DON'T MAKE A MONKEY OUT OF TENNESSEE
 It pains me how most present-day published accounts of Tennessee history attribute the origin of my beloved home state to the cockamamie theory of evolution. Although commonly accepted as proven scientific fact when served up to today’s gullible masses by the false prophets of so-called science, evolution is actually an absurd theory proven fictitious by its contradictions of simple common sense. Far from proven science, it’s positive silliness. For instance, consider a few of its manifold absurdities.
- Everything came from nothing.
- An intricately designed creation has no intelligent Designer or Creator.
- The ability to reason came from something that couldn’t reason.
- Life came from something that wasn’t alive.
- Fish evolved lungs without drowning in the water or dying flopping around on the dry ground.
- Man evolved from monkeys, but we still have monkeys.
- In spite of the fact we evolved from monkeys, we lost our gorilla-like strength and incredible tree climbing ability.
- Everything, including you and me and a head of cabbage, came from the same single cell that floated up on a slimy beach eons ago.
- Everything is evolving, despite the fact that everything is devolving, deteriorating, dying, and decaying.
- The universe is a cosmic accident.
- We are here by happenstance.
- A human being is no more significant than a cockroach or slug.
- Life is meaningless, because there is nothing beyond the grave.
I’m told that New Yorkers were offended when defined as Appalachians by the federal government in 1965, thanks to New York’s Catskill Mountains, a northern extension of the Appalachian chain. I’m also told that southern Appalachians were equally offended by New Yorkers being called Appalachians, since they were just as upset at being affiliated with New Yorkers as New Yorkers were at being affiliated with them. What offends me, an Appalachian-American, better known as a southern “redneck,” even more than New Yorkers being called Appalachians is the incessant insinuation of modern-day authors and historians that all Tennesseans are evolutionists; that is, people who attribute the explanation of the origin of their state to the theory of Charles Darwin—“In the beginning nothing”—rather than to the Genesis account of creation—“In the beginning God.”
I would like to remind everyone that Tennessee is famous, or perhaps I should say infamous, for having once prosecuted an evolutionist for the crime of teaching his cockamamie theory to schoolchildren. The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial has been called the most famous trial in history. It took place in Tennessee, in a little town called Dayton, which is just north of Chattanooga. It served as the opening salvo in this country’s long and ongoing war against God. Being the first court trial in American history to be nationally broadcast, as well as a trial for which sixty-five telegraph operators were brought in to cable news about the proceedings to Europe and Australia, it is safe to say that this opening salvo in America’s war against God was a shot heard around the world.
The plot of this famous trial was actually conceived in New York, the home state of those folks so contemptuous of southern Appalachians, like the East Tennesseans living in Dayton. It was hatched in the offices of the ACLU, who ran an advertisement in the Chattanooga Times promising to pay the legal expenses of any teacher who was willing to challenge Tennessee’s Butler Act, which was a 1925 law passed by the state legislature that outlawed any teaching in the public schools that denied the biblical account of creation.
The trial’s plot may have been hatched in the New York offices of the ACLU, but its script was written in a drugstore in Dayton, Tennessee. George Rappleyea, an engineer with the financially faltering Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, saw in the ACLU’s Chattanooga Times advertisement an opportunity to draw attention to Dayton and to shore up its struggling economy. Meeting in the Dayton drugstore of F. E. Robison, who became known as “the Hustling Druggist,” Rappleyea and Robinson enlisted a couple of cast members for their script. Superintendent of schools, Walter White, and schoolteacher, John T. Scopes, agreed to play the roles of Butler Act lawbreakers.
Scopes, who had agreed to play the role of a public school teacher espousing the theory of evolution to Tennessee schoolchildren, was served a warrant for his supposed crime on May 5, 1925, the day after he accepted the role from the trial’s scheming scriptwriters in Robison’s drugstore. Interestingly, Scopes was never put on the witness stand during the trial and asked whether or not he had actually taught evolution in the public school. After the trial was over, Scopes publicly admitted, “To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I had taught evolution.”
Like the planting of Rosa Parks on the back seat of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the Scopes Monkey Trail in Dayton, Tennessee was another historic event with enormous repercussions that was not, as the public has been misled to believe, spontaneous and unpremeditated. Instead, it was carefully staged and planned. Whereas one led to the civil rights movement and war on racial discrimination, the other led to the discrimination of Christians and war on the Christian Faith.
More than two hundred reporters were brought in to cover the Scopes Trial. The majority opinion among them was clearly illustrated by the best known of them. H. L. Mencken, a German reporter for The Baltimore Sun, was a well-known journalist. Nicknamed “the sage of Baltimore,” Mencken was an unapologetic disciple of Friedrich Nietzschehe, the German nihilist philosopher famous for his deity-denying declaration, “God is dead.” Mencken was also a racist, anti-semite, and devotee to Social Darwinism, which gave rise to Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazis Germany. Needless to say, Mencken’s reporting on the trial in Dayton was anything but unbiased. It, like the reporting of the majority of journalists covering the trial, was both slanted against and slanderous toward all Bible believers.
Mencken, who helped to secure the volunteer services of the famous criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow, advised Darrow that the best way to defend Scopes was “to make a fool out of Bryan.” William Jennings Bryan, a Christian and three-time Democratic candidate for the presidency, had volunteered his legal services to prosecute Scopes. Mencken, who couldn’t have cared less whether or not Scopes was convicted, only cared that Bryan, who he saw as the standard-bearer of all God-fearing and Bible-believing Americans, was made a fool of during the trial. Mencken’s obvious disdain for Bible-believing Christians is easily detected in his repeated references to Bryan, their standard-bearer during the trial, as “the old mountebank,” “old buzzard,” and “tinpot pope in the coca-cola belt.”
That indifference toward the truth and intolerance toward Bible-believing Christians was true of other members of the fourth estate who descended on Dayton to cover the famous Monkey Trial is exemplified by the explanation one reporter gave for his repeated absences from the court proceedings. When asked how he could cover the trial when he never attended it, he responded, “Oh, I don’t have to know what’s going on; I know what my paper wants me to write.”
The famous Scopes Monkey Trial was a staged event. It was schemed on a local level by men hoping to shore up their local economy, help their failing businesses, and pad their own pockets. However, it was schemed on a much larger scale by other conspirators for a far more nefarious purpose. They wanted to use the court proceedings to stigmatize Bible-believing Christians as anti-intellectual ignoramuses. In doing so, they hoped to cause the Christian Faith to fall out of favor with the majority of the American people. If they could cast Christians in such a negative light, as obstacles to human enlightenment and utopian society, these conspirators could then proceed with their plan to completely profane our culture by ridding it of any semblance of the sacred. They could expunge from our society its Judeo-Christian Ethic and shame all Bible-believing Christians into public silence, out of their fear of being readily and roundly condemned in the court of public opinion as albatrosses to American progress.
In 1925, in the little town of Dayton, Tennessee, two conflicting worldviews came to a head. First, there was the evolutionist’s worldview. According to the evolutionist, there is no Creator who serves as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong and to whom all men will eventually give an account of themselves. Instead, man is supreme and can serve as his own god determining for himself what is right and wrong. Man need not fear judgment, since there is no God to whom we will answer in a day of final reckoning. Second, there was the creationist’s worldview. According to the creationist, there is a Creator who serves as the final arbiter of right and wrong and to whom all men will eventually give an account of themselves. It is God, not man, who is supreme. Furthermore, there is judgment beyond the grave. All men should fear God, before whom they will ultimately stand to be rewarded with eternal bliss or sentenced to eternal punishment.
I’m a proud creationist. I’m also a proud Christian. Although I’m afraid I often cause Christ to be ashamed of me, I have no reason whatsoever to be ashamed of my profession of Jesus Christ. In addition to being a proud creationist and Christian, I’m also a proud Tennessean, a man from a state that once outlawed the cockamamie theory of evolution from being taught to children in its public schools. If I’m ashamed of anything, it’s that in today’s public schools the biblical account of creation is outlawed from being taught to our children rather than the cockamamie theory of evolution. As far as I’m concerned, if this is progress, I prefer the backwoods of Tennessee, where children aren’t taught by atheists that we’re all just a bunch of apes.
Don Walton
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