You probably have July 4 marked on your calendar: "Independence Day." Here's another day to circle: July 10. Wikipedia says on this day:
1925 – Scopes trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" begins of John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act.
2025 marks the 100th Anniversary of this famous American court trial. The Smithsonian Institution says:
“Dubbed ‘The Trial of the Century,’ the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial of July 1925 convicted Scopes for violating a state law prohibiting teaching the theory of evolution and engaged the United States in a debate over the mixture of religion and science in public schools.”
Smithsonian Releases New and Rare Photos of the Scopes Trial | Smithsonian Institution
That last phrase, “the mixture of religion and science in public schools,” is a Pandora's Box.
Most Americans know little about "The Trial of the Century," and even less about the larger, momentous, social and philosophical issues that surrounded the trial.
What if everything you know about the Scopes Trial is wrong? What if the important issues surrounding that trial were censored from your education?
Gary DeMar says, “Most of what America knows of the Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial held in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, comes from the fictionalized stage play and screen version titled Inherit the Wind.”
The "Scopes Trial" represents a conspiracy of atheists to remove God from public schools and prevent parents from making decisions about the education of their children. Just as Charles Darwin was not the first to promote an atheistic rival to the Biblical account of creation, so the Scopes Trial was not the first attempt to replace the religion of the Bible in public schools with the religion of Secular Humanism. The actual significance of both Darwin and the Scopes Trial are exaggerated by propagandists: neither one inaugurated anything nor definitively established anything. They are both cultural icons. But both are (obviously) worth studying.
The co-conspirators (The ACLU, H.L.Mencken, Clarence Darrow, et al) hoped to overturn laws passed by the people's representatives in state legislative bodies by 5 of the 9 unelected Justices of the Supreme Court.
The trial was also a conspiracy to destroy the reputation of William Jennigs Bryan.
The Scopes Trial was about two things:
The trial was motivated by two antithetical goals:
"Evolution vs. Creation" is considered a "scientific" question, while "who gets to decide" is a "political" question. It turns out that "evolution vs. creation" is also very political. It is equally "religious." I would like to present the evidence that people embraced evolution because they wanted political power. I would like to present the evidence that the Bible is not only creationist, but radically libertarian -- anarchist, in fact -- politically speaking, while advocating the highest levels of morality, culturally speaking.
If you're a high school graduate, you've been brainwashed for 13 years on the subjects of Evolution and The State. Add four years for college. That's about 17,000 hours of classroom schooling. Consuming this entire website will take about 25 hours -- or 18 hours if you were home-schooled. It will be a "paradigm shift." Nothing will come closer to converting you to anarcho-creationism. And if you become an anarcho-creationist, you and I may be the only two anarcho-creationists on the planet.
None of these forces want you to become an anarcho-creationist:
This "conspiracy theory" is a tangled web of conspiracies. It's difficult to track the workings of the larger conspiracy, because there are so many sub-conspiracies, some of which seem to be at odds with each other. They are united in their rebellion against God and hatred of the Bible.
"Anarcho-creationism" is a seemingly self-contradictory phrase, and you'll see a lot of this. Combining political freedom and Biblical morality goes against the agenda of the anti-Biblical forces that are in the majority. They want more political power, and more freedom to ignore Biblical morality.
Do you trust Hollywood to give you the truth?
Hollywood's version of the Scopes Trial, a movie called Inherit the Wind (1960) (imdb, trailer, full movie, archive), has been shown in many public school classrooms. The movie is pure anti-Bible propaganda. Spencer Tracy portrays the "courageous" and admirable liberal defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, Gene Kelly plays the role of reporter H.L. Mencken, who conspired with Darrow and the ACLU to challenge Tennessee's anti-evolution law, and Fredric March plays William Jennings Bryan, who opposed the teaching of Darwinism in public schools.
If you've seen the movie, you probably believe the following famous facts of the trial . . . and not one of them is true. (But today's public school graduates don't know the difference.):
None of these "facts" are true.
"The Monkey Trial" was about much more than monkeys. It wasn't even about "six-day creationism." William Jennings Bryan was not a "creationist" in this sense. He believed the earth was millions or billions of years old.
Historian Gary North has put together a free booklet on the Scopes trial. He writes:
What was the Scopes trial really all about? This:
a defense of democracy by Bryan and an attack on democracy by Clarence Darrow, the ACLU, and H. L. Mencken.
It was also about the government's plan to create a genetic master race -- an idea that Bryan was determined to stop.
If you want the proof, with 166 notes, I have provided it here, free of charge:www.garynorth.com/RoadtoDayton.pdf
Does this sound preposterous? Only because the textbooks have dropped this down the Orwellian memory hole. Doubt me? Read this: Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. This monstrous plan was validated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, two years after Bryan's death. Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell.
The Real Scopes Trial, and My Free Book Exposing It
I saw "Inherit the Wind" when I was a kid. In public schools I was taught that evolution was a scientific fact. I was never told that "progressives" in the U.S. preceded Hitler in the quest for a master race. I was told the "separation of church and state" (which actually means "separation of God and Government") was in the Constitution. Every day I pledged my allegiance "to the Republic . . . of the United States of America." I now believe
As a student, I was taught (in effect) "Make sure you go to school, for there you will be taught the most important things you need to know." But the most important things were banned.
What is the most important thing man can do? In the 18th century, nearly every English-speaking American knew by memory the answer to the question "What is the chief end [purpose] of man?"
Today, virtually no graduate of public school knows the answer to that historic question.
I don't blame my teachers. My mother taught in California public schools for more than 30 years, but what she taught me at home was illegal to teach in government-run schools. I had good public school teachers, but they were employed by a bad system. William Jennings Bryan questioned that system, but not effectively.
America's public school founders four hundred years ago would be horrified at today's schools. They would be shocked at what is taught and angry at what is not taught. Americans in 1925 were better educated than Americans in 2025. They read more and at a higher level and thought about more significant topics than Americans today. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman says serious consideration of important issues has been diluted and turned into entertainment in the last few generations.
If you think you know about the Scopes Trial, you can skip these introductions. This website attempts to debunk a lot of myths about the Scopes Trial and that entire era of American history. There's nothing particularly erroneous about these introductions. The problem is what they avoid talking about. But it is helpful to know something about the trial and that era.
The Associated Press recently interviewed Ken Ham, who created a full-scale model of Noah's Ark in Kentucky. Here's his response to that report:
On page one of this site, we were traveling through time with the great scientist Isaac Newton. We left off on our itinerary when we came to four men:
These four men were all connected to the "Trial of the Century," the "Scopes Monkey Trial." So let's continue the journey.
Another man connected to this trial was
He was one of the most popular Christian speakers in America, and was a Presidential candidate three times. He was a big deal. One month before his death, he was a legend.
Six days before he died, Bryan was cross-examined in the witness stand by a famous atheist attorney bringing to a close a trial dubbed "The Trial of the Century," also known as "The Scopes Monkey Trial." The case involved a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism in tax-funded schools. The trial symbolized the conflict between Evolution and Creation, or as some phrase it, the conflict between "religion and science." The atheist attorney, Clarence Darrow, spoke contemptuously of Bryan's religion as "your fool religion." Darrow's questioning was brutal. Not particularly high I.Q., but aggressive and insulting. Bryan's responses were less than convincing.
The confrontation between Bryan and Darrow was reported by the press as a defeat for Bryan. According to one historian, "As a man and as a legend, Bryan was destroyed by his testimony that day." His performance was described as that of "a pitiable, punch drunk warrior."
State v. John Scopes ("The Monkey Trial"): An Account
Some have suggested that Bryan's death was a result of his devastating defeat at the hands of Darrow the atheist. Bryan's defense of the Bible was embarrassing. Bryan was subsequently humiliated by the Press.
Ironically, Bryan didn't really believe in "creationism." He believed the scientists had proven that the world is very, very old. Millions or billions of years old. In short, if Bryan's job was to defend six-day young-earth creationism, Bryan was intellectually compromised, and creationism was not represented in the Scopes Trial..
So why was Bryan caught defending creationism in this trial? And why was he the man to face off against Darrow the atheist? What made him "a legend?"
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Bryan was perhaps the leading spokesman for Conservative Christianity in America at this time. He was also a prominent politician. We've been told William Jennings Bryan was a conservative "creationist." He was actually a progressive Democrat. The Democrat Party nominated Bryan to be the Party's candidate for President three times: 1896, 1900, and 1908. At the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago, his famous “Cross of Gold” speech won him the Democrat Party nomination for President at the age of 36, and is still considered one of the most important political speeches in American history.
Bryan was a friend of the working class. That's a Biblical place to be. Owners can take care of themselves (James 5:4; Leviticus 19:13; Deuteronomy 24:14-15; Job 24:10-11; Job 31:38-39; Isaiah 5:7; Jeremiah 22:13; Malachi 3:5; Colossians 4:1; Exodus 2:23-24; Exodus 3:9; Exodus 22:27).
Wikipedia says that "Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called 'the Great Commoner.'" Bryan believed the common people could be trusted to govern themselves. The word "democracy" comes from the Greek word demos, meaning "the people." Bryan believed the people can govern themselves. Bryan's opponents believed "the people" need to be governed -- by their genetic, intellectual, and social superiors. Technocrats.
Bryan believed all human beings were created in the Image of God. He wrote a book titled In His Image. He believed we should treat each other with dignity according to Christian ethics. The poor and weak should be cared for, for they too are created in the Image of God. Bryan's opponents followed Nietzsche.
Here is the full title of Charles Darwin's famous book from 1859:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Bryan understood the implications of the key words in Darwin's title, and believed that there was a conflict between Darwinism and Christianity:
The lion must kill the gazelle to survive. But the lion must protect his gazelle by killing any other lion who attempts to seize it. When that lion kills his competitor, that's a "biologically just decision." Man is an animal. Therefore man, in his "struggle for life," must learn to kill. War is "natural." War proves the "fittest."
Bryan resigned as President Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State because Bryan opposed U.S. entry into World War I, and Bryan knew that Wilson was lying America into a horrific and unnecessary war.
Bryan was right and Wilson was wrong, one of America's worst Presidents, contrary to what you were probably taught in public school.
Bryan believed war was a result of the teaching of atheistic evolution. He was right about that too. In Germany, in 1911, General Freiderich von Bernhardi wrote a book entitled, Germany and the Next War. Ashley Montagu comments:
"War," declared Bernhardi, "is a biological necessity;" it "is as necessary as the struggle of the elements of Nature;" it "gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things." "The whole idea of arbitration represents a presumptuous encroachment on the natural laws of development," for "what is right is decided by the arbitration of war." In proof thereof such notions of Darwin's as "The Struggle for Existence," "Natural Selection," and the "Survival of the Fittest" are invoked with sententiousness quite military both in logic and in sense. According to Bernhardi, it is plainly evident to anyone who makes a study of plant and animal life that "war is a universal law of nature." This declaration and fortification of Germany's will to war - for it had the highest official sanction and approval - was published in 1911. Three years later the greatest holocaust the world had ever known was launched. . . .
Ashley Montagu, Man in Process, (World Pub. Co., 1961), pp. 76-77.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
ridiculed democracy and socialism for protecting the worthless and weak and hindering the strong. Social Darwinism and the antidemocratic cult of naked power, as preached by advocates like Nietzsche, were laying the foundations of fascism, which would one day plunge the world into the most terrible convulsion in its history.
Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith, (Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co.), 1969.
Bryan's book, In His Image, was highly critical of Nietzsche. This was an offense to a reporter named H. L. Mencken, as we will see below. Mencken helped orchestrate the Scopes Trial in order to destroy Bryan.
But Bryan's warnings were prophetic, and after World War I and his own death, Darwinism would lead to another world war.
Hitler based his politics on Darwin. Jews must be segregated, he urged in Mein Kampf, to avoid mixed marriages; were they to occur, all nature's efforts "to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile."
Adolph Hitler got many of his ideas from the people William Jennings Bryan opposed. And because Bryan opposed them, they set out to destroy Bryan.
Mussolini was strengthened in his belief that violence was basic to social transformation by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Mussolini's attitude was completely dominated by Evolutionism. In public utterances he repeatedly used the Darwinian catchwords while he mocked at perpetual peace: it would only hinder the evolutionary process.
If Marx was not "converted" by the preaching of Darwin, he was certainly "sanctified" by it. Jacques Barzun notes that
In an age of social Darwinism, the combination of the ideas of struggle, of historical evolution, and of progress proved irresistible. The Marxists became merely a sect in the larger church . . . .
Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Doubleday, 1958.
William Jennings Bryan is portrayed by Hollywood as a bigoted, narrow-minded fundamentalist buffoon. (Hollywood portrays all Christians this way.) Although Bryan defended some "fundamental" theological doctrines of Christianity (the virgin birth, deity of Christ, etc.), and especially the Jeffersonian doctrine that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," Bryan was a liberal Democrat. In fact, a progressive democrat. Some political experts say he was the most left-wing candidate for President ever put forward by the Democrat Party (including Joe "Crime Bill" Biden, and Kamala "Prison Packer" Harris. Even more progressive than so-called "socialist" Bernie Sanders.) Bryan tried to take Christian ethics seriously, but using the power of the State proved to be a counter-productive way of doing that.
But while Bryan was somewhat "left-wing" in his politics, Bryan was not a six-day creationist. He believed the earth was millions if not billions of years old. Bryan wasn't challenging the geologists. He was challenging "progressives" who wanted to take control of education away from parents and local communities.
And he was challenging Darwinists, White Supremacists, and eugenicists who viewed common people with disgust and wanted to create a purer, stronger, smarter race of "scientific" elites.
William Jennings Bryan was an opponent of racism, eugenics, and Nazism.
He distrusted the Federal Government, and wanted his progressive policies put into effect by state and local governments. He was against elite control of education. He believed in democratic control of education. His opponents did not.
More and more people are becoming aware that secular progressive control of public schools has been a disaster. Homeschooling is growing. But when secular progressives cannot refute the statistics or the logic against their public policies, they resort to name-calling: "Fundamentalist!" "Theocrat!" Too many ignorant Americans genuflect before the ad hominem. Insults are easier to understand than syllogisms.
In the 21st century, "discrimination" and "racism" are big offences. So why isn't the left in our day resurrecting William Jennings Bryan to persuade fundamentalists to oppose racism, which Bryan opposed? And "progressives" and "democratic socialists" want to advance their "progressive" technocratic platform, but again, why don't they target fundamentalist Christians by appealing to William Jennings Bryan to embrace progressive political policies? Why do secular progressives refer to Bryan (if they refer to him at all) as simply a clownish six-day creationist, when he wasn't a six-day creationist at all?
Because the secular left isn't based on facts.
Neither was your public school education.
You may not have heard about the Scopes Trial, though it was an international sensation at the time. And you certainly didn't hear about the bigger issues of that trial: creation vs. evolution, democracy vs. aristocracy, peace vs. war.
This website examines the failure of William Jennings Bryan to advance Christianity against atheism, creationism against evolution, and democracy against "statism" (the worship of The State). We start with a closer look at "The Trial of the Century."
Here's how the left-leaning Smithsonian article above, and your typical public school, views the two sides:
| Left | Right |
| Science | Religion |
| Reason | Bible |
| Evolutionism | Creationism |
| Facts | Faith |
| Democracy | Theocracy |
| Freedom | Tyranny |
I think I was lied to.
I was raised a Christian, but I believed six-day creationism is a fable promoted by ignorant anti-science religious bigots.
And it may be that a lot of bigots promote the Bible.
But it is also true that a lot of Nazis have promoted evolution.
But is there actual "truth" that we can arrive at by an intellectual evaluation of the evidence? Evolutionists say they have the facts to make evolution the truth. I want to get to the truth. This website is for intellectually curious people who want to get to the truth.
In education, progressive Darwinist archism is seen in Rushdoony's book, The Messianic Character of American Education. Today's public schools are acknowledged even by liberals to be the established church in America. As Gary North says, "Sidney E. Mead, in his important book, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (1963), has argued perceptively that the public school system is America’s only established church." Scientific secular education is foundationally religious, because it was pervasively anti-religious, where "religion" was limited to Christianity. State-controlled schooling was messianic. The secular religion of evolutionist statism, inculcated in the youth, would save "progressive" civilization. Educators were our Saviors. At least they thought so.
Here's a more detailed summary:
At this point, I offer as proof an essay by Gary North:
This chapter, from his book Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, was republished as a typeset pdf:
North's essay is essential reading in this context.
Nazism started in America.
In the body of this website, I have many other linked resources on this subject.
More summary below
I would now like to begin persuading you to become an extremist "creatorist." The Scopes Trial is the tip of the iceberg. I want to build a ship bigger and stronger than the Titanic, which will not be sunk by this iceberg, but will break it up and melt it.
I hope you'll be able to join me in making this profound confession:
I was a victim of educational malpractice.
But not "malpractice" in an "oops!" way, but deliberate and intentional mal-education by the government. (I don't blame all public school teachers; my mother taught in California public schools for over 30 years. But she was a Christian, and "the system" -- the atheistic education bureaucracy, backed by atheistic courts -- constrained her.)
Recall the article from The Smithsonian Institution:
“Dubbed ‘The Trial of the Century,’ the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial of July 1925 convicted Scopes for violating a state law prohibiting teaching the theory of evolution and engaged the United States in a debate over the mixture of religion and science in public schools.”
Smithsonian Releases New and Rare Photos of the Scopes Trial | Smithsonian Institution
When the Smithsonian says there was "a debate over the mixture of religion and science in public schools,” there was no debate over the mixture of Hinduism and science, or Islam and science. America's public schools were originally created to make sure everyone who graduated was a Christian who could read the Bible for himself. In 1892 the Supreme Court of the United States proudly boasted that America was "a Christian nation." On July 9, 1812, President James Madison proclaimed a day for Americans to pray
that He would inspire all nations with a love of justice and of concord and with a reverence for the unerring precept of our holy religion to do to others as they would require that others should do to them.
It wasn't Buddha or Muhammad that said "do unto others."
"Our holy religion" was Christianity.
Recall the chart above
| Left | Right |
| Science | Religion |
| Reason | Bible |
| Evolution | Creationism |
| Facts | Faith |
| Democracy | Theocracy |
| Freedom | Tyranny |
Just about everything in the chart above is backwards.
I want to persuade you to become a Bible-believing Christian who understands that true knowledge (Latin: scientia, "science"), reason, and freedom comes from the Bible. Tyranny and irrationalism come from denying the Bible, either as pagan religion or as atheism.
Two of the most popular objections to the Bible are:
I believe this is all empty propaganda. The government, the "scientists," and the Hollywood producers are all conspiring to deprive you of the facts and keep you from becoming a Bible-believing Christian. Even the clergy are in on this vast conspiracy. Churches are pawns of the military-industrial complex and the entertainment-industrial complex.
I think I have the footnotes to prove all this. I think you'll find my sources persuasive -- if you read them -- and I suspect your Monday-Friday teachers as well as your Sunday School teachers have warned you against reading such fringe, dissident writings. I admit that a few years ago I would never have read anything like this website.
I think the real message of the Bible is pretty clear, but has been covered up by those who profit from an evolutionary worldview.
The most popular Bible passage in America 300 years ago -- before Darwin wrote his book on the origin of favored races -- was Micah 4:1-7, which speaks of a day when a New Jerusalem would beat "swords into plowshares" and everyone would dwell peacefully under his own vine and fig tree. Synopsis.
I'd like to take you on the journey I took that led me to see that evolution is a religion, and the religion of evolution was invented to justify bigotry, racism, genocide, war, and tyranny. By "tyranny" I mean a Monopoly of Violence which in the 20th century
I believe we must abolish the myths of evolution and statism. My opponents call this "anarcho-creationism." I'm OK with that label. I'm OK with the Bible.
I'd like to expose the myths about the Scopes Trial.
It was not about monkeys, it wasn't about layers of rocks. It was about Tyranny vs. Democracy. Then I'd like to expose the myths about Evolution. Not monkeys and rocks. Evolution is a religion. It is a religion of racism. It is a religion of tyranny. It is a religion of mass death.
But first, the Scopes Trial.
The Bible got into court because Tennessee passed a law (H.B. 185) prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism.
The law provided:
That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals
John Butler, the Representative who sponsored the bill, said "I'd read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense."
Should those fathers and mothers be forced to pay taxes to fund public schools which undermine what they are teaching their children at home?
That legal question has still not been resolved 100 years later.
Or rather, it has been resolved: against the parents.
Courts have ruled that it is illegal ("unconstitutional") for public school teachers to tell students that the Declaration of Independence is true:
Parents do not have the right to tell public schools to teach these things to their children.
To teach public school students these ideas is to violate the "separation of church and state." Those who want these foundational ideas taught to the next generation want to "impose a Theocracy" on America, according to atheists.
Even though those actual words come straight out of "America's Birth Certificate."
And, of course, students in atheistic government schools will never be taught this basic principle of the Declaration of Independence:
America's Founding Fathers would certainly have taken up arms against any government which taught children that the Bible was nonsense. Public schools in America were originally created with the express purpose of making sure everyone could read and understand the Bible, because our nation and its laws were based on the Bible.
Atheists hate the Bible. They hate the idea of God, and even more so the idea that the Creator communicates with man His creature, and will hold man accountable for his obedience or disobedience to the Creator's commands. William Blackstone said that "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" were only to be found in the Bible.
I think I understand atheists. I can understand why it's much more comfortable to have a long distant path billions of years back to some "big bang" than it is to read Genesis and contemplate the idea that God created everything just a few thousand years ago. That puts God much more "in your face."
If you're like me, your parents, your schools, your government, your Hollywood media all told you that the Theory of Evolution was no longer a theory, but a scientific fact. I used to believe that. I also believed that people who took the Bible literally were bumpkins. When I was a sophomore in high school, a Christian zealot gave me an evangelistic tract that quoted a man who earned a Ph.D. in biology from Berkeley, informing me that one cannot determine the age of a rock by Carbon-14 dating, but must use another method, because the half-life of some elements was too short to fit into an evolutionary time-line. In other words, the theory of evolution dictated the age of rocks and determined which radiometric clock must be used to confirm the theory. That struck me as a form of circular reasoning. I looked into the matter. I began to see that there was a war between the Bible and evolution which was not strictly based on facts, but more on wishful thinking. Many advocates of evolution admitted that evolution was not strictly scientific, but had to be true, otherwise the Bible would run our lives, and that would be terrible.
It was a religious, not a "scientific" issue.
I was intellectually curious. I read a lot on both sides.
Are you intellectually curious?
Darrow was a famous criminal defense attorney who denied knowing his duty to the God of the Bible, and defended assassins, murderers, and union mobsters. According to EBSCO Information Services,
In 1907, he won acquittal for William D. Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners, who had been charged with complicity in the bombing death of a former governor of Idaho. In 1911, in another case involving union violence, Darrow defended James B. and John J. McNamara, who had planted dynamite in the Los Angeles Times building; the resulting explosion had killed twenty-one people. In 1924, [Darrow defended] Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, who had carried out the wanton and senseless murder of a fourteen-year-old boy.
During his lifetime, Darrow served as defense attorney in nearly two thousand cases; more than one hundred of them were for charges of murder.
Much of his success derived neither from factual expertise nor from technical mastery of the law; rather, he was determined and generally able to sway juries and judges with deeply felt moral appeals.
What was it about the Bible that Darrow hated so much?
I'm interested in court trials as well as the Bible. I believe the guilty are entitled to a fair trial. Somebody has to give them a defense. I would rather defend an innocent person unfairly accused, but I would even defend a murderer from an execution, because I don't believe in capital punishment. Most conservative Bible-believing Christians do. Here are my Biblical reasons for opposing "capital punishment":
I studied law and passed the California Bar Exam, but was denied a license to practice law. A Federal Court in Los Angeles told me that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that if your allegiance to God trumps your allegiance to the government, then you're not loyal enough to become an "officer of the court." You cannot qualify your allegiance to the government by saying "I am a law-abiding citizen, unless the government commands me to sin against God." The U.S. Supreme Court has said your allegiance to the State must be "unqualified."
So in a courtroom I would be on the same side as Clarence Darrow in a capital crime case. But my motivation for opposing the execution of a murderer is because of my allegiance to the Bible, not my hatred of the Bible, as with Darrow. I feel like Darrow actually liked murder, because it struck out at a hypocritical Christian society. Or something like that. Maybe I misjudge the man.
I will admit that Darrow, like Bryan, opposed Eugenics. He wrote an essay entitled
I'll give Darrow credit: he opposed the rich ruling over the poor (cp. Proverbs 22:7).
How disappointing, then, that Darrow chose not to work with Bryan to oppose eugenics? Rather, Darrow demonized Bryan. The two did not differ absolutely on evolution (except Darrow did not believe in a Creator at all). And they both opposed eugenics.
Darrow suffered from "Bryan Derangement Syndrome."
Henry Louis Menken was a writer, journalist, and essayist. In an important way, he was the architect of the Scopes Trial. He solicited famous criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow to get involved in attacking William Jennings Bryan in court. In a 2004 article posted on the University of Missouri (Kansas City) website, Douglas Linder described this little-known background:
Mencken shaped, as well as reported, the Scopes trial. On May 14, 1925, he met Darrow in Richmond, and -- according to one trial historian -- urged him to offer his services to the defense. Hours after discussing the case with Mencken, Darrow telegraphed Scopes's local attorney, John Randolph Neal, expressing his willingness to "help the defense of Professor Scopes in any way you may suggest or direct." After Darrow joined the defense team, Mencken continued to offer advice. He told defense lawyers, for example, "Nobody gives a damn about that yap schoolteacher" and urged them instead to "make a fool out of Bryan."
Why did Mencken want to make a fool out of Bryan? Mencken was a smart guy, but he was no fan of Christianity. He preferred Friedrich Nietzsche. He wrote The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907) and translated Nietzsche's book The Antichrist (1895) from German into English in 1918. William Jennings Bryan wrote a book against Nietzsche. And for this, Mencken believed Bryan had to be destroyed.
William Jennings Bryan was a victim of a secular progressive conspiracy based on personal attacks, not scientific facts.
Mencken was a "secretive racist." His parents were first-generation German-Americans, related to Otto von Bismarck. Mencken admired German efficiency over humanitarianism. Darwin's "favoured races" (whites) were more orderly and disciplined than "savages." Watch this video for Mencken's racist writings:
Gary DeMar writes:
In 1908 Mencken published The Philosophy of Nietzsche where he argued that Nietzsche “had supplied the philosophy for modern Germany’s ruthless efficiency, in which Mencken took an ethnic pride.” [quoting Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 104.
The Scopes Trial 100 Years Later - The American Vision
Nobody is 100% wrong. Mencken said many good things:
"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
H.L. Mencken 1924
It is richly ironic that H.L. Mencken wrote a positive obituary about a man named J. Gresham Machen (/ˈɡrɛsəm ˈmeɪtʃən/; | GRESS-um MAY-chin). Machen was pushed out of the Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary when both institutions went liberal. He founded the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Seminary to perpetuate a Reformed Protestant Bible-believing church and seminary.
In his obituary, Mencken disagrees with Machen's fundamentalism, but claims that fundamentalism is more logical than liberalism, which doesn't even have a claim at being a logical religion. Liberals claim to be Christian but don't even agree with all the fundamentals of the Christian religion. Why do they bother going to church or dressing up like clergymen? At least fundamentalists are trying to be consistent with principles with which Mencken and other liberals don't agree. Mencken's obituary, "Dr. Fundamentalis," appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun (January 18, 1937), 2nd Section, p. 15:
Machen was an intelligent fundamentalist. Mencken respected Machen for not being a hypocrite. The opponents of "fundamentalists" were known as "modernists" a century ago, and "liberals" more recently. Machen wrote a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism, in which he argued that "Christianity" without the fundamentals of Christianity is not just Christianity with some theological errors, but a completely different religion from Christianity. That means the mainstream Christian religions like United Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians are not Christian churches at all. Mencken agreed with Machen on this. Why do liberals pretend to be Christians when they hate Christianity? Mencken hated hypocrites.
When Princeton Theological Seminary (home of fundamentalists like B.B. Warfield) abandoned the fundamentals in favor of liberalism, Machen left Princeton and formed the Westminster Theological Seminary. Machen was pushed out of the liberal Presbyterian church and founded the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. These events were front-page news in the New York Times, back in a day when Americans still cared a little about true religion and the press was not as frequently criticized for "liberal bias." It's a different world today.
Machen's book Christianity and Liberalism could have been titled, Liberalism vs. Fundamentalism.
Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church were committed to preserving the "fundamentals" of the Christian faith in the tradition of Calvin and the Protestant Reformers.
Go to Fundamentalism
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