Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
This message is sponsored by Greenlight. With school out, summer is the perfect time to teach our kids real world money skills they'll use forever. Greenlight is a debit card and the one family finance and safety app used by millions of families, helping kids learn how to save, invest and spend wisely. Parents can send their kids money and track their spending and saving while kids build money, confidence and skills in fun ways. Start your risk free Greenlight trial today@greenlight.com Spotify that's greenlight.com Spotify so here's a story about a hot summer in Tennessee that changed everything about how Americans fight over what gets taught in schools. It's 1925, there's no AC and if you've ever been in a Tennessee summer, that is awful. And if you think our culture wars are intense now, buckle up. Because what happened in a small town called Dayton is still playing out in school board meetings, state legislatures and courtrooms across the country today. America in the early 1920s is basically having a collective identity crisis. You've got rapid urbanization, massive waves of immigration. World War I has just ended and everywh everyone's still processing the trauma. There's the Red Scare making people paranoid about communists everywhere. And suddenly national newspapers and radios are letting people see how other Americans live. And a lot of white Protestants don't like that. These folks had spent generations assuming that Protestant Christian values would just automatically define American public life, that it was the default setting. But now that certainty is slipping away. You can picture your grandfather saying, America's going to hell in a hand basket. And when people felt like they're losing control, they usually don't respond calmly. So what did they do? They went after the schools. They did a lot of the same things that we're seeing happening now as the culture changes. And they refuse to embrace that change. Because if you can control what kids learn, you can shape the future. Anti evolution campaigns started popping up across the south in the Midwest. Tennessee passed something called the Butler act in March of 1925, which literally made it illegal to teach that humans evolved from other animals. You could get fined anywhere from 100 to $500, which was serious back then. But here's what's crucial to understand. These laws weren't really about evolution. It never is. I mean, yes, they were about evolution in the sense that it was against what Protestant Christians believe, but it was about so much more. They were about who gets to decide what truth is. It was about controlling the access to information. They were about local control versus distant experts. It was about religious authority versus scientific authority. They were about who counts as a real American and who gets to shape the the next generation. All of those same questions. We are still fighting about them. And today we're going to talk about the Scopes trial, its impact on education, how we still see this attitude of how dare you not be a Protestant Christian norm, How dare you teach something different? All of which is still happening today on Flipping Tables. Hello and welcome back to Flipping Tables. Thank you for all. There's been a kind of a surge of news subscribers and messages as well as some topic recommendations, which I really appreciate. It's been a really busy last month and a half. I've been in and out of Minnesota helping with the Immigrant Defense Network, as well as just local mutual aid and protective gear for nurses and doctors volunteering their time, as well as veterinarians and just people that are in kind of high stress situations trying to help. The fallout of what's been happening after Metro surge and since leaving Minneapolis, there, it's still pretty much the same. ICE is everywhere. They're just in the outskirts a little bit more in the suburbs, in rural towns outside of Minneapolis. They have not left en masse. There's still more agents, ICE agents in Minneapolis, in the surrounding area, than there are police officers in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined. We still have $14,000 left of mutual aid that I right now, there has been so much mutual aid that has surged to Minneapolis. I'm just, it's just in a savings for mutual aid until people either ask me for help or there's another need that's gonna be present. So I really appreciate that. I was part of some grocery deliveries while I was there, and one of the bags that I had to pack was for newborn diapers. And it was just so heartbreaking that, you know, this family can't leave their house. They've got a newborn. I don't know if they're getting to doctor's appointments. I have no idea. It was just really, it was very sobering to be there. And I'll be in Nashville for a couple days as of this recording, and then I'll be in London for a while for my debate at Cambridge, which I'm very excited about. But let's talk about the Scopes trial. Today. We're going to talk about how a lot of things that started changing in the United States in the early 1900s are dramatically impacting what we're seeing now. What we are seeing now is a culmination of a hundred years of Christian nationalism. Working to take over the country and make the country in their image. We are a country that was founded on religious freedom. It was a primary concern of the founding fathers that there would be no religious dictation to anyone in America. They believed, believed that in order to keep the harm that had caused so much damage and so much loss of life in Europe away from the United States, that it was very, very important that we had the freedom of religion. And that does not mean the freedom of only Christians to practice. In the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which passed unanimously and without any rebuttal in the Senate, it passed without a debate. Was, it says in the first paragraph, the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion. They were very, very clear about what they stood for and what was important. And unfortunately that's gotten twisted a lot, especially since the 1920s. But part of what caused this dramatic change, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, which then later rebranded to be Christian, the Christian Evangelical movement. The part of this rise was, it was this, this crisis of identity. Everything's changing, everything's getting radically urbanized. Men are being removed from these traditional I'm a man jobs, like physical activity, outside working, in these kind of exertive senses. People are now moving from living in multi family households to living in single family homes. So this, this idea that people start to, that people are like, oh, like this is just the way it is. This is the way it's always been. The woman stays home and she takes care of the kids in the house by herself. That's not true. That didn't actually start happening until the 20th century. So private. Prior to that, your parents would live with you or brothers and sisters would live together because it was really expensive to build a new house. So families would live together. There was a village to help raise the family. And often women would work in the family business behind the SC or they would work on the farm or they would help outside with the ranch. They were not strictly homemakers. That was, that's a very new thing. This, this kind of system that has isolated women that are in the home is very, very new. Prior to that, her mother probably would have lived with her or her parents or her sister or, you know, his parents. So this is a very new system. Don't let somebody gaslight you into believing that this is how it's always been. It's not. People didn't have the money to build a house each time they got married, you know, and you would live on the family property and when your parents got older you would take care of them, and when they passed, you would inherit the property. So we're going to talk about the Scopes trial in particular, because I think that it's one of the best kind of microscopic looks that we can take at how one incident and one change created such a long ripple effect into what we're seeing today. So the Scopes trial didn't start with some rebellious teacher that took a brave stand for science against religious oppression. And it started in a drugstore in Dayton, Tennessee. It was. They were struggling. The economy was bad, right? Sound familiar? Economy was bad. Mining and manufacturing were drying up. And then local business leaders were sitting around a Robinson's drugstore, heard that the aclu, the American Civil Liberties Union, was looking for a teacher willing to challenge this new anti evolution law. And somebody had one of these business owners had the idea. They realized that a big sensational trial could put Dayton, Tennessee on the map, get them national attention, revive the local economy, make their small businesses more money. In 1925, Tennessee had passed the Butler act, which was a state law that made it illegal for public school teachers to teach any theory that denied the biblical account of divine creation as taught in the Bible and instead taught that humans descended from lower order of animals. The law was introduced by State Representative John Washington Butler, a farmer and fundamentalist Christian who believed evolution undermined both scripture and social morality. The Butler act passed quickly through the Tennessee legislature and was signed into law by Governor Austin Pei in March of 1925. The measure emerged during a broader wave of early 20th century Protestant fundamentalism, which reacted strongly against modernist theology, higher biblical criticism and Darwinian science. Now, one of the things to note here, especially like many of you follow my page because we, we talk about the Bible a lot in a. In an honest reflection on the Bible. The Bible contains a lot of different forms of literature. And one of the forms is myth. Genesis. The creation story in Genesis is myth and it's based on other myths, other creation myths that arose out of Egypt and Mesopotamia, often where there were chaotic waters that were either tamed by a God or a sea God versus a storm God or a land God would fight a battle when the, when the God defeated the sea God, he would create the earth. There's a very similar set of mythology that arises from the time that the creation story in Genesis was written. Also, the creation story in Genesis contradicts itself. So Genesis 1 is different from Genesis 2 in that the order of creation is different. And in Genesis 1, the ha, Adam or Adama is the being. It it's the, the better translation is being. It's not a man and it's not a name. But God creates this being and he creates male and female at the same time in Genesis 1, in Genesis 2 is when we see him put Adam, he, you know, designates Adam. The first being to sleep takes a rib and creates the female. Then later. So it's this contradiction between Genesis to that creates the legend of Lilith, which comes from the Alphabet of Ben Surah. So in order to explain this contradiction in the Hebrew Bible, they created this legend that Lilith was Adam's first wife from Genesis 1. And because she would not submit, specifically submit sexually, so she wouldn't take a sexually subservient position, she was, she then fled the garden when they tried to bring her back, she threatened newborns with a curse. And then Eve was Adam's second wife who was built to be subservient to him, and instead of being created equal with him, she was taken from his rib. And of course, then they blame women for all sin in the world and continue blaming the world for, or blaming women for the entirety of the world's problems. So come right off the bat, they have this law, the Butler act, which says you can't teach anything but Genesis. And it's a very, it's very, it's very similar to what we have now where we have Prageru working with the Trump administration to create what they call a patriotic civics course, which means they are going to whitewash the hell out of history and they're also going to make it all about Christian fundamentalism. So I grew up very much with this idea that the core of the degeneration of society was the belief in evolution. And I'll get into this more later as we go. So the Butler act is passed. These businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee realize that if they can create a trial, a big nationwide known trial, it will bring business and attention to Dayton, make them more money and help the struggling local economy. So they recruited this young guy named John T. Scopes. He's a 24 year old fresh out of University, Kentucky, working as a high school science teacher and a football coach. Here's the thing, Scopes didn't even think that he had taught evolution. He had been working as a substitute teacher using the state approved biology textbook. And the town needed a defendant, though. So Scopes agreed to testify that he had covered the evolution chapter, even though he wasn't sure that he had taught from it. He volunteered to be indicted. This is important because it tells you right from the start that this case was never about John Scopes. It was never about that chapter. He was the substitute. He wasn't even sure that he had taught it. This was theater and it was strategy. And I need you to understand that the conservative movement, the fundamentalists and the Christian nationalists are so good at this. This was a proxy war for a much bigger conflict. Dayton boosters recruited the young teacher and coach, John T. Scopes, who had occasionally, again occasionally substitute taught in biology and use the state approved hunter civics biology textbook to agree that he had covered the section on evolution so that the town could host this made up sensational trial. Scopes was indicted on May 25 of 1925. The charge was simple. He taught that humans descended from lower animals which violated the state law of the Butler Act. But immediately this thing exploded well beyond Dayton because both sides knew what was really at stake here. We're going to, we're going to bring in some heavyweights now. We've got William Jennings Bryan who's the three time Democratic presidential nominee, famous populist, former Secretary of State joins the prosecution. So remember, this is before the party switch here. So if your Democrats are the conservatives at this time, this guy was one of the most famous Americans alive at the time. William Jennings Bryan had spent his career fighting for farmers and workers against corporate power. And now he was on a crusade against evolution because he saw it as a threat to biblical authority and traditional values. Do I sound familiar to what's going on right now? And on the defense we have Clarence Darrow, a famous Chicago attorney, defender of radicals, labor unions, defendants facing the death penalty, known for his fierce skepticism of organized religion. He saw the Butler act as a dangerous religious authoritarianism dressed up as Democratic will. Tennessee is still doing this right now as of today. They have moved forward a bill called HB570 in the Tennessee legislature that would give women the death penalty if they get an abortion. They do not believe in something like that for pedophiles. They don't believe that the people in the Epstein files should be investigated and prosecuted. How convenient. So you have these two titans. William Jennings Bryan, who's one of the famous people living in America at the time, and Clarence Darrell who is a very famous def defense attorney. And they're about to face off in a sweltering Tennessee courtroom in the middle of summer. Again, no air conditioning, so miserable, hundreds of people packed in. And Judge John T. Ralston starts every single day by reading from Genesis. He opens with prayer. He makes it crystal clear that his courtroom is a Space where religious authority and legal authority are going to be blurred together. Now, Darrow is furious about this, and he should be. But Ralston keeps ruling that the only question for the jury is whether Scopes violated the statute. Not whether the statute is constitutional, not whether evolution is scientifically valid, not whether you can have indifferent interpretations of the Bible. Just did Scopes teach evolution, yes or no? This drives the defense nuts because it means they can't make their real argument, which is that the Butler act violated the Constitution. They're boxed in from the start. The prosecution's case is very straightforward. They call students who testify that, yes, Mr. Scopes taught from the evolution chapter in the biology textbook. The defense doesn't really dispute this because he's the one who said he did, even though he's not sure he actually did. Instead, Daryl wants to highlight the absurdity. This is where he takes the defense. Tennessee approved this textbook, put it in schools, and then criminalized teachers for using a state approved textbook. That's the contradiction he tries to expose. So Darrow's team brings in expert witnesses, scientists and theologians ready to testify that evolution is widely accepted in the scientific community. And plenty of Christians read the Bible in a non literal way, that they don't read Genesis as literal. And that is also their freedom to not take it literally. They show, they want to show the jury that this isn't simple science versus religion. It's more complicated than that. But then Judge Ralston drops the hammer. He rules that none of the expert testimony will be allowed in front of the jury. The jurors will never hear from scientists on evolutionary biology. They will never hear from theologians about different ways to interpret scripture. Ralston says it's irrelevant. The legislature makes its decision and the court's job is just to enforce it. Darrow is livid. Like this is such a misappropriation of justice. This judge should have been removed immediately. So Darrow's entire strategy is just gutted. Without expert witnesses, he's got nothing. He can't educate the jury. He can't make his constitutional argument. He's stuck. And that's when Daryl does something absolutely wild, something that's never been done before and probably hasn't been done since. He calls the prosecuting attorney to the stand, William Jennings Bryan, as a witness for the defense. He's going to put the prosecution's own lawyer on trial. Freaking genius, Daryl. If you ever read some of the stuff he was in, he is so smart. The prosecution objects, of course, but Brian, to everyone's surprise, agrees to do that. And maybe he thinks that he would look like a coward if he didn't say yes. Maybe he genuinely wants to defend his faith publicly. We don't know. Either way, he takes the stand. And it's so hot and the crowd is so huge in this trial that they move the entire proceeding outside to the courthouse lawn. Hundreds of people gather to watch. What happens next becomes the most famous moment of the entire trial. And again, an example of the sheer brilliance of Clarence Darrow. Darrow starts grilling Brian. How long were the days of creation? Were they literal? 24 hour days? Where did Cain get his wife if Adam and Eve only had three sons? Did Jonah literally survive inside a fish? Does the sun actually revolve around the earth or does the earth revolve around the sun? And Brian, Oh, Brian tries. He really is. He keeps insisting that the right of the people speaking through the legislature to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue. Because he can't answer these questions right. Like when you get into the weeds of some of this, it gets really hard to answer these questions. He's trying to make this about democracy, local control, quote, states rights, quote, parents rights to decide what their children learn. Do I sound familiar? Because again, in Tennessee we passed the school voucher bill which was all about parents choice. Parents choice, parents choice. And over 50% of those school vouchers went to wealthy families for private schools. And Tennessee just approved a budget that public school children will be allotted $4,400 a year. Private school children will get 7, $300. Because it's not about choice. It's about starting to limit access to education, defunding public education. And then when it doesn't work, being able to shut down schools and prevent people from the education that they should be entitled to. Two good and co coffee creamers are made with farm fresh cream, real milk and contain 3 grams of sugar per serving. That's 40% less than the 5 grams per serving in leading traditional coffee creamers for a rich, delicious experience. Whether you enjoy your coffee hot, cold, bold or frothy, two good coffee creamers. Make every sip a good one. Two good coffee creamers. Real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local Kroger in the creamer aisle. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts lifelock. How can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't. One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud. What do I do? My refund though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. Lifelock fixes identity theft, guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage. I'm so relieved. No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply this episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream Brian also got this line that is just famous. He said it is better to trust in the rock of ages than to know the ages of rocks. Faith over science, tradition over expertise. Well, this is the way it's always been. Trust in God over trust in technocrats to sound familiar? Because you hear basically the same argument repackaged today in fights over climate change, vaccine and gender affirming care. The framing is identical. In fact, there is a woman right now, so I am filming on February 20. There was a woman in Texas who has a son named Ethan who is in the hospital due to brain swelling from getting measles. And to quote his mother, she said she would still not give him the vaccine because we don't know why God chose Ethan, but we're praising him anyway. This is God's will. Instead of giving her son a freaking vaccine that could keep him out of the hospital and save his life. Because I'm going to trust God over science. The same relentless nonsense is still going on today. I'm sorry, I'm a little fired up if you couldn't tell. Brian tries, but under Clarence Darrow's relentless questioning, he starts to crack. He admits that maybe some biblical language is figurative. Maybe the days of creation weren't literal days Maybe he doesn't have the answer to every scientific question. And Darrow pounces on these admissions, using them to show that biblical literalism backed by criminal law is both intellectually untenable and it's dangerous. The next day, Judge Ralston orders Brian's entire testimony stricken from the official record. Because Daryl won. Like Daryl won the argument, Judge Ralston orders it taken out of the record. He says it's not relevant to the legal question, but it doesn't matter because the damage is done, the victory is won, depending on your perspective, because reporters have already sent their dispatches to newspapers all over the country. The transcripts are out. The confrontation between Brian and Daryl becomes a thing everyone remembers about the Scopes trial. And here's something so sad. Though. William Jennings Bryan died less than a week after the trial ends, he was only 65 years old. Some people say the trial killed him. The humiliation and the stress were too much. He did not die from suicide. He died of natural causes. We'll never know for sure, but the timing is extremely striking. Now, before we move on to the media spectacle and Menken's role, we're going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to have these ads, you can subscribe at patreon@patreon.com montemater you get all of the episodes ad free. You get private writings for me. And now we do several monthly pop ups where I come do a live session with just my Patreon supporters talking about current events, what's going on in my life, and doing some biblical instruction. And you get to see all of the past Bible studies and notes as well. Welcome back. Thank you for listening to those ads. Now let's talk about why this trial became such a huge deal on a national level in 1925. This was cutting edge media coverage. Chicago radio station WGN broadcast portions of the trial live, which was unheard of. This is one of the first American court cases to get radio treatment. People across the country could listen in real time to was what was happening in this tiny Tennessee town. So the business owners who thought this up did get attention on the town. They were successful in that regard. Card telegraphs are sending dispatches constantly. Newspapers are covering every detail. This is the 1920s version of like the O.J. trial. Millions of Americans are tuning in. And then there's H.L. menken. If scopes is reluctant, is the reluctant defendant and Darrow is the combative defense attorney, Menken is the gleeful narrator who turns the whole thing into content. He's a Baltimore journalist and cultural critic who makes his name mocking what he calls America's was Boo Boisi, which is basically his snobbish term for unsophisticated masses. He was kind of a jerk. He spent years lampooning evangelical Protestantism and shows up in Dayton expecting a circus. And he gets a circus. Well, he writes about it that way. Menken Dispatch. Menken's reporting dispatches are vicious. He writes about Dayton, Tennessee, like it's some backwards hell hole stuck in the Middle Ages. He is. He is throwing dirt on Dayton's name name. There are street preachers everywhere, vendors selling toy monkeys as souvenirs, which is obviously a dig at evolution. Revival meetings are happening on every corner. And Menken is treating all of this with dripping contempt. He writes that all. All that remains of the great case against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant. He calls Dayton residents yokels. He describes Brian as a buffoon. He treats fundamentalist theology not as a legitimate worldview that appeals to respectful engagement, but as a primitive superstition that deserves only mockery. But this is where it gets complicated, because Menken's writing is entertaining. It's. It's witty, it's sharp. His column probably sold a ton of newspapers. Secular readers, of course, love it intellectually, Z it up. But for fundamentalists, for conservative Protestants, Menken's coverage becomes proof to them of something they long suspected. This is going to sound familiar. The educated elites hold them in contempt. The colleges are bastions of liberal indoctrination. This is where this really takes a foothold in Christian fundamentalists, that the elites look down on them, hold them in contempt. And because of the persecution complex that is kind of inherently written, written into these fundamentalist groups, they believe that because they're being, quote, persecuted, meaning someone doesn't like them or value their opinion, it means they're right. Historians would later note that fundamentalists remember the Scopes trial less as a legal defeat, which it was, and more as a humiliating media ambush. They technically won the case, like Scopes was found guilty. What Daryl was able to do was change the public opinion of the nation with how he handled that defense. But Scopes was found guilty because the judge threw everything out. He literally wouldn't let Darrow present a case because it was a. It was a personal religious vendetta for the judge. But culturally, they felt destroyed. Sophisticated outsiders had come into their town in Dayton, mocked their faith, and made them look like idiots in front of the Entire country. One historian described it perfectly by saying, quote, the trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflict it staged without ever actually resolving them. The legal question, of course, got answered, of course, with a very biased, unfair judge. But the cultural conflicts just got way worse. Like, this is one of the first times we see, like a culture war arise in the United States between Christian fundamentalists and everybody else. Menken's role cannot be overstated because he really went on and he was. He, Like I said, he was a dick. It's like, it's okay if you don't believe in. In Christian theology or Christian fundamentalism, whatever. He was a dick about it. So think about the media voices today who cover conservative Christian things or the Trump administration when they claim to be conservative Christians. Cable news hosts, late night comedians, viral tick tock accounts. The ones who get huge engagement by making religious conservatives look stupid. This is. This is Menken's footsteps. They're producing the same effect. They're energizing their own side while giving the other side evidence for their personal narrative. And the Christian fundamentalist narrative is the elites hate us. The Democrats are evil and mean, and because they're persecuting us, we must be right. We must have the truth. So Mencken's legacy, and this is complicated. He helped expose real dangers of religious authoritarianism, and he did. And he did that very well. But his methods also contributed to cultural polarization that we are still living in, that we see every single day. And it's what conservative movements keep using. They keep reinvigorating these culture wars because it's. It creates an environment where people pledge allegiance to them. So let's go back to the legal side of things really quick. The trial wraps up. Judge Ralston tells the jury their job is simple. Did Scopes teach evolution, yes or no? He strikes Brian's testimony for the record. This judge is horrible. He makes it clear that the jury is not supposed to think about whether this law is wise or constitutional. Darrow, recognizing that acquittal is impossible under these instructions and wanting a clean record for appeal, actually asked the court to direct the jury to find Scopes guilty, which they do in about nine minutes. And it's. And Judge Ralston fines scopes $100, the minimum allowed by the law, of course, because again, remember, Scopes didn't actually do anything. He just played along with us. And then, less than a week later, William Jennings Bryan dies in his sleep. He's exhausted, some say heartbroken, embarrassed. His supporters see him as a martyr who defended his faith. His critics remember his humiliation on the witness stand. The country is divided on what his death means, just like they're divided on everything else about this trial. The case goes to the Tennessee Supreme Court on appeal. And in 1927, the court does something clever. They overturn Scopes's conviction on a technicality. Turns out the judge wasn't supposed to set the fine. The jury was. That's a violation of state procedure. So the conviction gets thrown out. But the Tennessee Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the Butler Act. They say the law is fine. It's constitutional. They basically tell the state to drop the whole thing and move on. So legally, the anti evolution law stays on the books. It doesn't get repealed until 1967. But after this ruling, the state does stop enforcing it. The issue kind of goes dormant, but it was still on the books until 1967. And here's the thing. Like, I grew up in all creationist education, so I went to. I went to all Christian national schools. I always had a Bible course, the entirety of my education. I was only taught creation science. And also my dad would take us for years. It's just all the time. We would go to church on Wednesday nights, sometimes a different night of the week, but usually Wednesdays. And they would take us through Ken Ham's answers in Genesis, which is just a form of Christian apologetics around defending creationism. And Ken Ham would show these diagrams where he would. And I'm going to actually put one on screen. I'll send it to Seer to put on. But he would show these diagrams where the foundation of the culture was really built on evolution or creation, because he considered all of these other, quote, problems like abortion, women's rights, feminism. The LGBTQ community arose from the belief in evolution. So his belief was you had to be able to fight against evolution first to preserve Christian fundamentalist faith, which he's. He's right in a certain way. But I was trained in this. I was trained to like. And this was. This was back during. Is it David Barton? Is that his name? Where he was like, there's. There's chariot wheels on the bottom of the Red Sea. None of that was true. In fact, David Barton's book was so untrue that his own publisher pulled it off the shelf. So none of this was true. They never found the ark. They never found things in the Red Sea that were not like, you know, just artifacts that were, like, on the coast or, you know, there was no evidence of any of these things happening. But we were taught how to have these Arguments and Christian apologetics is different from scholarship in theology quite a bit. Christian apologetics is very a la Charlie Kirk where he's got these one outliners and he's got these kind of gotcha questions and statements, but he really doesn't ever get into the weeds of it. It's really about backing someone into a corner with an argument and then being like, see, I'm right. Theology is a little bit more expansive. Theology is about collecting information to be able to go in depth with a predisposed theology you already believe. So if I, I'll use the example of if I believe in creation and I'm a Christian fundamentalist and I study theology, I am studying the Bible through the lens of what I already believe. Scholarship, on the other hand, looks at all of the information, says I'm going to get as much information as I can about history and language, all of these other things, and then I'm going to make my decision about what I believe about theology or the Bible. So they're, they're very different types of study. But I was trained in Christian apologetics for five years straight and, and then that was furthered again. I went to Liberty University. We were technically taught like about we, we were taught some of the things in a way of saying this is what evolution teaches. But we know that creation went like this. But it was very minimal. Actually one of my goals for this year for myself is I realized I don't know anything, anything really about natural history. And I want to be able to learn. So in, in this instance with Tennessee, they keep the Butler act on the books. They start to not enforce it. It gets officially repealed in 1967. So from a pure legal standpoint, this case is kind of a wash. Like the fundamentalists technically won the case because the law stayed on the books. But they also lost because the conviction got overturned. Everybody quietly agreed to let the issue die. Like it. It was really shown for what a scam it actually was. But culturally this trial did such massive damage because here's what historians have shown. Fundamentalists experienced the Scopes trial as a again humiliating media ambush is what they called it. Even though they won in court, the verdict didn't matter. They felt embarrassed and so they got vindictive. What mattered was that national newspapers had mocked them. How dare you laugh at us. How dare you mock us. How dare you. Intellectuals had dismissed them. They didn't get to be part of the in group with intellectuals or sophisticated people. Sophisticated outsiders had treated them like ignorant hicks. And the sense of humiliation would shape how fundamentalism would change for generations. The Scopes trial also established something that's still with us today. Again, it popularized the idea that public schools are the frontline battleground for America's culture wars. Understand that MAGA and the movement we see now started on school boards. School vouchers that are now in place in Tennessee and Texas are specifically designed to gut public schools the same way they want to gut the Department of Education and shut it down. They are specifically designed to gut public school funding so that when those schools are failing and not performing well, they can close them and deny access to children for education. Especially if those children are poor or they are people of color. Ronald Reagan's campaign manager, like famously said, we have to control access to education. We cannot allow everyone to get educated. Which is why under Reagan, that's when tuitions for colleges started to really go up while he was governor of California as punishment for the Vietnam protests in Berkeley. And that is why schools, sorry, Christian fundamentalists. Have attacked school funding from the get go. They don't want all children to be educated. And if they are educated, they would prefer that the woman is forced to stay home and homeschool them to give them the bare minimums of being able to read, write and do basic math, but not that they have access to colleges and furthering education. Colleges are not these bastions of liberal indoctrination. It's access to information. And the more information you get, the wider your world worldview gets your it. Your opinion should change as you go through life because you're learning something. If your opinion never changes, it just means you never learned something or you never had the time, the patience or the desire to be introspective enough to evaluate your own beliefs. But the Scopes trial is really what directed Christian conservatives vehemence against access to public education and into controlling what is taught in schools. Think about every major educational controversy since then. School prayer, sex education, creation science, intelligent design, teaching about racism, or what they say, critical race theory, which is a collegiate course, it is not taught in K through 12. Teaching about American history, like what really happened things about gender and sexuality. Every single one of these fights echoes the Scopes trial. It's the same arguments, the same tension between local and constitutional rights, the same conflicts between religious authority and scientific expertise. Expertise. And here's the thing. In schools, I have no issue with them teaching. Both teach creation and teach evolution. Present the information. Let kids make up their own mind. Oh, but creation really wouldn't hold up in that specific reference, right? So they have to say, well, you should only teach creation, you should only teach this. You should only teach this version of American history because we don't want you talking about how bad slavery was and the transatlantic crossing and Jim Crow and segregation and how we as Christian fundamentalists fought so hard to keep segregation and racism and prison place can't have that. And the legal battles didn't end in Dayton either. It wasn't until 1968, 40 years later, that the Supreme Court struck down the anti evolution laws. In Epperson vs. Arkansas, the court said these laws violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. You can't use the state law to enforce a religious view in public schools. Again, another note about Tennessee, because this is where we're at. They just passed putting the ten commandments back in school, which are a violation of the establishment clause. You cannot use state law to enforce a religious view. It is against the constitution to do that. And as a parent, if that's what you believe, wonderful. It is your job to teach your children that it is not the public school's job to promote your religion. Then in 1987 in Edwards vs Aguilar, the Supreme Court invalidated Louisiana's balanced act treatment which required that creation science be taught alongside evolution. The court said, nope, that's still establishing religion. And I do agree here, while I don't on core principle disagree with teaching both to show the contrast, it is still promoting a religious belief. I think the only way that teaching them all quotation mark happens is if you were to take a whole bunch of creation accounts or the history of the world and evolution and teach them all like a host of them so that you're not promoting just one religious belief. So here's the thing. These legal victories didn't end the conflict. Obviously we're still here. Year Tennessee just passed putting ten commandments posters on the walls while they take away SNAP benefits to to starve children. And they won't allow for children to have free meals in school. Yeah, okay. They transformed it. It's like Christian conservatives couldn't ban evolution or mandate creationism anymore. So they adapted. They promoted, quote, intelligent Design, a supposedly quote, scientific alternative. They pushed for teaching the controversy, framing it as there's a legitimate scientific debate debate when there isn't one. Science doesn't agree with you, it just doesn't. They tried to restrict how evolution gets taught by emphasizing alleged weaknesses or uncertainties. And this goes again a lot back to Christian apologetics where they create kind of these bad faith and often illogical arguments against evolution. The strategy shifts but the goal remains the same. Control what kids learn about human origin. Control the narrative about science and religion. Religion. So what did the fundamentalists do after Dayton? They withdrew. They pulled back from mainline denominations that they saw as too liberal. Right. So this is, this is where separation within the Christian community happens. Because Christ followers and Christian fundamentalists and Christian nationals, nationalists are not the same thing. But Christian fundamentalists pull away from these denominations. They stop sending their kids to universities who taught evolution and biblical criticism. How dare they? They disengage from national politics for a while. They essentially cut of segregate themselves and start building their own institutions to be able to control how they see fit. Now this is a huge turning point because they, no pun intended, because that's one of them. But this is where they start to separate and decide. They are going to build a world in their own image. They create Bible institutes, Christian colleges, publishing houses, radio ministries, mission boards. And this is, you know, this is the end of the 1960s into the early 70s. So we see Liberty University get founded, Bob Jones University, the rise of James Dobson, they are starting. They're like, okay, we're going to pull away from you. They're like not sending their kids to these schools. We're going to build our own institutions that'll teach what we tell them to teach. Now this is all committed to preserving fundamentalist doctrine and transmitting it to the next generation. Historians call this the establishment of the fundamentalist subculture. Which is exactly. This is what I grew up in. This is my world. That's, that is born in the 70s. This really didn't exist prior to the 70s. Everybody went to public schools. Like there were certain private schools in the sense that like elite schools, especially in the Northeast. But there wasn't this kind of religious fundamentalist subculture that was literally building separate institutions so that they could choose their form of indoctrination so that they could get around these laws. These folks concluded that they couldn't trust secular institutions to treat them fairly. Keep in mind treat them fairly means they don't get special treatment. They considered it unfairly that Christian fundamentalism would not be given preferential treatment in public schools and public institutions. They were not being treated unfair. They were, they were being removed from a place of privilege where they were able to exercise their beliefs and their religions onto other people. And again, they've, this really comes down to they, they got laughed at. They got laughed at and they are still so butt hurt that intellectual people might laugh at them, might call them weird, that this is where we're at they'd lost cultural authority even when they won in court. And unfortunately what they don't realize now is by doing what they're doing and, and blindly following this administration, especially when things are so blatant, is they're losing more cultural authority. It's things in America are going to get messy. Right? They already are. Christian nationalism and fundamentalism will completely die after this. They have lost all of their credibility. They will never be able to regain power after this. There's no longer any pretense. They are openly supporting constitutional violations, breaking the law, bribes. Donald Trump just announced yesterday that he's taking 10mil 10 billion taxpayer dollars for his board of peace, that he has nominated himself the chair of that he gets to control the funds. So much corruption. The Epstein files. We know that these men are abusers. They are part of a trafficking ring. They are pedophiles and Christian nationalists and Christian fundamentalists are still supporting them. Them. They are absolutely disintegrating any credibility they had left. After this is all over, they will never have the cultural authority they had ever again. They got too power hungry and too reckless. They were creating this subculture. It's. It's really important to understand that the withdrawal was temporary. They weren't giving up on American culture. They were regrouping. They were building infrastructure. This is what we are experiencing now is a hundred years in the making. They have spent a century planning to do this. They were creating an alternative information ecosystem that they still live on right now. Right? Like think of the news and the headlines that Fox News puts out in these conservative think tanks. How it's so absolutely not grounded in reality. This is what they were building. It would allow them to maintain their identity, nurse their grievances. Right. We're being persecuted in America. America's persecuting Americans have, like Christians in America have never been persecuted. That's not a real thing. But it was. To prepare for future re entry into politics, the institutional base that fundamentalists built after the Scopes trial became the foundation of what would become the religious right in the 1970s and 80s. Jerry Falwell, again the founder of the moral majority in 1979, was trained at Baptist Bible College. He came directly out of this separatist fundamentalist tradition. And when he and others entered national politics, they brought with them this infrastructure. He's the founder of Liberty University. They brought with them the networks, the sense of embattled identity that's been cultivated since Dayton. This parallel information ecosystem is hugely significant because when fundamentalists and evangelicals did re Enter politics in a major way after Nixon. They brought their own media, their own educational institutions, their own networks. They weren't dependent on mainstream sources of information anymore. They weren't going to rely on those people that had pointed out their hypocrisy and their ignorance. They were going to create a new reality. They had built their own world. And that insulation made it easier to maintain the narratives that differed sharply from mainstream academic or scientific consensus and any possible grounding with the real world. Historian Kristen Kobes Dumes, who, who wrote Jesus and John Wayne. Great book. I highly recommend. It talks about how this parallel ecosystem created communities that are largely insulated from mainstream scientific and academic consensus. If you're getting your news from Christian radio, your education from Bible colleges, your books from Christian publishers, your worldview from pastors trained in fundamentalist seminaries, you're living a very different information environment than someone plugged into secular institution or at least has access to both of them. I am a reflection of this because where I grew up, all the books we had were from Christian publishers. Our music was highly policed. We watched a lot of Christian made movies. We also went. I went to only Christian schools and of course learned like was taught theology and history from my father. And the worldview was also parroted by my teachers and by my pastor. I was in an educational bubble that, that created so much lack of knowledge in my part that it was actually very. Even going to Liberty University, where I just simply had exposure to people who didn't grow up like I did was really jarring because the world that I entered was so different than the world I grew up in. But these sheltered environments make it easier especially to shuffle young women into a continuation of the sheltered environment, get them married off really young, get them married to these guys and continue in this sheltered environment where they don't have access to information, typically in. Until they get divorced or something happens when they're 35, 40, 45, and they start to realize that they can't stay in this life anymore. And abuse obviously is super, super common. One of the things I think about is some of the, the things that we were taught about like, you know, evolution. Evolutionists are attacking Christianity. They. Some of the things that were presented to me growing up as proof that hell was real or evolution was false. They told me dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to deceive people, to pull them away from Christianity. I was told that scientists had been able to drill to the center of the earth and they could hear the screams from hell. And that's how we knew that hell was a real place in the center of the earth. I am telling you that things like that were not niche. They were mainstream. And when you have no access whatsoever to information. Because in my entire adolescent life I never, I also never had unsupervised Internet time time. So you could not access any information. And they have to control it that way. Because look at me, someone who grew up in this system, someone who was the poster child. I had every intention of fighting for this movement. I was a no exceptions pro lifer. I was at Liberty unit, all these things, even growing up that way. As soon as I had access to more information it cracked, it fell apart. And I was like, wait a minute. None of this is true. None of this is accurate. This is dishonest. This is intentionally misleading meeting even going through all of that, I still, as soon as I had access to more information, my opinion changed. So remember that this, this building of this other network was strategic. They were building the infrastructure they would need to mobilize politically. Later. They got their feelings so hurt by being laughed at. They decided they were going to take it out on the rest of us. And when they did mobilize, they had the institutional base to do it effectively. That's what Turning Point USA is. Turning Point USA is, is a carryover of this tradition. The ability to have separate institutions to create an entirely separate alternate reality for the people that they want to recruit and keep in this movement. The infrastructure built during the post Scopes withdrawal period became the foundation for the evangelical political motivation mobilization in the 1970s after they lost the battle of segregation when they could no longer legally keep segregation academies, these Christian schools they had opened that did not allow children of color to attend end then they started to reenact politically. By the time Jerry Falwell founded the moral majority in 1979 after so his first anti abortion speech wasn't until 1978 they were still trying to get segregation in there to to push back on the civil rights. They considered the Civil Rights act and the Civil Rights Voting act to be a gross overreach of the federal government when all it did was guaranteed anti discrimination laws. When they lost that battle, Paul Weirich, the founder of the Heritage foundation said we can use abortion. Abortion. So Jerry Falwell preaches his first anti abortion sermon in 1978. He founds the Moral Majority in 1979. He and others were explicitly linking theological conservativism with political conservativism. This is where we start to see the marriage of. Because this is Again after the party switched. So now the Republicans are the conservative party. He's now saying, well, you can't be a Christian and vote Democrat. Well, Christians have to be conservative. That's where this marriage starts to happen. Happen. And before I really dive into the persecution narratives and Christian nationalism as we see it today, I'm going to take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. You can miss these ads and have access to bonus content@patreon.com Monty Mater, welcome back. So now that we're back, let's talk about how the humiliation of the Scopes trial got woven into what we see now, like what Christian nationalism is doing today. Conservative Christians tell a story about who they are and what's happening to them. In this story, they're an embattled but righteous group under constant attack from the the nation, from the secular judges and universities and media and minority movements like gay people that want to erase Christian influence from public life. Never mind that Christians, especially white Christians, hold the most substantial cultural and political power in this country, and they always have. Always. In the history of always. The narrative is about perceived loss, perceived threat, and perceived persecution. The Scopes trial is a foundational chapter in this story of this persecution. It's Exhibit A for what happens when Christians trust these secular institutions. They humiliated us. They made fun of us. They said we were ignorant and backward, which they were. Menken's dispatches from Dayton get retold across generations as evidence of elite contempt for ordinary believers and the persecution of white Christians in America. Scholars who study Christian nationalism have identified a pretty consistent pattern to how this persecution narrative works. It has four elements. The first element is it defines real Americans as white, Christian and aligned with traditional gender and family norms. Everyone else is a guest at best. How true does that ring right now with ICE enforcement, with people? There is a political leader who called for the deportation of Native Americans where the Trump administration and its cronies are painting only. Only white Christians who are aligned with white versions of history who are traditional. Traditional gender roles, traditional family norms count. That's number one. Number two, it claims that liberal elites and demographic outsiders are stealing the country. They're hijacking things that belong to the Christians. Again, no. Not a Christian nation, a nation founded on religious liberty. And the establishment clause dictates that you cannot use state or federal power to privilege a religious cause or a religious attitude or a religious belief belief. Number three, it interprets the loss of any symbolic dominance or legal privilege like hanging your Ten Commandments in the classroom when no other Religion gets any representation. It interprets that loss of significant, of symbolic dominance as discrimination. Just recently, the last two weeks, we've seen the Department of of justice say their civil rights group is going to look into reverse racism against white people. They're going to look into Christian persecution. No, we're not taking the Ten Commandments out of the classroom and then putting up some other religions doctrine saying they can have it, but you can't. You're literally upset that you don't get personal privilege in public spaces. That's what it's about. But it interprets this loss as discrimination against white people, against Christians. So if a school can't lead mandatory Christian prayer anymore, that's not religious neutrality. You're persecuting Christians. Does this all start to make a lot more sense now? And fourth, and lastly, it concludes that aggressive political resistance and sometimes violent action is morally justified as quote, self defense against this perceived persecution. If you genuinely believe your faith is under an existential threat, then extreme measures start to seem reasonable, you know? January 6, researchers Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civil civics life. And it's not just about personal faith or even religious freedom. It's about using state and federal power to enshrine a particular religious cultural vision as normative and prescriptive for all Americans, whether those Americans share that vision or not. Because keep in mind, a lot of Christ followers and Christians don't agree with Christian nationalism. And this is a violation of their civic liberties as well. Because Christian nationalism said, says I, my opinion and my interpretation of the Bible and my belief about what a family is and my belief about what single women should do is prescriptive. It is now being you. The state is now using laws to enforce my belief on you, whether you're a Christ follower or not. Because you and I have different doctrinal beliefs. But my doctrinal belief is right. So I'm going to use the state to enforce my belief on you. So this even impacts other Christians who are not caught up in the crazy. Jones and Cooter observe that Christian nationalists see themselves as patriots who are fighting against the perceived enemies of both God and the nation. Nation. How familiar does that feel? But notice the framing. Your political opponents aren't just wrong, they're enemies. They are enemies of God and enemies of your country. This is where we get into the Christian nationalist rhetoric of God and country. This is the idea that they're playing on that your enemies are actually enemies of God in your nation. And you should be defending your nation. The dangerous combination because it puts disagreement outside the bounds of normal democratic politics. It becomes now a matter of salvation, right? A matter of saving the world, saving the country. It raises the stakes outside of a difference of opinion. You don't compromise with enemies of God, right? You fight them. And here's where the research gets very scary. Scholars have done experimental studies where they expose conservative Christians to media messages about Christian persecution. When they measure people's willingness to endorse political violence, they find that people who read persecution heavy narratives express significantly higher support for violent action in defense of Christianity sanity compared to the control groups. And I'll repeat that persecution narratives increase support for political violence. January 6. January 6. January 6. The more people that you can convince are under attack, the more willing they become to use extreme measures in response. That's why understanding the Scope trial matters. This is where this all starts. Because the sense of humiliation and betrayal that came out of Dayton fed into and created this persecution narrative. That is, that is torturing us right now. That is putting people's rights and their lives at stake right now. It provided again evidence that the elites hold Christians in contempt. No, they don't. They had intellectual and scientific reasons to not take the Bible literally. It suggested that mainstream institutions cannot be trusted. It justified their withdrawal, the building of their unreality institution ecosystem and eventually political mobilization in the 1970s in this framework. So think about this. Think about this. If you've ever wondered like, how can this maga person, person think this way? How can they remain so entrenched? Let me explain. Within this framework, any criticism is persecution. When you, when, when this idea plays out like this, any criticism is persecution. Any loss of privilege is discrimination. When, when conservatives used to complain online that there was censorship on social media, they weren't being censored, their posts weren't taken down, they weren't being charged by the government for offenses. Even though what they really want to say is the N word. That's, that's specifically what they be able to say without consequences. But even then, the state, the state wasn't going to arrest you for saying that. You might get slapped in the mouth, people might think you're a dick, but you weren't, you weren't getting arrested. But when they were saying that things were being censored, they were mad that there was fact checking. That underneath their post, a fact check would show up and say, hey, this isn't true because they are losing their privilege to lie and enforce a rhetoric they want people to believe. Believe that. They want the culture to reflect. And because someone called them out on their lie, because it was factually untrue, they considered that persecution. They consider that discrimination. Loss of the privilege of segregating their schools is discrimination against white people. Loss of the ability to only select resumes that are white men was discrimination against white men. Taking the Bible out of classrooms was discrimination against Christianity when all it did was was level the plane field. You see how this works. When you criticize a conservative Christian position on abortion or gender, you're no longer engaging in an intellectual or democratic debate. You're persecuting them. Right? Persecuting me for my faith. You're persecuting me because I believe this. Even if you use the Bible and you point out that the Bible in fact does not have an opinion on the abortion argument because it designates life at breath, you're persecuting me. You're persecuting me. When a school stops requiring Christian, Christian prayer for even for students who are not Christians, that's not neutrality. You're persecuting Christians. Early fundamentalist reactions to Dayton already contained these ingredients. They depicted themselves as victims of sneering journalists, big city lawyers, you know, those city yuppies, and condescending scientists. Even though they won the legal case. This, this is. The deeply embedded hatred of conservativism to science is very closely to tied to the Scopes trial. They consider science to be a humiliation of their belief and an attack on their belief. And nearly a century later, again, we hear the echoes of this in every single bill that comes. Every culture war issue, social, you know, school curriculum, university governance, claims of anti Christian bias. There isn't one. You just don't get privilege. But to them, that's persecution. Christian nationalist leaders routinely argue that policies recognizing religious pluralism, meaning everybody gets the right to believe religiously what they want, want, or protecting LGBTQ people who have the right to choose that life for themselves amounts to the persecution of Christians. Here's something I want to say. When you think about a lot of the issues that conservative Christians are in a tizzy about, right, that you know you're persecuting Christians. You're, you know, whatever it is, are all things they can avoid. If you don't think that trans people should be able to play sports, don't put your kids in sports. They're not that good anyway. If you don't want an abortion, don't get one. If you believe in small government, then government certainly shouldn't be telling you who you can love providing it's a consenting adult. If you don't want a gay marriage, you can avoid that. You can avoid gay people. You cannot talk to gay people if you want to. You don't like black people, don't talk to them. You have the right to do that. You'd be a dick. You'd be a jerk, but you have the right to do that. Everything they complain is persecution. Are things they can avoid void. Because the persecution is not the issue. It's the fact that they no longer have privilege and they can no longer control the issue without backlash. They love cancel culture. Look at what they did with the super bowl when they found out it was a Puerto Rican Spanish speaker they made. They're like me, have our own party me. They love cancel culture. They don't like when it applies to them for being jers. Survey research shows that strong adherence to Christian nationalism are more likely than other Americans to say Christian face as much or more discrimination in the United States as Muslims. Are you joking? Which is. It's wild. Because objective measures of hate crimes, economic inequality and political marginalization obviously say a much different story. But facts don't really matter when you are operating within a persecution narrative. I say this all the time. That facts don't matter when you can control the narrative. As one researcher observes, perceived persecution seems wrapped into evangelical identity and itself. Because without this persecution narrative, they lose control of the demographic. Without the culture wars, they lose control of the demographic. If you, if you were able to get all of these conservatives to forget about the culture wars for like a hot second, for two seconds, suddenly they care about making sure that tax law favors the middle and lower class. Suddenly they care about their taxes should be paying for better roads. Roads and affordable education and free health care. Suddenly they start realizing that they're paying into a pool that they aren't getting anything out of. Suddenly they start realizing that they have more in common with their black neighbor than they have indifference. And that their their black neighbor, their Muslim neighbor, their gay neighbor is not the problem. The billionaires that are giving $700 billion in corporate subsidies every year are. They're literally stealing money from them. Without that persecution narrative, this entire movement falls apart. As one researcher observes, again, perceived persecution seems wrapped into the identity itself. And again, it's not incidental. It's corrupt core. Because it is necessary to control the group, victimhood becomes central to how these communities understand themselves. And think about it. You get raised believing you are fighting this just cause for God. So let's bring this all back. We're going to make full circle. We're going to come back to schools. Because of the Scopes trial established public education as a primary arena for these conflicts. Religious authority versus scientific knowledge. Local control versus expert judgment. Tradition versus change. Because Lord knows they hate change. Change who belongs and who decides this. This becomes crucial to understanding why education is such a battleground area and requires thinking about what schools actually do. They transmit knowledge, but they also socialize young people into civic norms. That's the point of controlling the school. They prepare workers for the economy. They reproduce or they challenge existing social hierarchies. They shape identity, they shape values. They shape what vision of America the next generation is. Inherence. For Christian nationalists, control over public education is essential because schools have generational consequences. If you can embed your perspective into textbook standards, classroom practices, you can shape the worldview of millions of kids. You can determine what is true, what counts as normal, and what counts as American. Today, again, we're seeing this play out everywhere. States are passing laws restricting how teachers can talk about racism. They're requiring parental notification for consent on discussions of gender and sexuality, which is just a scientific thing that we know about right, right now. And also, like, if you are a straight person, nobody could pay you enough money to turn gay. That's not how it works. Right. It's, it's part of what we understand in science. Now they're mandating displays of religious mottos like In God We Trust in classrooms. The Ten Commandments. They're banning books dealing with LGBTQ plus themes or racial justice. They, they banned To Kill a Mockingbird, which was like, that was actually a book I even read in school. They banned the color purple. All of these legislative efforts mirror the Butler act strategy. Use state power to define what counts as legitimate knowledge. Exclude perspectives deemed threatening to a particular religious or cultural vision. Criminalize or stigmatize educators who don't comply. In Oklahoma, you've heard all about him. State Superintendent Ryan Walters recently passed a requirement that public school classrooms incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, into curriculum for grades 5 through 12. He explicitly called for the purchase of 500 Bibles to be placed in advanced placement US government class classrooms. AP courses on United States government were required to have a Bible. In Louisiana, officials tried to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. In Tennessee, they just passed it. In Texas, a Bible based curriculum for public elementary schools was approved in November of 2024. And this is a coordinated strategy and they're doing it in their testing ground states it's happening because Christian nationalists view public education as a battleground for advancing their vision values. They learned from Dayton that curriculum fights are really fights about power, authority and the future. Burke and Hadley warned that these conflicts, quote, point to a fundamental struggle over whether the United States will remain a pluralistic democracy. And I want to remind you that Christian nationalists do not believe in pluralism. They believe in religious freedom for themselves. They believe in religious determination for themselves. They do not believe that you should be able to practice your religion as you see be fit. They do not believe that schools and statewide education should be neutral on religion. And they believe that they should be able to enact laws to force you to live the Christian worldview and lifestyle that they approve of. Right. No progressive Christianity in here. Think about what this means. So this isn't just a question about what we teach in biology class. This is whether America will be a country where people with different beliefs, different backgrounds and worldviews can coexist on equal terms, or whether one group's religious and cultural vision will be enforced through state power. Can public schools serve students from diverse religions, cultural and ideological backgrounds while remaining neutral? Or will they become sites where the majority religious commitments get imposed on everyone? This is also fueled by, again, the, the absolutely false narrative of the white replacement theory. Right. So their thing is, well, yeah, we, we want to exclude these other religions and these people from different countries and these brown people. That's part of the whole narrative. The part of it is controlling information and creating a country that the norm. An American is a white Christian. And again, here's the persecution narrative at work again. When teachers, students or civil liberties groups object to these laws because they're unconstitutional, they get accused of attacking Christians, not engaging in policy debate, not defending constitutional principles. They get accused of attacking Christianity. This is, this dynamic has played out over and over and over and over. Disagreement is framed as hostility. Pluralism is cast as a zero sum threat. Simply believing differently from Christian nationalists or advocating for equal treatment of other groups is portrayed as a persecutory act that justifies using state power to punish dissenters. We see that happening now all the time. The persistence of these fights over nearly a century tells you something important. They aren't transient political disputes that we can resolve and move on from. This is an enduring tension that is built into the structure of American democracy. There's this tension between religious authority and secular governance, between majority rule and minority rights, between local control and what the Constitution actually protects. So nearly a century after the Scopes trial, we're still arguing about science and religion and expertise and democracy. Who counts as a real American right? Who gets to decide? The trial obviously didn't help these conflicts. It just exacerbated them. The fundamentalist sense of humiliation and betrayal. Betrayal is still the same. The idea of this persecuted persecution narrative is just absolute fuel and fodder for Christian nationalist movements. And I'll admit, much to my own shame that I very much believe this and. And participated in this rhetoric. Christians are being persecuted. We gotta fight for God. And I was very combative. Like, my personality has kind of always been like this to a degree, but especially when I truly believed I was fighting for God. I was vicious, vicious, vicious about it. Now, listen, this isn't all doom and gloom. There are people again organizing and fighting back. We see that all over. There's the Freedom From Religion foundation that pursues lawsuits to black government endorsement of religions. We have the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. That is working really hard to say, hey, it's fine that you want to practice this religion and that this is what you believe, but everyone else should get that right and you shouldn't get favoritism over everybody else. And these. A lot of times I think sometimes people look at these cases and they're like, I mean, is it a big deal, deal that the 10 Commandments are in the school or the 10, or in front of a courthouse? And it is, because it makes the establishment of privilege for one religion. These are very important. So if there are cases like this happening in your state or like, these are things you need to get involved in because this is the foundation of it. No one gets privilege. Because we see what happens when people get drunk off that privilege and decide that now they get to legend, legislate their own belief. Now let's talk about just the characters of the Scopes trial in. In perspective of what we're experiencing today, they're not. These are not like dusty historical figures. These are prototypes, and we can see them today. So John Scopes, the guy who was like, I don't think I taught from the chapter, but maybe I did. But, yeah, I'll plead guilty for this. I'll say I did. John Scopes is the everyday teacher who suddenly becomes the focal point of a long lawsuit of what can be taught. Critical race theory, gender identity, sex education. By the way, sex education is one of the number one ways to prevent child abuse. Child sex abuse in children, which after the release of the Epstein files, I have obviously now shown that conservatives don't actually care about that but it is the, the number one way to prevent childhood sexual abuse. Because when children have vocabulary and they understand their body a little bit more and they understand what's right and wrong, they're able to get help. So there's always a John Scope somewhere, even now, just trying to do their job. And then they find themselves in the cent center of a just a national controversy. Judge Ralston, that jerk is every judge who defers heavily to state legislatures on curriculum and morality policies, treating them as expressions of the people, even when they privilege one religious worldview over the other. You don't see this pattern in contemporary rulings on every. Sorry. You do see this pattern in contemporary rulings on everything from gender identity to. Don't say gay restrictions. Same thing. Judge Ralston. William Jennings Bryan is the populist preacher politician who frames school fights as battle over weather, unquote, quote, quote. Real Americans control their institutions. We hear this. Parents rights, local control, protecting kids from indoctrination. After the fall of Roe, it was states rights. And now we know that it was never about the state's right to do anything. Clarence Dar. Darrow is the civil liberties lawyer who sees religiously motivated laws as dangerous attempts to impose orthodoxy using the state, which is against the Constitution. And Menken. And I will admit that I've done this where I really roast somebody online because I'm ticked off off. But Menkin is every media voice that turns complex conflicts into punchy morality plays, cable news, host late night comedians again, viral accounts. And I do some of these. I try not to do a lot of them. I try to gear more towards education than anything. But even I've done this right. And who gets hyped up in the comments? Well, it's people that already follow me that are already open to these ideas. It's not the people that it's for. And when I was working on this script, I was like, I gotta, I gotta work, work on that. These character types recur in every major culture war episode that America has ever had. We have the same emotional currents, right? Christian nationalists are feel betrayed. And now it's flowing into politics, court rulings, academic research, diverse classroom lessons. And then their interpretation that anything other than privilege is persecution is affecting these culture wars. And so like this is where we kind of land with this. Burke and Hadley ask an urgent question and they're researchers on Christian nationalism and its reflection in culture. These conflicts point to a fundamental struggle over whether the United States will remain again a pluralistic democracy. Do we really believe that we should be a nation where everyone has the right to determine their own life, to choose their own religion, to live again, within the legal parameters. Because the government. I believe in small government. And the government's job is to protect its citizens, and that includes from exploitation, their autonomy, protection of their body, which is why murder is against the law and protection of their property. Property. So the stakes are actually this existential. Are we going to be a nation where the government shouldn't have any say whatsoever in your religious beliefs or who you marry? Again, provided it's a consenting adult right? Because they have to protect the autonomy and the body of children who cannot legally give consent. They should have no say in how you express your gender. They should have no say over what medical procedure you want to do. None, zero, Zelch, nada. They shouldn't have any say on that because that. That is a reflection of small government and that's government doing its job. Instead, we see a government that is using laws to enforce Christian doctrine and also exploit people by passing laws that allow billionaires and corporations to rob the nation blind. And currently our president, because he's made more money in his presidency from being president. Just this. Just this term. Like, well, I guess both terms, but he has made more money than all of the other presidents of the United States combined, even adjusting for infl.