US Senator Joseph McCarthy unleashed an era of suspicion on the American people as he went looking for communists. His trials, both public and behind closed doors, focused on the government as well as Hollywood and the Army. He claimed that he had lists of communists, but failed to produce that list. It wasn't until the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring and summer of 1954 that his unfounded hearings were put to rest.

One year later the play Inherit the Wind opened. It was supposed to be a critique of the McCarthy era set inside of a re-telling of the Scopes "monkey" trial. In doing so, it got many of the facts wrong. John Scopes never spent any time in jail. He didn't have a girlfriend, and that girlfriend was not berated on the stand. The townspeople of Dayton, TN were welcoming to both Bryan and Darrow.

To explore this work of art and revisionist history I spoke with the hosts of the Seeing and Believing podcast Kevin McLenithan and Sarah Welch-Larson.

Select differences between the Scopes trial and Inherit the Wind

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The trial was basically over. The prosecution won. John Scopes was moments away from being convicted of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. The ACLU and the prosecution had what they wanted. But Clarence Darrow did not. He wanted to make a monkey out of William Jennings Bryan, the famous "fundamentalist". But how?

Darrow knew that if he turned down the chance to make a closing argument that Bryan would not be able to make one either. That meant that Bryan's carefully crafted words would never get heard. But he had one more trick up his sleeve. He would call Bryan, the lawyer for the prosecution, to the stand. Imagine that! The case was no longer about the defendant. It was about the lawyers trying to flex.

Bryan took the bait. He got on the stand outdoors next to the Rhea County Courthouse in front of an audience of millions. Darrow, in a masterstroke, hit him over and over with the questions of any village atheist. Did Jonah really get swallowed by a large fish? Did the sun really stand still because Joshua prayed that it would? And Bryan... floundered on live radio.

This event was made even more famous by the long-running play Inherit the Wind on broadway, which was followed up by a movie adaptation. But the play got it all wrong. Edward Larson, professor at Pepperdine University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Summer for the Gods, joins Chris to uncover what really happened on that muggy summer day.

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Tennessee was the first state in the United States to crack down hard on the teaching of evolution in public schools. Others had dabbled, but Tennessee went all the way. The ACLU wanted to challenge the validity of the case in the courts. In order to do that they needed an educator to teach it, get busted, and be brought to trial.

At the same time, the town of Dayton, TN needed a boost. After the biggest employer closed down it faced serious economic trouble. What if the men of Dayon could manufacture a court case to draw the attention of the nation? They found a young teacher named John Scopes and convinced him to participate in their scheme. They booked Scopes, even though he probably never taught evolution. The ACLU had its case.

Soon William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow hopped on board and it went from a publicity stunt to something for the history books. This is the event that some historians (wrongly) point to as the death of Christian fundamentalism in the United States until it was revived by the Moral Majority. One man fighting for the biblical idea of creation and another for godless atheism. But the real history is far more complex.

Edward Larson, professor at Pepperdine University, joins us to discuss the trial and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Summer for the Gods".

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In the 1600s, an Irish Archbishop named James Ussher did a bunch of math. The Bible is full of numbers and genealogies. He sat down and calculated that, in his opinion, the Bible dated creation at 4004 BC. According to Ussher, that is when God created man. That number has really stuck around!

I gathered my small group together to explore the Adams Synchronological Chart. It is a 23-foot-long timeline of human history, beginning in 4004 BC and ending in 1900. There it was! The 4004 BC number! Which brings up an interesting question, right? What did Christians really believe about evolution just before it became a linchpin battle for fundamentalists?

I turned to Edward Larson for answers. He's a professor at Pepperdine University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Summer for the Gods". The book chronicles the Scopes "Monkey" trial that we'll be covering in the next two episodes. But it also gives us a great introductory look at what Christians believed about evolution in the build-up to the trial.

It turns out that evangelical Christians and even fundamentalists were all over the place when it came to ideas of evolution. Many Christians, like William Jennings Bryan, believed in an old earth and even some forms of evolution. But they thought that it was God who caused that evolution. Charles Darwin, though, said that evolution was a matter of chance adaptations, thus cutting God out of the equation. Fundamentalists like Bryan were determined to stop the spread of Darwinian evolution for that very reason. They believed that if young people were taught that they were the result of grand mistakes then what reason did they have to treat each other with respect? To be good citizens?

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Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were wealthy young men in the early 1920s. They lived in big homes in Chicago and had world-class educations. They were both pushed hard academically, and Richard was sexually abused as a child. Both graduated early from high school and college. The two were an odd pairing. Nathan was quiet and awkward, not particularly handsome. Richard was gregarious and outgoing, good-looking... and a psychopath.

Nathan loved Richard, and the two sometimes had sex with each other. Richard realized he could control Nathan by trading intimacy for criminal activity. They started with typical juvenile delinquent behavior. Soon, though, Richard wanted more. He considered himself a master criminal, someone too smart to get caught. He and Nathan were exposed to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote that the ultimate purpose of humanity was to evolve into what he called the ubermensch or superman. Leopold and Loeb thought they were that evolved human. Therefore, they should be able to plot and execute the murder of a young boy without ever getting caught.

Only, they were so bad at it that it took very little time to pin it on them. Only the brilliance of Clarence Darrow, the country's most prominent defense attorney, could save their lives.

In this episode, we're joined by Candace Fleming. She's the author of the book Murder Among Friends about the crime.

The version of Also Sprach Zarathustra used in this episode is courtesy of the Creative Commons License and was produced by Kevin MacLeod.

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Eugenics. It's one of those words that gets thrown around these days, often by people accusing "the other side" of wrongdoing. But what is eugenics?

I invited law professor Paul Lombardo, author of "Three Generations, No Imbeciles", to join me to try to answer that very question. It turns out that that question is harder to answer than you'd think. In the early 1900s, the word "eugenic" was often used to mean "pure" or to imply that a product was healthy for babies. But that word also extended into segregating certain populations from society and forced sterilizations.

It is important to understand the history of eugenics because some Christians use the fear of eugenics as a lens to understand the Scopes "Monkey" trial. I think that is an accurate connection, but we really should understand it. Did William Jennings Bryan support eugenics? Can Christians support eugenics? Many did. There were even competitions that rewarded pastors for writing pro-eugenics sermons. That was especially true for liberal pastors.

In this episode, we attempt to answer some tough questions. I hope you enjoy it!

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Truce will be back on January 10th! Chris is working through the whole break in order to prepare for his big presentation in front of his church. He's trying to get Truce fully funded for 2023.

New episodes are already done, but he's trying to create a little cushion of extra episodes in case of emergencies. Thanks for your support of the show!!!

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Harry Emerson Fosdick had a certain reputation. He was the theological "bad boy" of modernist theology when he stood at a lectern in the 1920s and delivered his famous sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?". He was in New York City. One preacher, preaching one sermon. But this one talk spread all over the country and created real upset. Could modernist theology win in the Northern Presbyterian denomination?

J. Grescham Machen didn't think it should. He was a fundamentalist and wrote in response to Fosdick's sermon. But how does one keep out heresy?

The fundamentalists decided to call in a big-name Christian celebrity -- William Jennings Bryan. He was on a cross-country crusade to stop the teaching of evolution in public schools. Not because he didn't believe in science. He did. The problem that Bryan saw with teaching evolution in school was the cruelty that humanity would express if they believed they were nothing more than animals.

The battle between liberal and conservative Christians was a public one. William Jennings Bryan and Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote competing articles in The New York Times. Would it cause a split in the Northern Presbyterian denomination?

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So far this season I've covered William Jennings Bryan, a man who enjoyed the nickname "Mr. Fundamentalist". But he wasn't really a fundamentalist. Experts point to another man as the true face of fundamentalism. That man was William Bell Riley. He was a famous preacher in his day, bouncing around the midwest until he settled in Minnesota. He founded the Northwestern schools to spread his vision of Christianity and picked debates with modernists at the University of Chicago. He formed the World's Christian Fundamentals Association to help deliver denominations from modernism.

But... he lost. A bunch.

In this episode we explore the life of William Bell Riley to discover why he and the fundamentalists burned brightly, only to fizzle out a few years later.

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The modernish/ fundamentalist controversy was heating up in the early 1900s. Conservatives saw this coming a long way off but could not stop modernism from taking control of seminaries and popular pulpits. It was everywhere. It all came to a head with WWI.

Theological conservatives saw WWI as evidence that the world was getting worse. To them, it was a chance to fight for patriotic reasons. Modernists were also pro-war because they thought this was the "war to end all wars". There would be no more war after this and democracy would take over the world. The liberals fired the first shots in this theological battle because they thought that premillennialism encouraged people to root for the end of the world.

William Jennings Bryan was Secretary of State in the US during this time and did his best to keep us out of the war.

This episode features the voices of George Marsden (author of "Fundamentalism and American Culture") and Michael Kazin, professor at Georgetown University and author of "What it Took to Win".

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