Happy birthday, culture war!

Monday is the 90th anniversary of a day significant both in the rise of America’s culture war and the fall of American journalism. On July 20, 1925, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tenn., reached its climax when Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer of the era (and an atheist) verbally dueled with former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a thrice-defeated Democratic presidential candidate (and a fundamentalist).

I’ll summarize that dramatic debate, but first show the context of the trial, review how it had gone up to that point, and point out how influential newspapers covered it.

The essential element to understand: Two faiths were in conflict in Dayton. The New York Times editorialized for “faith, even of a grain of mustard seed, in the evolution of life.” Realizing there were only two ways up from sin and misery—God’s grace or man’s evolution—a Times editorial stated that evolution offered the most hope: “If man has evolved, it is inconceivable that the process should stop and leave him in his present imperfect state. Specific creation has no such promise for man.”

That faith ran up against Christian faith in God’s sovereignty and the hope offered by Christ’s sacrifice. Tennessee legislators had passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution as scientific truth. The battle was joined when one young Dayton teacher, John T. Scopes, responded to an American Civil Liberties Union plea for someone to agree to be the defendant in a test case, with the ACLU paying all legal expenses. The ACLU hired Darrow, the defense brought in Bryan, and the presence of those superstars brought out the journalists.

Newspapers dispatched more than 100 reporters to the trial. They wired 165,000 words daily to their newspapers over 12 days of extensive coverage. In theory, trial coverage could have been an opportunity to illuminate the theological debate that lay behind the creation vs. evolution issue. But in practice, with few if any Christians among those reporters, the position established early on by columnist H.L. Mencken went apparently unchallenged: “On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.”

Journalists from New York and Chicago saw the story as one of evolutionist intelligence vs. creationist stupidity. Nunnally Johnson, who covered the trial for The Brooklyn Eagle and then became a noted Hollywood screenwriter, remembered years later, “For the newspapermen it was a lark on a monstrous scale. … Being admirably cultivated fellows, they were all of course evolutionists and looked down on the local fundamentalists.” Leading journalists constantly attacked the theology of the creationists, perhaps because it was something their cultures had only recently “outgrown.”

The New York Times even noted at one point “a certain unexpectedness in the behavior and talk of the Dayton people. The unexpectedness comes from the absence in these Dayton people of any notable dissimilarity from people elsewhere except in their belated clinging to a method of Scriptural interpretation that not long ago was more than common in both North and South.” The Times writer in those two sentences understood that fundamentalist beliefs were far from bizarre. In fact, it was the newer method of scriptural interpretation that had been regarded as bizarre in Times Square as well as Tennessee only a short time before.

The Christian exile from mainline journalism—the absence of salt—led to poor reporting. Evolutionist reporters, without anyone to check them, wrote that Christians were trying to make one pro-evolution book “a book of evil tidings, to be studied in secret.” This was nonsense: Hundreds of pro-evolution writings were on sale in Dayton. Even a drugstore had a stack of materials representing all positions. John Butler, the legislator who introduced the anti-evolution bill, had a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species for his teenage children to read. He told reporters, “I am not opposed to teaching of evolution, but I don’t think it ought to be taught in state-supported schools.”

The key issue was not free speech, but parental control over school curricula. Even in Tennessee, Christian parents were already beginning to sense that their beliefs were being excluded from schools they were funding. William Jennings Bryan spoke for them when he said he “never advocated teaching the Bible in public schools,” but believed, “There is no reason why school children should not hear of Bible characters as well as other characters. In other words, there is no reason why the reading of the Bible should be excluded while the reading of books about other characters in history, like Confucius, should be permitted.”

Tennessee legislators saw their anti-evolution bill not as a way of putting Christian religion into the schools, but of forbidding proselytization for what they saw as a trendy but unproved evolutionary faith. Tennessee Gov. Austin Peay opposed the uncritical acceptance of evolutionary material “that no science has established.” One anti-evolutionary organization called itself the Defenders of True Science versus Speculation, contending that evolution “is a theory not yet approved by science,” particularly since species-transitional fossils (“missing links”) had not been found. “Demonstrated truth,” Bryan insisted, “has no terrors for Christianity.”

New York and Chicago journalists, instead of explaining that, wrote leads such as, “Tennessee today maintained its quarantine against learning.” The battle was “rock-ribbed Tennessee” vs. “unfettered investigation by the human mind and the liberty of opinion of which the Constitution makers preached.” Reporters regularly attacked Christian faith and “this superheated religious atmosphere, this pathetic search for the ‘eternal truth.’” One journalist described Scopes, the teacher-defendant, as an imprisoned martyr, “the witch who is to be burned by Dayton.” (Actually, Scopes did not spend a second in jail and regularly dined in the homes of Dayton Christians.) If the creationists were to win, another journalist wrote, “The dunce cap will be the crown of office, and the slopstick will be the sceptre of authority.”

Contempt extended to depictions of Dayton residents and opposing attorneys: Journalists called them “treewise monkeys” who “see no logic, speak no logic and hear no logic.” When William Jennings Bryan Jr., an attorney, arrived for the trial, a columnist wrote, “Junior is bound to be a chip off the old blockhead. … Like father, like son, and we don’t like either.” One New York headline described Dayton jurors, who following the trial gave thoughtful accounts of the proceedings, as having “Intelligence of Most of Lowest Grade.” One reason and piece of evidence: “All twelve are Protestant churchgoers.”

Leading reporters provided inaccurate coverage of the debates between creationists and evolutionists. For instance, when Bryan debated Darrow’s associate Dudley Malone on July 16, the court transcript shows strong and intelligent orations by both sides. Bryan, within Christian presuppositions, made a sophisticated and coherent argument. He stressed the evolution theory’s lack of scientific proof and emphasized its inability to answer questions about how life began, how man began, how one species actually changes into another, and so on. He pointed out the irreconcilability of Darwinian doctrines of extra-species evolution with the biblical account of creation, original sin, and the reasons for Christ’s coming.

Malone stated the evolutionist position in a similarly cohesive way. Both sides apparently did well. But journalists wrote that Bryan’s speech “was a grotesque performance and downright touching in its imbecility.” Bryan coverage by a variety of reporters was laden with sarcastic biblical allusions: “Dayton began to read a new book of revelations today. The wrath of Bryan fell at last. With whips of scorn … he sought to drive science from the temples of God and failed.” According to The Chicago Tribune’s news coverage, the debate proved that “the truth as applied to man’s origin was not locked in a book in the days of Moses.”

The biggest show came four days later, on July 20, when Bryan and Darrow went at it in a debate bannered in newspapers across the country: “BRYAN AND DARROW IN BITTER RELIGIOUS CLASH.” The trial transcript shows a presuppositional debate in which both sides enunciated their views with occasional wit and frequent bitterness. If the goal of the antagonists in the Tennessee July heat was to keep their cool, both slipped, but it was Darrow who showed extreme intolerance, losing his temper to talk about “fool religion” and call Christians “bigots and ignoramuses.”

Darrow was upset because Bryan, contrary to the depiction in the Broadway play and major movie a generation later, Inherit the Wind, avoided Darrow’s major traps. Darrow asked, “Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?” Bryan replied that everything “should be accepted as it is given there,” and some was “given illustratively,” such as the description of Christians as the salt of the earth. Darrow asked if Bryan believed the biblical story of Jonah’s unlikely survival in the belly of a big fish? Bryan replied, “One miracle is just as easy for me to believe as another. … A miracle is a thing performed beyond what man can perform.”

And so it went. One small Oklahoma newspaper proclaimed, “Mr. Bryan came out more than victorious. He made a monkey out of the defense counsel and left them gasping.” That newspaper consistently had a pro-Bryan bias, so more useful is a report from The Los Angeles Times, which concluded that “Bryan emerges in a better light than his rival.” The pro-evolution (but attuned to local culture) Arkansas Gazette reported that Bryan “stood up before Darrow at times and defied him to do his worst. … He gave a deeply emotional religious appeal that struck the hearts of many of those who sat in front of him.”

Once again, though. New York– and Chicago-based reporters declared Bryan a humiliated loser. The New York Times called Bryan’s testimony “an absurdly pathetic performance [by] a voice calling from a poorly-furnished brain-room.” The New York Herald Tribune contended that Bryan was “losing his temper and becoming to all intents and purposes a mammal.”

Years later, the pro-evolution science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp, after reading 1920s accounts by journalists and other observers, concluded, “The newspaper reporters may have depicted [Bryan’s] speech as less effective than it was, because most of them were city men, hostile to the speaker. To them, the Great Commoner Bryan was the leader of organized ignorance, the modern Torquemada. They would not have liked his speech no matter how eloquent or stirring it was.”

Some predisposed reporters were so far off in their understanding of the other side’s beliefs that their stories became ludicrous. For instance, one journalist wrote that “the humiliation of being called ‘an ignoramus’ and a ‘fool and a Fundamentalist’ cut Bryan to the quick.” Bryan, though, knew and quoted two Bible verses from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19, ESV). Bryan was also proud of being a “fundamentalist,” one who went back to basics and viewed the Bible as inerrant. To call Bryan a fool and a fundamentalist in one phrase was to offer him not a slap but a badge of honor.

Overall, most major newspaper reporters produced so many unobservant stories that it often seemed as if they were closing their eyes and not even seeing the trial at all. The ultimate in this came when one New York scribe, under a headline “Scopes Is Seen as New Galileo at Inquisition,” wrote that the “sultry courtroom in Dayton, during a pause in the argument, became hazy and there evolved from the mists of past ages a new scene. The Tennessee judge disappeared and I racked my brain to recognize the robed dignitary on the bench. Yes, it was the grand inquisitor, the head of the inquisition at Rome. … I saw the Tennessee Fundamentalist public become a medieval mob thirsty for heretical blood. … [It was] 1616. The great Galileo was on trial.”

It seemed that most reporters in Dayton, even when they tried to be fair—some had no such intention—could not help seeing the atheistic side as plausible and the Christian view as “nonsensical.” The life and beliefs of one of the best of the Scopes trial reporters, Raymond Clapper, shows the pattern. In 1912, ready to enter college, he was leading Presbyterian church meetings in Kansas. But after four years at the University of Kansas, he chose “a more reasonable belief.” By 1923, Clapper and his wife had “discarded the orthodox teachings of our youth. We could not believe the Old Testament prophets, whose teachings no doubt fitted well the savage age in which they lived…. The story of Christ we thought was moving and beautiful but we could not accept the virgin birth or the resurrection

Before Clapper arrived in Dayton to cover the trial, his mind already was made up: He believed that “the whole case of fundamentalism [was] ridiculous.” It was no surprise, then, when Clapper’s stories argued, “Fundamentalist justice has plugged up the ears of this Tennessee mountain jury.” Olive Clapper, his wife, argued, “Unbelievable as the trial was to intelligent people, it did have value because the end result was greater enlightenment of people on the subject of evolution.” Clapper had done his best to provide that enlightenment.

The Clapper story could be repeated many times. Journalists who were or had become opposed to the Bible wanted to teach readers the anti-Christian “truth” as they saw it. There was no one to counterbalance their emphases, because Christians no longer had much of a presence in American journalism. Yes, there were denominational magazines and church newsletters, but coverage of major events such as the Scopes trial was in the hands of those who might be ever watching but never seeing.

Adapted from Prodigal Press: Confronting the Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media (Revised and Updated Edition) by Marvin Olasky and Warren Cole Smith (P&R Publishing, 2013).