One hundred years ago, a public high school teacher stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching human evolution. His nation is still feeling the reverberations today.

The law books record it as State of Tennessee v. John T. Scopes. History remembers it as the “ Monkey Trial.” The case 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 culture 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.

Today, new state laws requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public 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 education. Advocates of religious diversity and church-state separation are countering it in capitols, courts and public 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 found 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 public schools — and whether to keep it out entirely — is still being fiercely debated.

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 case challenging the Butler Act and to bring attention to Dayton.

Daniel Mach, who directs the ACLU program on freedom of religion and belief, sees a through line between 1925 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 public 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 simply no reason to turn back the clock now.”

In 1925, the ACLU lost the Scopes case. It would be more than 40 years before the Supreme Court would overrule an anti-evolution teaching ban. But the trial, which took place from July 10-21, dealt a big hit to Bryan’s reputation. He died days after it ended.

Suzanne Rosenblith, an expert on religion in public education 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.”

SOURCE Associated Press