Jennifer and Jason Reinoehl of Granger, Indiana, tried to bring about a modern version of the Scopes Trial. In 2023, the couple filed suit claiming that the teaching of evolution by their local public school in Mishawaka, Indiana, is the equivalent of teaching atheism.
According to their federal court complaint, teaching evolution to their five children “convey[s] a governmental message that students should subscribe to Atheism.” This, they said, was a violation of the Establishment Clause and unconstitutionally interfered with their rights as parents to guide their children’s religious upbringing.
They claimed that components of evolutionary theory—such as the fossil record, speciation, and dating systems—were scientifically disproven and therefore render evolution “a non-scientific belief.” And “[b]ecause the atheistic Theory of Evolution specifically attacks the Judeo-Christian origin story,” the complaint alleges, “it has the purpose and effect of advancing the atheist religion.”
They are wrong about the science, of course, and atheism is not a religion. But I totally grant that evolution is irreconcilable with their Adam and Eve beliefs.
In August 2024, Federal Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker threw the case out of court on multiple grounds, including that there is no Establishment Clause violation because evolution is not a religious teaching. She added for good measure that, while a court typically would grant the plaintiffs the ability to amend their complaint to correct its deficiencies and then refile their lawsuit, “we conclude that any such amendment here would be futile.”
I like that: “futile.”
But the language used by the Reinoehls to assert their claims about atheism and evolution is not new. It is echoed in the accusations of William Jennings Bryan nearly 100 years ago during the prosecution of John Scopes, a Tennessee high school teacher whose crime was teaching the theory of human evolution out of the state’s official and authorized textbook, A Civic Biology by George William Hunter.
I recently read Brenda Wineapple’s excellent new book about the Scopes trial, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation. It is a fascinating and well-researched review of the trial itself and offers in depth biographical sketches of the headliners who have come down through history: Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and H. L. Mencken, as well as a raft of secondary players. The book recounts the July 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, almost hour by hour. Noteworthy too is how often the nonbelief of Darrow was thrown up at the defense team to conflate atheism and agnosticism with the theory of evolution.
It is worth recalling, as Wineapple does, how the trial culminates in the historic showdown between Darrow and Bryan, where the views of fundamentalists were put to the test.
After Judge John Raulston—a fundamentalist who was up for reelection the next year—excluded all the scientific experts Darrow and the defense team had arrayed for the trial, Darrow famously called Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible.
The Butler Act—under which Scopes was prosecuted—prohibited any Tennessee public school up through college to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man descended from a lower order of animals.”
The law reflected the view that teaching evolution endangered children and robbed them of their faith. As famed evangelist preacher Billy Sunday put it, “Evolution is Atheism,” a surety he inveighed to giant crowds.
Darrow and the defense team wanted to do two things by calling Bryan to the witness stand. First, they wanted to show the watching world how absurd it would be to take the Bible’s stories literally, as Bryan and the Tennessee law claimed to do. Second, they wanted to demonstrate that the Butler law was vague. How could John Scopes know what was impermissible to teach when the Bible was subject to so much interpretation?
Bryan willingly took the stand. Darrow then asked him incredulously about the story of Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Bryan said he believed it even if he couldn’t explain it. He said it was a miracle. Darrow asked Bryan about Joshua commanding the Sun to stand still in the sky. Bryan said he believed it as well and didn’t think about or care what might happen to the planet if that had actually occurred. Bryan testified that Noah’s Flood happened 4,262 years ago in accordance with the calculations of Archbishop James Ussher.
But then the question came of whether the Earth was made in six days, and Bryan answered, “Not six days of twenty-four hours.”
Bryan had been found out. He wasn’t reading the Bible literally, instead offering an interpretation that defied his fundamentalism. Darrow later in the proceedings pressed his advantage, and Bryan conceded that the six periods of creation could be “six years or 6,000,000 years or 600,000,000 years” rather than six literal days.
In frustration at being cornered, Bryan lashed out over and o ver using the one cudgel he had to attack Darrow: his nonbelief. Bryan said he was answering these questions “to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States.” He stood, shouting, “I want the papers to know I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst.”
And later Bryan screamed, red-faced: “The only reason they have asked any question is for the purpose, as the question about Jonah was asked, for a chance to give this agnostic an opportunity to criticize a believer in the word of God; and I answered the question in order to shut his mouth, so that he cannot go out and tell his atheist friends that I would not answer his question.”
None of this happened in front of the jury, which hastily convicted Scopes who was then fined $100 by the judge. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of the Butler law but reversed the guilty verdict against Scopes on a technicality, a maneuver that prevented an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Today, we think of the Scopes Trial as a pyrrhic victory for Bryan. The Butler law was essentially moribund from that time on. Darrow had successfully demonstrated to a wider world and the annals of history the absurdity of biblical literalism (even to its claimed adherents).
But as we know, that has not stopped those who embrace creationism from trying every which way to get it back into America’s public schools.
Each year, the Center for Inquiry’s Office of Public Policy is called upon to beat back creationist bills in state legislatures. They come under different guises such as so-called “teach the controversy” bills that promote critiques of evolution as a way to make room for religious explanations of creation. Lately though, because the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated its openness to religion finding its way into public schools, the proposals have been more bold.
Earlier in 2024, three bills in Oklahoma were defeated. The state senate bill would have required public and charter schools to “provide instruction to students on the concepts of creationism and/or intelligent design” alongside any instruction on evolution. Two state House bills would have permitted the teaching of “intelligent design.”
And a bill passed by West Virginia says that teachers may not be prohibited from discussing any “scientific theory” of how life or the universe came to be. The sponsor of the legislation said during a floor debate it would allow for intelligent design to be taught. We are watching carefully to see how that is acted upon.
CFI is doing what it can to combat this trend. In addition to our lobbying efforts, we run the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (as part of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science). Under the program, teachers are taught through in-person training workshops in every state in the country how to teach evolution and answer its critics. We have helped more than 3,500 teachers to be better equipped and therefore more likely to teach evolution.
Although much of our effort focuses on the United States, we also run The Translations Project, which offers free downloads of books on evolutionary biology written by Richard Dawkins in languages dominant in the Muslim world: Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Indonesian. The world, and especially the Muslim world, needs more scientific literacy.
All these efforts are needed and more. Despite it being nearly 100 years after that fateful trial that captivated the nation, the word atheist is still used as a smear. Evolutionary science is still considered suspect because it works without a supernatural agent. Elected officials still seek to use the power of law to force the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in science classrooms.
I truly hope that, in the words of Judge Sarah Evans Barker, their attempts are “futile.” I worry that they are not.
As a postscript, I am happy to report that CFI will jointly host a conference with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Scopes Trial. The conference will be held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, July 18–20, 2025, and will include a trip to Dayton, Tennessee, to see the Rhea County Courthouse. Look for registration to open sometime before the end of 2024.
Jennifer and Jason Reinoehl of Granger, Indiana, tried to bring about a modern version of the Scopes Trial. In 2023, the couple filed suit claiming that the teaching of evolution by their local public school in Mishawaka, Indiana, is the equivalent of teaching atheism. According to their federal court complaint, teaching evolution to their five …