How far would you go to defend an idea? This country is supposedly built on the right to hold and share ideas that aren’t held by the most vocal or powerful among us. Yet so many of us as far removed from the original, bloody context of 1776, and in our daily lives, we don’t think too much about the one thing that was supposed to make this country different: the right to disagree, and be open about it, and not be hanged for it.
You can’t blame us for having forgotten: too many people are too focused on fighting for their lives to engage with abstract ideology. Still, our biggest American problems—racial inequality, the war on bodily autonomy, the freedom of some being dependent on the oppression of others—often gather around such disagreements. The oft-quoted phrase misattributed to Voltaire often stands as a summary of the American ethos, in theory: “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
But the reality is less clear cut: it’s more often the case that we must go to the mat to defend our own opinions, not those of others.
In 1925, one public school teacher challenged a state-wide law that made it illegal to teach children anything that presented an alternative to Biblical creationism. This event turned into the trial of the century almost overnight: the Presbyterian orator William Jennings Bryan and trade union lawyer Clarence Darrow headed to Dayton, Tennessee, where the local case played out on a national stage. Bryan, considered the country’s finest Biblical scholar, argued that anything taught in schools that goes against the teachings of the good book must be, by nature, sinful and unlawful. Meanwhile, Darrow was left to make the same argument so many of us are still making in cases like these all over the country. He argued that science does not have to stand in opposition to, or direct rebuke of, the Bible, and that to force educators to choose between the two would break at least two of America’s fundamental promises to itself at the start of its genocidal rebranding: the promise of freedom of speech, and the guarantee that church and state should remain separate entities under the law.
Darrow didn’t win the initial case, but he did win the larger battle after the original verdict was overturned on a technicality. More importantly, he won in the court of public opinion, and the court of memory. We don’t remember the fact that Darrow lost, because today we’re supposed to have the freedom to teach evolution in schools. But as with everything in this country, decisions can be appealed, overwritten, re-litigated, and walked endlessly backward, depending on what’s at stake. And when it’s peoples’ religious morality at stake, they’re prepared to walk things quite far back indeed, even into the Stone Age.
Inherit the Wind, from the 1955 play of the same name dramatizing the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” is everything you’d expect Hollywood to make of this story, especially a Hollywood on its last legs, milking its aging stars to the point of exhaustion. But it succeeds because it’s a dramatization not of an isolated moment in time, but of a never-ending American argument, one we’re having even today, over and over again, and one that has never been settled to anyone’s satisfaction. Is it evil to believe that science is real, and is it ignorant to believe that science and God have never had any interaction? It depends on who you’re talking to.
For the famously agnostic Darrow—fictionalized here as Henry Drummond, played by Spencer Tracy—it’s not so much a question of what one believes, but of what one is allowed to believe on American soil. He’s a proponent of free speech and free belief, and he doesn’t believe that Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species poses any true threat to the parables put forth by the Bible. For Bryan, or Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) it’s more than a threat: the idea of displacing Biblical study with science1 unseats him, and represents the falling of a nation into Satan’s grasp. Surveying it all—and providing his own obnoxious commentary—is E.K. Hornbeck of the Baltimore Herald (the newspaperman H.L. Mencken in real life, played by Gene Kelly.) He’s firmly on the side of science and progress, but that doesn’t stop him from being tickled to death by the whole thing. He doesn’t much care whether high school teacher Bertram Cates (the John Scopes analog) hangs from the gibbet or not—he knows it’s going to provide good copy no matter the outcome. Between these three men—Drummond, Brady, and Hornbeck—we get the three faces of the American conscience: one deeply religious, god-fearing, tied to the old ways, another fighting to the death for someone’s right to disagree with those ways despite perhaps believing in them himself, and the last looking on with the moral agnosticism of the cynic.
What they find out is what they already knew, in part. That justice isn’t blind, that superstition is often stronger than morality, and that morality itself has almost nothing to do with the law, at least in this country. Most of all, that morality is too subjective to legislate to most peoples’ satisfaction.
"Religion's supposed to comfort people,” Bertram Cates shouts at the jury, “not frighten them to death!" This is his defense after his fiancee is forced on the stand to tell the story of how the town pastor—at the funeral of a little boy who drowned—told that boy’s father that his failure to baptize his son meant he wouldn’t get into heaven. This was the thing to make Cates turn away from what he saw as the Church’s cruelty. He claims that religion should be a balm—what he doesn’t see is that realistically, religion, for most people, is anything but comforting. It’s a structure that helps us police and govern ourselves where the law can’t, by terrifying us into thinking that everything that feels good is bad, and everything that feels bad is holy. For Brady, who interprets the Bible with an almost autistic literality, the word of God leaves no room for interpretation. If it says God made the world in seven days, he made it in seven days.
But it takes only a few questions to break down this thinking. Once Drummond gets Brady on the stand to talk about the Bible (the court has prohibited him from discussing Darwin at all) he asks whether or not we know what qualifies as a day in Biblical terms. He pokes holes in Brady’s thinking, but it doesn’t get him anywhere. To modern viewers, this is familiar. It doesn’t matter how cleanly and clearly you debunk the ideas put forth by the religious right: in the end, they are not unaware of the fact that their way of thinking is a magical one. It’s simply that they don’t care, and aren’t curious to push its bounds and investigate its blind spots. And people who don’t care and aren’t curious aren’t ever going to let their minds be changed—not ever.
That’s the most frustrating thing about watching Inherit the Wind, a parable of the Scopes trial made as commentary about the McCarthy Era. Religion doesn’t exist because we have so much trouble telling right from wrong. Often enough we can do that just fine for ourselves: it’s that our own ideas about morality too often conflict with those of the people we must share space and community with. “Right and wrong is the same for everybody,” says Barbara Stanwyck in one of my favorite films, Remember the Night. “But the rights and the wrongs aren’t the same.” That’s exactly the truth. People who want to take away my rights and the rights of those like me don’t see themselves as the bad guys. How could they? In their mind, I’m the one who is wrong. So how can two people so separately convinced of their rightness ever see eye to eye? One of us must have doubts.
That’s part of the reason why we find ourselves at such a shitty standstill right now. We believe too strongly in our own rights, and damn too harshly the others’ wrongs. Some would tell us that all it requires to fix this is to reach across the aisle and acknowledge the others’ humanity, but this is false. We must instead commit to our disagreement to such a fervent degree that we become willing to cut off anyone who doesn’t see eye to eye with us. Because we’re tired of freeing up valuable community space for people who, at the end of the day, have made the choice to see us as the enemy.
But the battle was never about right vs. wrong: it was always about the possible vs. the impossible. “Can't you understand,” Drummond says, “that if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it? And soon you may ban books and newspapers and then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and pretty soon you try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding.”
He’s right about that: the trouble is, we’ve never had any trouble feeding it in this country. It gets fed, whether we like it or not.
I used to belong to the “vote blue no matter who” camp. I used to think that we had to live in reality, and play by reality’s rules. And reality always meant compromise. But at this point in time, I’m too disgusted by the deep brokenness of the political system that feels impossible to fix. It is impossible: that’s precisely why we must tear it down and build something new, something not built on the backs of enslaved people, something that doesn’t create strict definitions for what makes a human being count as human. Something that doesn’t create echoes of injustice in every system of law and organization we depend on in this country. We need to fight for something better, even if we don’t know what that looks like. This—whatever it is—is not democracy, and it is not enough. Too many people are suffering too much, and what more do we need to know than that?
From this moment in time, the Scopes trial feels laughably trite. Back then, it felt natural to fight for someone like Darwin, who represented science and fact rather than superstition and fear. But Darwin himself was a white supremacist, one who wove his harmful ideas about fictional racial differences into his era-defining work. Can we even fight for the legitimacy of someone like Darwin, whose own blindness rivals that of William Jennings Bryan’s?
I don’t know. It’s not easy to parse the past this way, especially when the problems of the past are so much with us in the present. More and more, I feel like we need to start from scratch. We need to throw away the idea that our pre-existing systems are in any way neutral, we need to resist the temptation to brand religious thinking as bad and scientific thinking as good. In reality, the religious right has nothing to do with religion: they’re fighting to remain in the past, while the rest of us are begging to be allowed to create a liveable future.
Will we ever get there?
Next week: horror in the comments.
There’s also the obvious element of racial panic represented by Christians loath to see themselves as having any relationship to the animal kingdom other than that of oppressor. White Christians were happy to liken non-white people to animals, but when it came to evolution, they were outraged to consider a direct line between themselves and the great apes we all descended from.
or, they genuinely live in a different reality. the trouble it seems to me is that they are driven to accept that one by feelings of bitterness and despair that grow out of those very forces that have broken the back of the system set up at the start. which was always always designed to provide for those with advantages like white skin and male bodies, the two factors that no longer reward them. it's the bitterness of their crushed entitlement that blows back at us. i totally agree with you, people like biden can only put a finger in the hole in the ship we're sinking in, and we do need a deep renewal. i feel like there are good signs, the strength of the rising labor movement, the way people are working to build more livable communities in shattered cities, the way lucy's trans colleague can go into the courtroom wearing anything she wants, and win cases. things will be different when my generation bows out, which we don't seem inclined to do. but it trump wins, all bets are off for sure, which is why, old fashioned as it sounds, much as biden drives me nuts, i think we really have to get out the vote....
i got fired up reading this, first one way, then another... finally, i feel like i fully understand your hunger/passion to begin anew with better building materials... but maybe on account of having lived so long (that's not a compliment, like, i know more, oh no) i feel i've had time to ponder why the societies a lot of us come from and the one we've created, haven't succeeded better at including humane fairness among our core values. but really, through out history, haven't people fought over power? and often in the name of religion (the "holy" roman empire, crusades, etc). i don't think there's any such thing as starting over, i think it's more about recognizing the kind of ugly realities history offers us to think about, and see how, knowing that people want power to protect themselves, or get me, and that power corrupts, how do we build systems that take those forces into account. starting over i think would lead to the same mistakes...