A century after a man was convicted of teaching evolution, the debate on religion in schools rages

By HOLLY MEYER NASHVILLE Tenn AP One hundred years ago a population high school educator stood trial in Dayton Tennessee for teaching human evolution His nation is still feeling the reverberations this day The law books record it as State of Tennessee v John T Scopes History remembers it as the Monkey Trial The incident ballooned into a national spectacle complete with a courthouse showdown between a renowned agnostic defense attorney and a famous fundamentalist Christian politician who defended the Bible on the witness stand In a sweltering pre-air conditioning courtroom the trial became a linchpin for a tense debate that wasn t just a small-town aberration This is a broad-based beliefs war of which the Scopes trial is just one place lightning struck says James Hudnut-Beumler professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee In the modern day new state laws requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in citizens school classrooms are facing legal challenges As the Supreme Court leans right there is an ongoing conservative push to infuse more religion often Christianity into taxpayer-funded guidance Advocates of religious diversity and church-state separation are countering it in capitols courts and residents squares We are fighting on an almost daily basis says Robert Tuttle a religion and law professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington D C That Tennessee jury ascertained Scopes guilty of violating the state s Butler Act of teaching any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible A century later the role of religion in inhabitants schools and whether to keep it out entirely is still being fiercely debated FILE A copy of the Ten Commandments is posted along with other historical documents in a hallway at the Georgia Capitol on June in Atlanta AP Photo John Bazemore File Several perceive a threat to their spot in the beliefs While attempts to interlace America and the divine are not new from the last half of the th century to in current times they are driven by a perceived threat among white Christians who think their dominant spot in politics and practices is being eroded by secularism or multiculturalism Tuttle says Other contemporary examples of the debate over religion in schools include adding chaplains and Bibles to classrooms infusing designated prayer time into the school day and expanding voucher programs that can be used at religious schools At the Supreme Court the justices effectively stopped the first taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school and gave parents a religious exemption for LGBTQ -related instruction Tuttle s scholarship was used in the latest federal appeals court ruling that declared Louisiana s Ten Commandments law unconstitutional citing a similar Kentucky law the Supreme Court ruled against in Tuttle and his co-author Ira Lupu assert that the principles underlying the Establishment Clause the First Amendment s ban on the authorities establishing a religion remain alive despite arguments that cite a change made in a school prayer ruling by the Supreme Court We have good reasons not to concede the battlefield to the forces aimed at eliminating the idea of a secular state their article states When they overclaim their victories others should speak up The day after the court ruling Republican Gov Greg Abbott signed the Texas Ten Commandments bill that had easily passed the GOP-controlled state legislature Lawsuits have been filed to block it and the Arkansas law that was approved earlier this year Abbott has taken on a Ten Commandments issue before He reiterated his encouragement for the new law while celebrating the th anniversary of his Supreme Court success that prevented efforts to tear down the Commandments monument on the grounds of the state Capitol I will unfailingly defend the historical connection between the Ten Commandments and their influence on the history of Texas he says in a video posted on X Texas Values a conservative Christian law and program nonprofit rallied advocacy for the Texas bill If other ideals are shared in the classroom the Ten Commandments should be able to be shared as well says Mary Elizabeth Castle director of regime relations for the organization A similar argument was made in by Scopes prosecutor William Jennings Bryan a onetime populist firebrand who became the face of the anti-evolution movement If the Bible cannot be taught why should Christian taxpayers permit the teaching of guesses that make the Bible a lie Bryan wrote in The New York Times A educator might just as well write over the door of his room Leave Christianity behind you all ye who enter here Bryan College a private Christian college is seen July in Dayton Tenn AP Photo Mike Stewart The arc of the religion-in-schools debate is long About years earlier advances in biblical criticism caused conservative Christians to double down on rejecting anything they believe conflicted with their interpretation of the Bible human evolution included says Hudnut-Beumler He blames weaponized post-World War I rhetoric for spreading anti-evolution beliefs to law He sees parallels to in current times Whatever we re going through now he says it s the product of people manufacturing rhetoric in a way that stokes fear Castle sees the school prayer decision as a step in the right direction There s invariably just going to be that conflict where people are trying to trample on religious freedom she says and so that s why we do the work that we do The American Civil Liberties Union joined by other legal groups is representing the families in Louisiana Arkansas and Texas that sued to block new Ten Commandments laws A much younger ACLU boosted by the star power of defense attorney Clarence Darrow represented Scopes who agreed to be a test circumstance challenging the Butler Act and to bring attention to Dayton Daniel Mach who directs the ACLU project on freedom of religion and belief sees a through line between and what he describes as a present-day assault on the separation of church and state There are those who want to use the machinery of the state and in particular our community schools to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else Mach says The constitutional guarantee of church-state separation has served us as a nation quite well over the years in general And there s entirely no reason to turn back the clock now Related Articles Trainee loan interest to kick in again for million borrowers Trump administration announces Republicans urge US universities to cut ties with Chinese-backed scholarship operation What Trump s big tax law could mean for the youngest Americans Federal trial starts over Trump administration s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists Fillat Miller Can AI make up for poor development In the ACLU lost the Scopes occurrence It would be more than years before the Supreme Court would overrule an anti-evolution teaching ban But the trial which took place from July - dealt a big hit to Bryan s reputation He died days after it ended Though a brief legal circus the trial inflamed social divisions Conservatives and fundamentalists in the Midwest and South felt mocked by those they considered liberal East Coast elites They were humiliated Tuttle says That s internalized and it carries through In the s tensions flared with a school funding incident before the Supreme Court They returned in the s when the justices ruled against school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings It was upsetting Tuttle says to conservative Christians who saw schools as a source of morality The link you see with the Scopes episode is a sense of alienation and devaluing of what civic experience means to them he says Suzanne Rosenblith an expert on religion in general guidance at the University at Buffalo in New York sees the wave of court cases as primarily First Amendment tensions Your argument for removing something can be seen as ensuring that Congress makes no law respecting the establishment of religion And my wanting something included that s my way of exercising my right to religious freedom she says And it could be on the same issue A lesson to be learned from the last years Rosenblith says is that America remains a pluralist democracy and requirements to be approached as such All sides are going to win several and lose particular she says But how can we treat each other especially those with whom we disagree on these essential issues how do we treat each other more seriously Holly Meyer is global religion news editor for The Associated Press AP s religion coverage receives help through the AP s collaboration with The Conversation US with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc The AP is solely responsible for this content