For the Living of These Days
August 08, 2025 at 04:31PMFor decades, Dayton, Tennessee has hosted an annual reenactment of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a jury upheld the Butler Act, barring teachers in the state from teaching human evolution. To mark the centenary of the trial, Martha Pack traveled to Dayton to join the courtroom audience while actors playing William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow debated faith, science, and the limits that fundamentalism places on interpretation. Park, who also contributed illustrations, applies her strong visual sensibilities to the reenactment itself, deftly detailing the trial’s legacy and its limitations. “If, in a place like Dayton, history were reinterpreted, rather than simply reenacted,” she writes, “how might that open up possibilities for new insights, revelations, and wisdom for our own time?”
Whoever wrote the copy on the Rhea County Heritage Foundation website was well aware of the trial’s contemporary resonance, promising that the reenactment would rehash “arguments supporting Darwin or the Bible, majority or minority rights, parental control of schools, and much more.”
I’d bought a ticket for the reenactment the day the box office opened. As I drove east from my home in Memphis to the other side of Tennessee, I wanted to know what meaning this trial held — and still holds — not just for Dayton, but for the present-day melding of white evangelical Christianity and conservative politics. I wanted to know what is revealed about history and faith — and ourselves — when we reenact the same story year after year.
In the courtroom, the floor-to-ceiling windows had been covered in heavy black fabric; stage lights hung from the ceiling, and I settled onto the same stiff, wooden seats that had been present for the original trial. The director coached the audience: We would be responding to cues projected on a screen, prompting us to applaud, laugh, or murmur incredulously to each other, in accordance with the trial transcripts. Then the play began…
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/08/dayton-tennessee-scopes-trial-reenactment/
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