A century-long arc in education jurisprudence came full circle last month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that denying parents the option of pulling their children from classroom instruction against their religious beliefs is unconstitutional. While the bookend case from 1925 has little commonality in substance or kind with Mahmoud v. Taylor, the trial of schoolteacher John T. Scopes—which concluded 100 years ago today in Dayton, Tennessee—offers compelling evidence that history rhymes.

The recent spate of education cases with a religious tinge that have landed on the Supreme Court’s docket would seem to reflect a growing anxiety about the place of faith in American schools. Whether that’s true or not, it’s nothing new. Concerns over what schoolchildren learn—and what manner of religion they’re exposed to—go back to the founding. A 1742 Rhode Island law sought to limit the influence of schools that promoted “New Light” revivalist Protestantism, stating, “The erecting of any other schools, which are not under the establishment and inspection aforesaid, may tend to train up youth in ill principles, and practices, and introduce such disorders as may be of fatal consequence to the public peace and weal of this Colony.” A century later, Horace Mann sought to position his emerging system of common schools above the sectarian fray. “Our system . . . disclaims to act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions,” he reported.

The hostility persisted nonetheless. Between 1852 and 1918, all states passed laws making school attendance compulsory. Meanwhile, President Ulysses S. Grant openly advocated for a constitutional amendment limiting public funding to public schools on the basis that church and state should be “forever separate.” That call was answered by Maine congressman James Blaine in 1875, but his amendment failed to achieve a two-thirds vote in the Senate for passage. Even so, several states took up their own versions of the Blaine Amendment, cutting private religious (read: Catholic) schools off from public monies. Oregon took it a step further in 1922 with legislation that disallowed private schools from serving as a legal alternative to mandatory public education. This tacitly anti-Catholic law was struck down by the Supreme Court three years later (see The Centennial of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, features, Summer 2025)—mere weeks before the Scopes Trial.

On the Origin of Culture Wars

Around the same time that Horace Mann was establishing common schools in Massachusetts, the young English naturalist Charles Darwin sailed the world aboard the HMS Beagle, collecting samples of flora and fauna and recording geological anomalies throughout the southern hemisphere. His observations of similar but distinct species of mockingbirds, finches, and tortoises on the various islands off the coast of South America began sowing doubt about biologists’ prevailing assumption that animals are ordered from higher to lower forms in independent lineages. For the next two decades, Darwin analyzed the evidence for common descent, positing that all life evolved from a single ancestor and was naturally selected into distinct species over billions of years. This research culminated in On the Origin of Species (1859), his seminal work theorizing evolutionary biology, and The Descent of Man (1871), which brought humans under that theory.

The ideological earthquake that is often associated with the theory of evolution was not immediately felt. Darwin’s work was initially accepted on its evidentiary merits, with minor quibbles from fellow scientists and some theologians. Few in either camp saw any contradiction between evolution and a supernatural divine hand that guided its processes. Darwin himself endeavored to reconcile his Anglican upbringing with his naturalist calling. Any mutual admiration between faith and science forged from Darwin’s theory was not to last, however, especially when it arrived on the shores and into the textbooks of Protestant-dominant America.

Evolution exposed any pretense about the secularity of public education. As the theory made incremental inroads into science curricula in the 1920s, policymakers got wise to the implications and reacted with legislative alacrity. In that decade, nearly half of U.S. states introduced bills that would outlaw the teaching of evolution in public schools. No longer was it the divisiveness of minority religious sects that threatened to adversely influence American schoolchildren; it was science.

The Butler Did It

John Washington Butler was among the politicians who looked askance at evolution. The Tennessean had heard stories of God-fearing youths who had gone off to college, studied the theory, and returned home as atheists. He could not abide the thought of his own children falling under Darwin’s spell, and on his 49th birthday, as a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, he proposed a bill: “An Act prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.”

The Butler Act was signed into law by Tennessee governor Austin Peay on March 21, 1925. It made it “unlawful for any teacher . . . to teach any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Butler admitted to not knowing much about evolution at the time he introduced the bill, but he was a devotee of William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and evangelical Christian who had lobbied nationwide for anti-evolution legislation. Bryan praised the Butler Act, saying “The Christian parents of the state owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (founded in 1920) took notice of the Butler Act and prepared to challenge its constitutionality. It offered to defend any Tennessee public teacher who would openly defy the act by teaching evolution. One man did—kind of. More about him in a minute.

The community leaders of Dayton, Tennessee (population 1,800 in 1925), saw an opportunity. Unlike Butler or Bryan, who were driven by a moral imperative to defend the fundamentals of Christianity, the denizens of Dayton were more pro-publicity than pro-evolution. What better way to put their small town on the map than a public test case of the Butler Act? All they needed was a defendant.

They found their emissary in substitute biology teacher John T. Scopes.

Trial and Errancy

The trial of John T. Scopes itself hardly bears mentioning, in part because it is already a fixture of every history curriculum that covers the 1920s, and in part because it has all the hallmarks of a show trial—a dubious defendant, celebrity lawyers, sensationalism, and very little interest in its underlying question: Should the state dictate what children learn in school?

Scopes wasn’t even certain he had taught evolution. Darwin’s theory appeared in a science textbook mandated for instruction by the state of Tennessee, meaning most high school science teachers were technically in violation of the Butler Act. Although he was willing to stand trial and even coached his students to testify against him, Scopes later remarked he had skipped the evolution lesson.

And then there were the lawyers. Scopes was defended by a team of five attorneys, headlined by the eminent (and agnostic) Clarence Darrow, and prosecuted by a team of eight, including the devout Bryan—all for a misdemeanor. On the trial’s penultimate day (moved outdoors because of the crushing Tennessee heat), Darrow took the unusual tack of calling opposing counsel Bryan to the stand and grilling him about Biblical inerrancy. Scopes who?

On July 21, 1925, it took the jury mere minutes to deliberate and deliver a guilty verdict to the defendant. Scopes never testified and was fined $100 ($1,840 today). Because it was the judge who levied the fine, not the jury as required by state statute, Scopes’s conviction was overturned on appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. It was as if neither the law nor its transgression ultimately mattered.

Does It Matter?

Today, the Scopes Trial is most remembered for its cultural cachet during the Roaring ’20s, a decade when turn-of-the-century morality and postwar skepticism were at loggerheads. That tension found its way to the classroom, making the trial an opening salvo in our ideological disputes over education. It began with a fascinating premise: Should religious faith or empirical science take priority in educating children, and who decides? As happens in most culture-war conflicts, that premise evaporated in the heat of battle, leaving just advancing and retreating armies and ultimately ending in a stalemate.

Essential questions were not resolved by the Scopes Trial, and concerns about what students learn in school lingered. Should the evidence of biological science be accommodated at the expense of earnestly held personal convictions? Is it in the interest of children to have their baseline values thwarted by dogmatic rationalism? From students to parents, teachers to administrators, policymakers to citizens—everyone has a stake in the outcome of these arguments.

The Scopes Trial matters because, a century later, we are still engaging in these debates—between faith and science, church and state, private and public, merit and equity, national pride and self-recrimination. In the absence of either permanent victory or durable compromise, this is what the exercise of democratic control over public schools inevitably looks like.

It matters because it is right to question what students are learning and yet still concede that more knowledge is almost always better than less. Recent research, first published in Education Next, shows the repeal of evolution teaching bans (as the Butler Act was in 1967) has promoted understanding of the theory without undermining religious commitment and even made students more likely to pursue careers in STEM fields (see The Cost of Canceling Darwin, features, Summer 2022).

And it matters because even spectacles like The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes can lay the groundwork for future litigation and, in so doing, produce more consequential cases about fraught topics in schools. Mahmoud v. Taylor not only puts a tidy bow on a century of curriculum controversy but also bears a fascinating contrast to its predecessor. The dispute in Montgomery County, Maryland, was ignited not by attention-seeking townspeople but by a district swept up in cultural zeitgeist. The transgression was not against state law but against the religious convictions of a group of parents. The desired outcome was not a ban on or removal of classroom materials but the option for families to recuse themselves from exposure to them. And the conclusion was not meaningless but rather gave a voice to those who should have one and a reason for policymakers to do some soul-searching about their decisions.

It only took a century to get there. Call it the theory of educational evolution.

Michael Poor is managing editor of Education Next. He is the great grandnephew of Mary Darrow Simonson, granddaughter of Clarence Darrow.