NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) \u2014 One hundred years ago, a public high school teacher stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching human evolution. His nation is still feeling the reverberations today.<\/p>\n
The law books record it as State of Tennessee v. John T. Scopes. History remembers it as the \u201c Monkey Trial<\/a>.\u201d The case ballooned into a national spectacle, complete with a courthouse showdown between a renowned, agnostic defense attorney and a famous fundamentalist Christian politician who defended the Bible on the witness stand.<\/p>\n In a sweltering, pre-air conditioning courtroom, the trial became a linchpin for a tense debate that wasn\u2019t just a small-town aberration.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a broad-based culture war of which the Scopes trial is just one place lightning struck,\u201d says James Hudnut-Beumler, professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.<\/p>\n Today, new state laws requiring the display of the Ten Commandments<\/a> in public school classrooms are facing legal challenges. As the Supreme Court leans right, there is an ongoing conservative push<\/a> to infuse more religion \u2014 often Christianity \u2014 into taxpayer-funded education. Advocates of religious diversity and church-state separation are countering it in capitols, courts and public squares. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are fighting on an almost daily basis,\u201d says Robert Tuttle, a religion and law professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n That Tennessee jury found Scopes guilty of violating the state\u2019s Butler Act \u2014 of teaching \u201cany theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n A century later, the role of religion in public schools<\/a> \u2014 and whether to keep it out entirely \u2014 is still being fiercely debated.<\/p>\n Some perceive a threat to their spot in the culture<\/p>\n While attempts to interlace America and the divine are not new, from the last half of the 20th century to today they are driven by a perceived threat among white Christians who think their dominant spot in politics and culture is being eroded by secularism or multiculturalism, Tuttle says. <\/p>\n Other recent examples of the debate over religion in schools include adding chaplains<\/a> and Bibles<\/a> to classrooms, infusing designated prayer time into the school day and expanding voucher programs<\/a> that can be used at religious schools. At the Supreme Court, the justices effectively stopped the first taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school<\/a> and gave parents a religious exemption<\/a> for LGBTQ+-related instruction.<\/p>\n Tuttle\u2019s scholarship was used in the recent federal appeals court ruling<\/a> that declared Louisiana\u2019s Ten Commandments law unconstitutional, citing a similar Kentucky law the Supreme Court ruled against in 1980.<\/p>\n Tuttle and his co-author, Ira Lupu, assert that the principles underlying the Establishment Clause \u2014 the First Amendment\u2019s ban on the government establishing a religion \u2014 remain alive despite arguments that cite a change made in a 2022 school prayer ruling<\/a> by the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have good reasons not to concede the battlefield to the forces aimed at eliminating the idea of a secular state,\u201d their article states. \u201cWhen they overclaim their victories, others should speak up.\u201d<\/p>\n The day after the court ruling, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas Ten Commandments bill<\/a> that had easily passed the GOP-controlled state legislature. Lawsuits have been filed to block it<\/a> and the Arkansas law<\/a> that was approved earlier this year. <\/p>\n Abbott has taken on a Ten Commandments issue before. He reiterated his support for the new law while celebrating the 20th anniversary of his 2005 Supreme Court victory that prevented efforts to tear down the Commandments monument on the grounds of the state Capitol.<\/p>\n \u201cI will always defend the historical connection between the Ten Commandments and their influence on the history of Texas,\u201d he says in a video posted on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n Texas Values, a conservative Christian law and policy nonprofit, rallied support for the Texas bill. If other ideals are shared in the classroom, the Ten Commandments should be able to be shared as well, says Mary Elizabeth Castle, director of government relations for the organization. <\/p>\n A similar argument was made in 1922 by Scopes prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, a onetime populist firebrand who became the face of the anti-evolution movement. <\/p>\n