RNS | Covering the world of religion.

Having nothing better to do the other evening, I decided to treat myself to an evening of Amazon Prime — and watching, once again, one of my favorite movies. 

I discussed this movie, and its implications, with my friend Doug Mishkin — a lawyer, singer-songwriter, lecturer and interviewer. 

The movie is “Inherit the Wind,” made in 1960 – exactly 65 years ago – which was based on the play written in 1955 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee – 70 years ago.

The film is a classic, with such Hollywood A-listers as Spencer Tracy, Frederic March and Gene Kelly — a fictionalized account of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 — which happened exactly one hundred years ago this month.

It is the story of Bertram Cates (John Scopes), a young biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who is arrested and stands trial on charges of teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to impressionable young students — a violation of the Butler Act, a Tennessee law that made it illegal to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

The prosecuting attorney was the bombastic, Bible-thumping Matthew Harrison Brady, based on the famous turn-of-the-century politician and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan; the defense attorney, Henry Drummond, based on the eminent attorney Clarence Darrow; and there is the wisecracking journalist, E.K. Hornbeck, a thinly disguised H.L. Mencken.

We see Brady/Bryan and Drummond/Darrow battling over the fundamental issues of educational freedom, the interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and the meaning of evolution and faith.

“Inherit the Wind” has wonderful and memorable lines. My personal favorite is Brady’s (or Bryan’s) stubborn insistence that “I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than I am in the age of rocks!”

Except, if your knowledge of the “Monkey Trial” is based only on the film, you would be missing some key truths — which are still relevant today. 

Let’s talk about the defendant, John Scopes. He was not primarily a biology teacher, but a sports coach; he was only substituting as a biology teacher. He was quite popular in the community. Despite what the film portrays, he was not dragged out of his classroom and jailed; rather, he volunteered to be arrested as a test of the law. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union had orchestrated it as a test case to challenge the Butler Act. When Scopes was found guilty, he was fined $100 — a small sum. He never spent time in jail. (The verdict was later overturned on a technicality, but the Butler Act remained in place until 1967.)

When the trial ended, Scopes’ high school asked him to return, but he opted to attend the University of Chicago on a scholarship, financed through a fund raised by scientists and journalists. He ultimately became a petroleum geologist. Basically, it all worked out just fine for him.

And then, there was the trial itself. If you believe the movie, you would think that the atmosphere was moblike. That wasn’t the case at all. Clarence Darrow said of Dayton: “I have not found upon anybody’s part — any citizen here in this town or outside — the slightest discourtesy. I have been treated better, kindlier, and more hospitably than I fancied would have been the case in the North.”

And William Jennings Bryan? If you believe the movie, you see him as a ridiculous religious fanatic. Bryan actually comported himself well at the trial. He was hardly a blubbering buffoon. Neither did he drop dead during the trial while delivering an incomprehensible defense of biblical faith — though he did die several weeks later while still in Dayton.

Bryan was a deeply committed Christian, but mostly of the social gospel variety, which saw Christian ethics as a basis for social reform. He fought for labor, against imperialism, against monopolies, for women’s suffrage and for a graduated income tax. He is most famous for his “Cross of Gold” speech — in favor of silver, opposed to the gold standard.

And yes: Bryan opposed the mandated teaching of evolution. 

The question is: Why?

For reasons that we would, today, call “liberal.”

As Garry Wills writes in his book “Under God: The Classic Work on Religion and American Politics,” Bryan was afraid that if people believed that humans had evolved from lower animals, then they might come to believe that there had been evolution within the human species as well.

Consider the textbook that Scopes had used in his class — Hunter’s “Civic Biology,” written in 1914. Hunter wrote about the four races of man — “Ethiopian, Malay, American Indian, and Mongolian,” all of which lead to “the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

From the idea that certain races were better than others; to social Darwinism, which imports “the survival of the fittest” into social policy; to the eugenics movement, which advocated the transformation of the human species through genetic means and the elimination of “living beings, not worthy of life.”

It would be a shorter leap to full-scale genocide. Recall that the Nazis first auditioned their machinery of death not on the bodies of Jews, but on the persons of the mentally and physically handicapped.

That is a very different William Jennings Bryan than the man whom we see in “Inherit the Wind.”

As you will hear on the podcast, Doug Mishkin has really done a lot of research into the Scopes trial.  He and I share a fascination about the subject — largely, because we are two Jews who care deeply about our religion. We know that there is an alternative to the wild-eyed faith that the film portrays. Moreover, we know that liberalism can find a voice in Scriptures, and vice versa.

And we know that the battle between science and faith is far from over. 

One last thing. Doug discovered something in his research that really grabbed me. 

The battle was really about parental authority — as with the current Supreme Court decision about classes that teach gay stuff.