NCSE's Branch discusses the Scopes trial with Church & State

NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch discussed the Scopes trial with Rob Boston for his article "An Evolving Struggle: How a 100-Year-Old Courtroom Clash in Tennessee Still Reverberates in America's Psyche — and School Classrooms," appearing in the July/August 2025 issue of Church & State, published by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a valued ally of NCSE's.

"There's no question that the Scopes trial was artificial, overblown — thanks to the titanic figures of Darrow, Bryan and the reporter H. L. Mencken — and inconclusive,” Branch told Church & State. "Why do we bother to remember this controversy of the 1920s, but have forgotten plenty of others that roiled the nation at the same time? The answer is that the Scopes trial highlighted broader themes that continue to resonate today, such as the importance of church-state separation, the complex relationships between science and religion and the potentiality for conflict between democracy and expertise.”

Branch also commented on the consequences of the Scopes trial. "Fearful of controversy, publishers began to downplay evolution in their textbooks, sometimes using euphemisms for evolution or omitting the e-word from the index. True, fundamentalist interest in pursuing the antievolution crusade subsided after the 1920s, but that was probably due as much to the Depression as anything. While there isn't a pre-Scopes-trial survey to provide a baseline, a 1939-1940 survey discouragingly suggested that only slightly more than half of high school biology teachers presented evolution as a central principle of biology."

And Branch suggested that today there's cause both for optimism and concern about the future of evolution education. "On the one hand, evolution education is increasing and improving overall, and the chance that a local teacher is espousing creationism in the classroom is dwindling," he observed. "On the other hand, in light of the upheaval in church-state jurisprudence, it is entirely possible that the foes of evolution education will redouble their efforts in the hopes of making up lost ground. Now more than ever, eternal vigilance on the part of the friends of evolution education is in order.”

Also quoted were Alexander Gouzoules, a coauthor of The Hundred Years' Trial: Law, Evolution, and the Long Shadow of Scopes v. Tennessee, and Edward J. Larson, a recipient of NCSE's Friend of Darwin award. Of interest in the same issue of Church & State is Bruce Gourley's article "The Evolution of Creationism: How Fake Biblical 'Science' has Mutated in Opposition to Church-State Separation."