Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
by Brenda Wineapple
View on GoodreadsBrenda Wineapple's narrative history of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" — Dayton, Tennessee; Bryan vs. Darrow; the teaching of evolution — as the foundational American legal-cultural confrontation over religion, science, and pluralism.
Core ideas
- The trial was both staged (Scopes deliberately violated the Butler Act to set up a test case) and genuine (the cultural cleavage it dramatized was real and persistent), and the staging doesn't drain the meaning.
- Bryan, often remembered as the foolish loser of the trial, is presented in dimension — a populist progressive on most economic questions whose religion-and-science position emerged from concerns about Social Darwinism's policy uses, not pure obscurantism.
- The book's contemporary resonance is the explicit point: the questions the trial raised (whose values shape public education, how science relates to religious belief, what pluralism actually requires) remain live in modern Christian-nationalist politics.
Published2024
Pages544
ISBN9780593229927
ReadMay 2025
