The ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ and CRT
Last month, Florida rejected 41% of proposed math textbooks for several reasons, chief amongst them the “dangerous and divisive” issue of critical race theory (CRT). With passage of the Stop WOKE Act and “Don’t Say Gay” bills, Florida offers a microcosm for a broader crusade on parental rights, with states across the nation proposing bans on the instruction of race, disability, atheism, sexual orientation, and more.
The GOP has become a self-avowed “Party of Parents,” with Republican leaders making passage of a Parental Bill of Rights a central plank of their platform. Democrats have attempted to stymie the public outrage over parental rights, yet they have largely been fighting this culture war at its surface, from accusations of conservative bigotry to arguments over fallacious claims of indoctrination.
The Scopes Monkey Trial may suggest why their efforts will fail. In 1925, football coach John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in the classroom, in violation of Tennessee law. The case was portrayed as a grand showdown between science and religion, but the Scopes Trial was a publicity stunt. Angling to raise their national profile, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) put out newspaper ads to solicit a defendant while leaders of Dayton, Tennessee, had Scopes deliberately teach evolution to put their city on the map.
The trial polarized the nation with hordes of people descending on Dayton, or “Monkey Town,” in support or opposition to Scopes. They flooded the courtroom while a circuslike atmosphere reigned outside. Minstrels, street vendors, and performing chimpanzees adorned this “Trial of the Century,” featuring the ACLU’s Clarence Darrow (an atheist) for the defense and Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.
Bryan set the stakes of the trial, declaring that “the contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death. ... If evolution wins in Dayton, Christianity goes.” But the Scopes Trial was hardly about evolution; it was about anxieties over immigration, race, and change more broadly.
For instance, a 1920s surge in immigration led the majority to feel it needed to protect its culture while Darwin’s notion of common descent threatened to invalidate “Godgiven” racial barriers enabling White supremacy.
With Darrow himself asking the court to find Scopes guilty, the case set no precedent and didn’t resolve any legal questions, serving instead as a spectacle in which both sides could claim victory.
Further anti-evolution laws were passed in the South and West in the following years, and the Tennessee anti-evolution law would remain on the books until 1967. The debate between creationism and evolution persisted unsettled.
The Scopes Monkey Trial reveals a long history of education being a proxy war for social controversy and emphasizes the futility of fighting a culture war only at its surface. The absurdity of banning math textbooks over a graduate-level legal framework makes evident that the parental rights crusade is hardly about discomfort, classroom indoctrination, and shame and more about a perceived existential threat to a certain kind of identity.
Undoubtedly, this threat has been politically engineered: conservative activist Christopher Rufo acknowledged that “the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Evolution and CRT are esoteric academic theories of little relevance to the common person, yet decades after inception, they have been “decodified” of their meaning with much pain and anxiety packaged underneath.
That doesn’t mean, however, that these grievances are any less real. Democrats have accused Republicans of distracting voters with irrelevant culture wars, but these culture wars clearly matter to voters. That’s why CRT, LGBTQ acceptance, and other parental rights concerns have become such political lightningrods. People feel as if their way of life is being threatened and, whether or not that concern is valid, these sentiments shouldn’t besimply written off.
This underlying pain must be acknowledged and defused, not dealt with superficially and obscured under the moniker of parental rights. Because otherwise, the Scopes Monkey Trial suggests that all you will get is a war of words that resolves nothing and leaves both sides in a toxic stalemate.