There are a number of reasons for people to remember the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that took place 100 years ago.
It was, in fact, a seminal moment in modern American history. As Sophie Hills reports in the June 23 Monitor Weekly cover story, the nation’s first “trial of the century” in 1925 not only laid bare deep rifts within American Protestantism, but also helped shape the emergence of modern evangelical Christianity and the power it now wields within the Republican Party.
But the Scopes Trial was not just a conflict between science and religion. It was also a transformative moment in American journalism. The news media descended on Dayton, Tennessee, to cover what everyone agreed was as much a staged national “circus” as it was a small-town trial about teaching evolution.
Evolution did pose real challenges to certain understandings of the Bible. And the issue of who controls what is taught in public schools remains divisive even today. But media coverage of the trial, in many ways, gleefully focused on geography and class, emphasizing the differences between urban and rural America.
Inside the courtroom, Clarence Darrow led the jeers toward fundamentalist Christianity. Outside, Northern urban outlets, often led by sharp elitist voices like H.L. Mencken, cast the rural South as a place of ignorance, while elevating the trial as a pitched battle between forward-thinking science and backward-looking religious faith. Lighter‑hearted coverage dwelled on Dayton’s atmosphere and spectacle, and editorial cartoonists had a field day.
Journalism didn’t just report the trial – it performed it, molding public memory long before the first academic histories were written. Indeed, as historian Tom Arnold-Forster wrote in 2022, “So the trial became a circus, and the circus became a trap: an all-consuming and self-sustaining spectacle that served to escalate cultural conflicts and entrench existing resentments through ever more sensational media coverage.”
Sound familiar? In so many ways, those resentments continue to play out, as religious conservatives bristle at how mainstream news outlets cover them.
Then, as now, there was a diversity of news tones and styles at work. The New York Times and outlets including The Associated Press published sober-minded and evenhanded dispatches from the trial. (The Christian Science Monitor mostly published AP stories in its limited coverage.) But the circus became the trap, sensationalism drew most readers, and fundamentalist Christians were caricatured as “the other.”
There were many lessons from the coverage of the Scopes Trial. In the 1920s and beyond, American journalism, as a guild, was just then starting to move toward an “objective” ideal, imperfect as it might be.
The issues at stake during the trial – scientific, cultural, and religious – were serious and important, and they should be vigorously debated, and even litigated. But there’s also an important value that journalists should keep close as they report on these issues, and which we chose to emphasize in this week’s story: the dignity of those we cover.
This column first appeared in the June 23, 2025, issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.
