well, they didn't win it initially, I should say. They won it on appeal, but this ends up becoming their most high-profile first case really – to defend Scopes. They asked Darrow to actually defend it. So there ends up being this epic clash between these two ideas – kind of these Christians that are opposed to teaching evolution with this high public profile clashing with this anti-Christian agnostic-atheist saying that we're allowed to teach it. What unfolded in the trial was just an amazing story. Once again, it was made for television even though television wasn't yet made.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. And they've made movies, too, on it, and a play, a Broadway play.

DR. SWAMIDASS: Inherit the Wind, which incidentally is important – that mythology of what happens isn't actually what happened in the trial. And that's an important point. But yeah.

KEVIN HARRIS: Your article relates the highly unusual move when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand as a witness. There was this audible gasp. I mean, that was highly unusual. And this became a sensational showdown. Talk a little bit about that.

DR. SWAMIDASS: To draw analogies to OJ Simpson, it might have been when they asked him to actually try on the gloves in the middle of the trial to see if they fit. I don't think you could find any analog of that that’s actually ever happened before in a criminal trial court, but something weird happened in that moment. So, this is something weird, too. And there's a lot of things that were irregular about it. To get into the navigating back and forth, Clarence Darrow wasn't part of the ACLU, and he wanted to use this as a strategy to argue against religion at large, but the ACLU didn't want him to do that because they realized they needed to win over religious folk. But their initial strategy didn't work, and so they decided that really what was supposed to be the last day of the trial when everything was wrapping up, all the legal questions had been decided, everything was settled, they decided to surprise the court. And no one really saw this coming. They decided it really the day before. They talked about it with one another. Darrow got permission to do this from his team, but they didn't really tell anyone what they were going to do. And it's important because kind of by almost a stroke of luck for the showmanship of it all, it had gotten so hot there during the summer in Dayton – and this is pre-air conditioning, too – that they decided to set up a stage outside and actually just have the final part of the trial as it closes on this stage as well. And so there's even more people because now it's this open air stadium feel almost to it and with hundreds of reporters there. And at that moment Darrow basically calls Williams Jenning Bryan to the stand to testify, totally surprising everyone. I've talked to my friends who are lawyers and experts in legal history. Everyone qualifies this by saying this is highly unusual. It does not usually happen. But then I ask people, you say that, but can you give me any other example where a prosecutor testifies on the stand under oath in the trial that he's prosecuting? Like, is that ever . . . can you tell me any other example? And then they'll say, “Well, you know . . .” This is kind of the typical academic hedging – you don't want to find that one. No one knows of any example where this has ever happened before. The judge clearly knows this, and probably against his better instincts says, "Well, I guess if Williams Jenning Bryan is okay with it, I'll allow it." And Bryan is okay with it on the condition that he's going to get a chance to put Darrow on the stand, too. That never happens actually. But in this really surprising turn where it just seemed like the trial was literally about to conclude in the next 10 minutes, Bryan goes on the stand on this gigantic stage with hundreds of reporters and hundreds of people watching, and what proceeds (and it's all in the trial transcripts) is this back and forth between Darrow and Bryan that frankly had almost nothing to do with the trial itself. It was really this public debate about Christianity, evolution, and some very memorable back and forth which is notable even to our academic work where he asks about Cain's wife.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah, he actually asked him that. “Where did Cain get his wife?” He says, "I don't know. She's hidden so that agnostics will hunt for her," I think was his reply. So it was really a spectacle.

DR. CRAIG: Josh, is there a transcript of the trial? Was there a transcript?

KEVIN HARRIS: Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a court reporter there typing everything down. It's entered into the official record. It became such an important historical event that all . . . I mean, there's just so much material out there now on this. It's a really good read actually if you have a moment. It's entertaining to the nth degree. Another thing that came up is the age of the Earth and whether or not to take the days as literal or not. But see, here's the thing. It's interesting. Bryan calls himself a fundamentalist. He calls himself a literalist, but he actually reads the days of Genesis as long ages. So, he's a lot like Hugh Ross in this regard. And so he has, I would say, a sophisticated understanding of literalism. It's not this narrow, wooden sort of uninformed Young Earth Creationism. Not that all Young Earth Creationism is uninformed, but he's definitely not in that camp. I mean, he's kind of a proponent of literalism, but arguing that the Earth is really old, there could have been people before Adam and Eve. None of that's actually really the key issue for him when he's talking about this.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's touch on one more thing, Josh, legally about it. As you point out in your article, this trial was a result of the violation of the Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of human evolution in particular. Let me ask you just from your reading and maybe talking with your legal friends, how could that have passed constitutional muster? I suppose that in 1925 there was a more Christian consensus in the country. But haven't attempts to legislate what can be taught as science generally failed?

DR. SWAMIDASS: There's two reasons why it wasn't overturned. The first is a technical issue. It would have had to get appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court at that point. And so what happened is that initially it was appealed and then the federal appeals court . . . I'm sorry, I don't think it was even federal appeals. It was actually in the state appeals court. It was overturned for a technicality. They didn't even really consider this issue. Really after that afternoon, basically every judge involved with it just thinks the whole thing is a circus. They want to rid themselves of it. And that's why Darrow doesn't go on the stand eventually. It just becomes a circus. They think there's actually nothing important legally here. Let's get this circus out of here. So that's why – because it never actually gets high enough that that question gets considered. They're like we're not even going to deal with that. We're not going to take it that seriously. But the other reason why it even happened is that it was not really yet established in jurisprudence that the First Amendment protections actually constrain the states yet. So, this was a state law. It wasn't a federal law, and it didn't actually get in front of the Supreme Court. And that actually gets developed later. So, it's only I think it's in 19 I forget if it's 65 or 64 that it becomes very clear that because it was motivated to protect a religious belief, it's unconstitutional even if it's done by just merely a state government. In contrast, the argument that was being made at that time is that it wasn't teaching a religious view. It was just telling them that they couldn't teach another view. So you couldn't teach. So that's something a state was allowed. So basically there's developments in that legal context that's happened since then that have really changed it. So that's why it was then okay and now it wasn't. I'd say another thing, too, that's important that's a little bit surprising when you look back at kind of what's going on in the categories there is that the ACLU – if you think about it - is called the American Civil Liberties Union. Right? They're thinking about individual rights which is the framing that all of us have right now, but at that time that's not actually what the dominant framing for rights were. What Bryan was really concerned about was majoritarian rights. He really was concerned about the right of a community to set the rules for itself even if that would be in conflict with an individual in that community's rules. Now, we really shifted then in a large number of ways. Most of us have been convinced by the ACLU's argument that actually the rights of the individual are important even if the majority of people in a community think something else should happen, and we need to find accommodation for them. So these are just shifts in society and politics that don't really align well on what we think about our normal left-right divides of Republican and Democrat. That's actually part of why it's helpful to look at history to see how things have changed since then.

DR. CRAIG: In your article, Josh, you point out that the times were ripe for the controversy stirred by this trial. The country was going through a modernist versus fundamentalist fight. What can you tell us about that contest?

DR. SWAMIDASS: I would say that if you're a Christian who's trying to be thoughtful about where we are and how we got here in this moment in the United States, this is probably one of the most important pieces of history that you never learned in high school to really learn. It's the story of this theological conflict that happened in American churches at the turn of the century a little over 100 years ago. It's called the fundamentalist-modernist divide. That ends up defining so much of our current moment to today, and it actually defines the context of the Scopes trial. What happened was is that modernism, which is a particular approach to Christianity, arose in Europe primarily, and this approach basically said we've learned all this stuff from science and we're learning all this stuff from the enlightenment and we need to modernize Christian faith by getting rid of all of its antiquated beliefs – things like the virgin birth, the resurrection, the idea that the Bible is really inspired in any sense, and Adam and Eve. We need to just adopt evolution because science has told us that that's true. Critical theory has shown us that the Bible has gone through tons of changes and it's definitely just a human word. It's not God's Word. But we're still Christians, so we're going to go to seminaries and we want to be your pastors and all that. And they were nearly total in their takeover in Europe. There in really the turn of the century, there was starting to become a push back. And the push back was different in how it played out in the United States where there never was a modernist takeover in the same way and what happened in Europe. In Europe, you studied under Pannenberg, right?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

DR. SWAMIDASS: And so he's what some people would call a neo-Modernist because in that context he's saying, well, no, actually Jesus really, really did rise from the dead.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. You know, I think that modernism's legacy does live on in the church although someone like Pannenberg is regarded as a conservative and even a reactionary because he does believe in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. But that puts him in conflict with many German systematic theologians and would not align him with these modernists of the early 20th century.

DR. SWAMIDASS: Karl Barth is another classic one people really recognize too, right? Pannenberg doesn't affirm the virgin birth, but he sees something about the resurrection. But if you're going to kind of look at the European story, it's kind of like a frog boiling in water to the point where the frog gets cooked and then maybe there's a guy who kind of does a restoration in a few individuals in that movement. What happens in America is totally different. There's some debates that happen in seminaries between Briggs and B. B. Warfield in the late 1800s, but then it really comes to a head in I believe it's 1909 when three Presbyterian ministers come forward to be ordained by the denomination, but they can't commit to affirming the virgin birth. And this creates a massive controversy. It starts with Presbyterians, it spreads to Baptists and to really essentially every denomination in the entire country because while it was like a frog boiling in the water in Europe, when it hits the United States, it’s different. The water is already hot, and people are saying, well, if this is where it leads then this is a complete disaster and we don't want to have anything to do with it. And so there's a much stronger reaction to it, and that really leads to the formation of what's been called the fundamentalist movement. But it's important to recognize that the fundamentalists back then 100 years ago are very different from what we would call fundamentalists today. They're a lot closer to what we would call evangelical today actually. Not in a political sense but a theological sense. They're ecumenical. They're international. They're concerned with just five core teachings that most of us today would affirm. At minimum. I mean I say most evangelicals would affirm entirely, possibly with just some modifications of language on inerrancy.

DR. CRAIG: Josh, if you can do this from memory, a list of the five fundamentals that the fundamentalists insisted on?

DR. SWAMIDASS: The five fundamentals were the inerrancy of Scripture, the miracles of Jesus, and this is from memory so we can go back and check it, too. It's the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Jesus, and the substitutionary atonement. Those are the five things, and these are all five things that are being challenged by the modernists. And I would say that there's kind of an unspoken sixth one that if they were to add a sixth almost certainly it would be this. It would be a historical Adam and Eve.

DR. CRAIG: Though it's interesting that creation is not one of the fundamentals.

DR. SWAMIDASS: Yeah. So if you look at actually what happens in this debate, the first thing that goes every time is a historical Adam and Eve. Then the next was the virgin birth, and the next was the resurrection. And you can actually see the centrality of those claims laid out. The core of the Christian faith is Jesus rising from the dead. And that's why I'm pretty certain, and I think we can have confidence, even though Pannenberg did not affirm the virgin birth, he did affirm the resurrection. I believe that we're going to see him in heaven as a brother in Christ. Right?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

DR. SWAMIDASS: Even though I think he's wrong about the virgin birth, there's something far more central about the resurrection than the virgin birth. And I actually don't know of anyone that rejects the resurrection but affirms the virgin birth. I just don't know of anyone who does that. And then after that would be the virgin birth. Then you have Karl Barth as an example of a person who does that but then rejects historical Adam and Eve. And then we have kind of like the neo-Modernists today of people like the evolutionary creationists and Scott McKnight, Kenton Sparks, Peter Enns. They reject the historical Adam but they would affirm the virgin birth, Jesus's miracles and that. You can kind of see that priority kind of arising there.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let's stop right there, and we're going to pick it up next time right here on Reasonable Faith. Are you looking for a deep dive into a philosophical systematic theology? Dr. William Lane Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology volume 1 and 2A are now available. Subsequent volumes will be coming over the coming months and years, and your financial support helps make this possible. If you haven't picked up your copy, be sure to visit wiley.com. That's wiley.com, Amazon, or wherever academic books are sold. And thank you.^[2]