The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war.

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments.

But that was not the case with all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, who held that the Bible is inerrant – without error – and factually accurate in all that it has to say, including when it speaks on history and science.

The Scopes trial occurred July 10-21, 1925. Between 150 and 200 reporters swooped into the small town. Broadcast on Chicago’s WGN, it was the first trial to be aired live over radio in the United States.

One hundred years after the trial, and as we have documented in our scholarly work, the culture war over evolution and creationism remains strong – and yet, when it comes to creationism, much has also changed.

In May 1919, over 6,000 conservative Protestants gathered in Philadelphia to create, under the leadership of Baptist firebrand William Bell Riley, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, or WCFA.

Holding to biblical inerrancy, these “fundamentalists” believed in the creation account detailed in chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God brought all life into being in six days. But most of these fundamentalists also accepted mainstream geology, which held that the Earth was millions of years old. Squaring a literal understanding of Genesis with an old Earth, they embraced either the “day-age theory” – that each Genesis day was actually a long period of time – or the “gap theory,” in which there was a huge gap of time before the six 24-hour days of creation.........

© The Conversation