The Scopes Trial

The Green Knight has a great post on the 1925 Scopes trial. The truth is not what we have been led to believe and this was an I opener for me. Yes the left can be guilty of revisonist history as well.

First of all, Bryan, like most 19th and early 20th-century evangelical Christians, was left wing, not right wing; he was also not a Biblical literalist. He opposed Darwin's theory not because it conflicted with the Bible but because it had been turned into the basis of a laissez-faire economic system that said, if you're poor it's your fault for being weak -- what was then called Social Darwinism. In Bryan's experience, evolution was largely an excuse to screw the poor. Second, Scopes was not just some guy; he had made a deal with the ACLU to be the test case for the Tennessee law. Third, the townspeople were pretty sympathetic to Scopes, and were for the most part open-minded about the whole question. Fourth, Darrow was, by his own admission, more interested in discrediting Bryan than he was in discrediting the law.

So William Jennings Bryan was a lefty and although he was on the wrong side it was for the right reason and Clarence Darrow was on the right side for the wrong reasons. So what was the battle of the Scopes Trial really all about?

First, as in 1925, the battle is not over evolution per se. Rather, it's what evolution has come to represent in the minds of its opponents: a materialistic, values-free worldview that leads to the persecution of the weak. In 1925, the real issue driving the anti-evolution forces was poverty; in 2005, it's abortion. In both cases, the problem with evolution, as opponents see it, is that it makes human beings into mere things -- things that can be disposed of without moral consequences.

Second, the reason that they have picked evolution is that they see it as the keystone of the world view that they oppose. Remove the central idea that human beings are merely animals, they think, and the rest of the liberal world view will collapse.

It would appear that we may in a sense have our "bad" guys and "good" guys mixed up here. Head over and check out the entire post.