Brenda Wineapple couldn’t have asked for better timing.
The release of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation—about the famous Scopes “monkey trial,” on the eve of its 100th anniversary next year—came amid a torrent of church-state conflicts, including Oklahoma and Louisiana mandates to use the Bible and the Ten Commandments in classrooms. These came after several high-profile Supreme Court rulings—including the reversal of Roe v. Wade—had already stoked worries about what some pundits have called “creeping theocracy.”
But there’s another reason Wineapple’s book is timely. Church-state conflicts simply never go away in the United States. Almost two centuries after fights about Bibles in classrooms gave way to a separate, sprawling Catholic education system, judges are again deciding whether or not taxpayers should fund religious education.
Wineapple’s recent books have ventured impressively far and wide, from biographical portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson to a survey of Andrew Johnson’s “impeachers.” These studies were all rooted in the 19th century, so it is fitting that Wineapple’s latest book, about a quintessentially 20th-century event, looks as far back as the 1850s.
For many Americans, Wineapple writes in her introduction, “religion—specifically Protestantism—was the only safeguard against moral bankruptcy,” and “should not be separated from government [but] should sit at its very center.” The Scopes trial, she argues, “stretched forward to…our century when once again schools would try to outlaw certain modes of teaching,” and it still makes us think about “where the country [is] headed.”
In the end, Wineapple makes a case that is at times insightful and persuasive, but at other times raises—or evades—as many questions as it answers.
Keeping the Faith begins with biographical chapters about two towering public figures: the crusading attorney Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925). They squared off in the July 1925 case officially known as State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. This somewhat Wikipedian start is a missed opportunity to explore the complex coalitions that had formed around religion and education after the Civil War in the United States. By the time of the trial, many native-born Protestants had actually embraced secular public schooling, without which (it was claimed) Jewish and Catholic immigrants would be even more culturally disruptive. The image of a quaint “little red schoolhouse” became a provocative symbol—an 1890s nativist dog whistle, even—prompting outbreaks of public discord and even violence.
At the same time, William Jennings Bryan emerged as both the “Great Commoner” and as a spokesman for Protestant America.
“I am more interested in religion than in government,” he wrote in a fascinating 50-page pamphlet widely circulated during the 1908 presidential race—the third he would lose. America’s religious tensions, like most other cultural conflicts, were eventually refracted through the blood-spattered lens of World War I, so that by the summer of 1925, Bryan (actually three years younger than Darrow) was something of a relic, at least to the urbane tastemakers of the 1920s.
Ever since, the shadow of caricature has loomed over the Scopes trial, and not just because of the dopey rubes and snooty city slickers in the 1955 play (and 1960 movie) “Inherit the Wind.” Similar biases are still very much with us, which is why 21st-century readers would be wise to resist snickering at Bryan and his ilk. Because the closer you look at these characters and this time period, the blurrier the ideological lines get.
Eugenics, for one, “appealed to progressives and conservatives alike,” Wineapple notes. Bryan himself was a K.K.K. favorite, came from a Confederacy-supporting family and backed the disastrous national ban on alcohol. But he was also a class warrior who fought for low-income farmers and workers, supported the vote for women and condemned U.S. militarism.
To her credit, Wineapple mostly steers clear of black hats and white hats. She establishes the social context for Scopes through prominent religious figures such as the eccentric, inclusive L.A. preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, as well as Bruce Barton, whose fascinating 1924 bestseller The Man Nobody Knows reimagined Jesus as a kind of capitalist life coach.
On the whole, though, Edward J. Larson’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner Summer for the Gods sets the era’s spiritual stage more comprehensively. This is important because, for all of the carnival-barking hucksters and new economic might, there was a genuine and profound spiritual longing in 1920s America.
“Our modern world…laughed at the Ten Commandments,” the wildly popular 1923 movie of the same name lamented in a title card. “And now a blood-drenched, bitter world—no longer laughing—cries for a way out.”
Wineapple skillfully outlines the cultural influences of Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin, Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken, including their scientific breakthroughs and rigid (even religious) rationality as well as their hypocrisies. (“All authorities were fair game,” Wineapple notes of Mencken, “except of course when he was the authority.”)
But she is also ultimately in the unenviable position of having to sort through the era’s myriad cultural giants, before settling on allusions to Theodore Dreiser and to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s proto-Proud Boy Tom Buchanan (though not the God-ly eyes of T. J. Eckleburg). We also get Elmer Gantry, The Sun Also Rises and forgotten playwright Sidney Howard, who lamented of the notorious 1924 murder committed by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb: “With all this radicalism in the colleges, what do you expect?” Wineapple herself quips that, to preacher Billy Sunday, the “world was fox-trotting to Perdition.” (Had Keeping the Faith looked more closely at Sunday’s takes on immigration restriction or the Spanish Flu epidemic, it might at least have lent a touch of credence to Sunday’s anxiety.)
Wineapple’s strongest sections capture the downright surreal atmosphere of the trial proceedings. Arrest warrants are signed in a drugstore, and more than once, Darrow’s New York-based team members, including the Irish Catholic Dudley Field Malone and Arthur Garfield Hays, a “secular Jew,” are treated as foreigners by people in Tennessee.
And Wineapple writes that when a King James Bible is entered as evidence, Hays objects, asking: Why not “Jefferson’s rewritten version…. Or the Catholic Bible” or any of “66 Protestant Bibles”? It’s a fair question—at least for those who believe such questions and faith are not incompatible.
But how can these questioners live side-by-side, amicably, with those who are considerably more devout? That’s why, for all of the cerebral existentialism implicit in Scopes, the dull technicalities of lawmaking are just as important.
Those technicalities, in the end, are what generally avert civil wars. “The hand that writes the paycheck rules the school,” Bryan liked to say.
But federalism’s local control taketh as well as giveth. Not content to have “their” God in “their” schools, many of Bryan’s Christian paycheck writers also wanted to deny parents any rights to opt out. This is one of many reasons why it’s so hard to tell the complete 1920s church-state story without also looking at a largely forgotten Supreme Court case decided just weeks before Scopes: Pierce vs. Society of Sisters.
If the Scopes trial is timely, that different landmark court case, also about to turn 100 years old, is just as relevant—even if it’s not mentioned in Keeping the Faith or most other studies of Roaring ’20s culture wars.
Pierce vs. Society of Sisters—like the 1923 case Meyer v. Nebraska—reflected the decade’s profound demographic and cultural changes. The former prevented lawmakers from interfering with private religious education, while the latter struck down mandates to teach only in the English language. In both of these cases, the Supreme Court—bravely, one could argue—bucked a majoritarian hostility toward all things “alien.”
Bryan actually believed Pierce would buttress his prosecutorial case in Scopes. But it was Darrow who grasped the long-term implications of these 1925 religious trials.
Tennessee’s “anti-evolution law,” his team argued, was unconstitutionally “partial to the Bible over all other sacred books,” including those used by Jews and Muslims.
“How could [state law] prefer the Koran to the Bible?” Bryan’s team responded. “We are not living in a heathen country.”
The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes was a pivotal moment in American history. But it was also just one chapter in a much longer epic—one that is sometimes frightening, often absurd and rarely predictable. Darrow himself expressed frustration that a trial such as Scopes was even necessary “in the 20th century in the United States of America.”
But such trials will likely be necessary for a long, long time. At least as long as there is a United States of America.
This article appears in February 2026.
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