What's killing the media goes all the way back to a famous 100-year-old culture wars trial: critic

05 July

One hundred years after the Scopes monkey trial author Amanda Opelt tells Religion News we’re still trying to win debates by abusing our opponent.

July 10 will mark the anniversary of the prosecution of educator John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in public schools in violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act. This was a case defined by Baltimore Sun writer and atheist Henry Louis Mencken, who not only coined the term ‘Bible Belt’ and ‘monkey trial,’ but also described the community putting Scopes on trial as “hillbillies,” “halfwits,” “peasants,” “yokels from the hills” and “gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range.”

Mencken writing of the trial in the town of Dayton was supposed to be satire, but Opelt argues that most news outlets accepted his take, “portraying the trial as a joke and the townsfolk as worthy of ridicule.” Mencken made no mention that town leaders had ulterior motives of generating interest in their town as its failing coal industry left the place impoverished and residents dying of black lung.

Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan had his own well-intentioned problems with the idea of evolution, and it was not—as Mencken wrote—because his mind “hates [knowledge] because it is complex — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for ideas.”

“Bryan’s adamant objection to the teaching of evolution in school had less to do with its complexity and more to do with the moral implications of [evolution],” writes Opelt, suggesting it was the coldness of the theory that scratched at him.

“The Darwinian theory,” according to Bryan, “represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate — the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” Bryan stated that “he believes the law of love as outlined in the Bible, rather than the law of hate, is what leads to true progress.”

Despite that, Mencken described Bryant as having eyes looking like “sinister gems,” and “blazing points of hatred.”

“He was a peasant come home to the dung pile,” said Mencken, who also described the town of Dayton, “as only a ninth-rate country town, and so its agonies are of relatively little interest to the world.”

“But the town’s agonies matter to me,” says Opelt, adding that rank dismissals of the other side in any argument may help “explain the legacy of mistrust for mass media among the rural and religious.”

“It also offers a vivid illustration of how prone we are to make our political and religious adversaries caricatures rather than contextualized characters with complicated stories, unique insights and real convictions,” writes Opelt. “Perhaps the trial’s most lasting legacy is the precedent it set for how we engage with our ideological enemies and the role the media play in that discourse.”

The real loser in the aftermath of the trial was probably not Scopes, who was convicted and told to pay a $100 fine (which was later overturned). Nor was it the evolutionists, says Opelt, who never saw the case make it to the Supreme Court, or even the anti-evolutionists, who became the butt of the national joke.

“Our discourse itself suffered perhaps the most defeating blow,” she writes.

Read the full Religion News report at this link.