A century after Scopes: Much has not changed, and much has changed

Versions of this address were delivered to the Society of Biblical Literature’s Global Virtual Meeting session on Scopes 100 Years Later and to Vassar College’s Science and the Culture Wars conference, and published on the Righting America blog in April 2025.

One hundred years after the Scopes trial. And there is no question that there is much that remains unchanged, including the conviction of many fundamentalists and evangelicals that: mainstream science is at odds with a faithful reading of the Bible; there should be equal time for biblical creationism alongside mainstream science in public school classrooms; and this conflict between faith and science involves not only the nature of public education but, in fact, the very soul of America.

So it was in 1925, and so it is in 2025. But much has changed in the past 100 years, and it is these changes — we will focus on three — that we want to highlight here, as we think it is crucial for biblical scholars, scientists, and interested Americans to have a clear-eyed sense of how — when it comes to creationism in the US (and beyond) — 2025 is not 1925.

The first involves the very nature of biblical creationism. At the time of the Scopes trial, most fundamentalists were “old-earth” creationists. They adamantly and passionately rejected mainstream biology, understanding evolution to be both profoundly antibiblical and — in its emphasis on humans as highly developed animals — morally and socially corrosive. But they simultaneously accepted mainstream geology, holding either to the “gap theory” — there was an indeterminate gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, during which time God used six days to order his creation — or the “day–age theory,” in which each “day” of Genesis 1:1 represented an indeterminate period of time.

William grew up with old-Earth creationism in a very tangible way. His father was a fundamentalist in theology if not in behavior — he made prodigious use of very colorful expletives, and won a great deal of money playing poker — and he passionately opposed evolution. But as a geologist who used aerial photographs to create maps that could predict where oil would be found, he also passionately held to the idea of an old Earth, particularly, the day–age theory.

So he was horrified by the 1961 publication of John C. Whitcomb’s and Henry Morris’s The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications. Borrowing heavily (without attribution) from the Seventh-day Adventist geologist George McCready Price, Whitcomb (a fundamentalist theologian) and Morris (a civil engineering professor) argued that Noah’s Flood was a yearlong global event that produced the geological strata that provided the appearance of an old Earth. More than this, they argued that not just the Earth but the entire universe was created in six 24-hour days less than 10,000 years ago.

Replete with footnotes, photographs, and the occasional mathematical equation, The Genesis Flood gave conservative Protestants what seemed to be a serious alternative to mainstream science. More than this, their young-earth creationism fits much better with taking the Bible literally than does old-earth creationism. As a result, young-earth creationism took conservative Protestantism (and beyond) by storm; much to William’s father’s dismay and anger, within a few decades it supplanted old-earth creationism as the dominant form of biblical creationism. And one very important consequence of this shift — from holding to the idea that Earth is billions of years old to the idea that Earth is but a few thousand years old — is that it dramatically widened the gap between biblical creationism and mainstream science. And this is significant.

A second and related change is that the role of the Bible in the arguments for a young-earth creationism seems, at least in some very influential quarters, to have become increasingly unserious, even irrelevant. Why do we say this? As we began research for our book Righting America at the Creation Museum, we assumed that we would find lots of Bible at Answers in Genesis’s Creation Museum. And in one sense, there is indeed some Bible, or better, there are many little snippets of Bible. But as we looked closely at the museum’s ubiquitous placards — and here we had the assistance of a very bright doctoral student — we discovered an inconsistent use of translations, extraordinarily creative editing of biblical passages, a lack of ellipses to indicate where text (sometimes whole verses) had been removed from a passage, and the failure to provide relevant context for the passages that are displayed. To give one example of the latter (and keep in mind that the threat of Hell is very important to AiG), in the Museum’s “Jesus Rooms” there is a placard with Matthew 25:41: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” That’s it. No mention of the verses before and after, which make clear that those condemned to the everlasting fire are those who did not give the hungry food, the thirsty drink, the naked clothing, and so forth. Proof-texting on steroids.

Of course, it is no accident that these verses are omitted. The emphasis on caring for “the other” as the condition for salvation does not fit with AiG’s ideological agenda. And when one looks at AiG’s 46-point statement of faith, which all employees must sign, one finds this ideological agenda combined with a proof-texting that is carried even further, on occasion beyond any text at all. Each of the 46 propositions includes references to Bible verses. So here’s proposition #29: “the concepts of social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory are anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing (Ezekiel 18:1–20; James 2:8–9).” We looked up these passages and found nothing to indicate that social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory are anti-biblical. But as we are not biblical scholars, we turned to Abingdon’s New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, where we discovered nothing to corroborate AiG’s assertions.

All this to say that for AiG and its attractions, the Bible is often little more than a prop used on behalf of young-earth creationism and its right-wing culture war arguments. Let us be clearer. Young-earth creationism is not simply an argument that biblical creationism is true, nor is it simply an argument that biblical creationist science is the true, factual way we should understand the universe. As we discovered in our research, what matters most at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and AiG’s website is preparing conservative evangelicals to serve as right-wing culture warriors who attack (among others) feminists, the LGBTQ+ community, DEI initiatives, and “woke” thinking, and who argue in behalf of Christian nationalism and patriarchy.

More than this, the young-earth creationist juggernaut that is AiG is very busy attacking what they see as the scientific and academic conspiracy that works to brainwash us into believing that evolution is true, that global warming is real (“the climate cult”), and that COVID vaccines are efficacious.

Of course, to hold such conspiratorial views is made much easier when one resides within a bubble that protects adherents from what many of us would see as facts. In this regard, over the past few decades the right- wing media industry — Fox News and much, much more — has exploded, providing a wonderful landing spot for the most outrageous conspiracy theories.

But there’s also education. In the Scopes trial, the controversy was about what would be taught in the public schools, schools that were, with few exceptions (in some places, Catholic schools) the only game in town. But this is radically changing. Today we have a plethora of Christian schools and homeschools, schools which are often equipped with fundamentalist textbooks from publishers such as Bob Jones University Press, Abeka Books, and Accelerated Christian Education. These schools suffuse their students with a heavy dose of young- earth creationism, white Christian nationalism, and more. And then many of these students head off to “Creation Colleges” — you can see a list of them on the Answers in Genesis website — where they are inculcated with very similar messages.

Folks like AiG’s Ken Ham have been quite aggressive about promoting this alternative educational system, And now there are states that are funding or seeking to fund private schools. So the fight now is not just about getting creationism, the Bible, and white Christian nationalism into the public schools. It is also about funding private schools, including fundamentalist schools. It is about expanding the right-wing subculture. It is about taking dominion over the culture.

This is where we are. One hundred years after Scopes.