Books attacking religion, particularly Christianity, have earned quite a bit of money recently for publishers and their authors. Pundits are now having a field day attacking Mike Huckabee’s stance on evolution.  Democratic strategist Paul Begala reportedly remarked on CNN on Super Tuesday, “Nobody is more conservative than Huckabee.  He doesn’t believe in evolution or gravity or photosynthesis.” 

            Those who love to lob such oversimplified charges imply that those who do not accept the doctrinaire theories of evolution as set forth by one explorer named Charles Darwin, a century-and-a-half ago, are relics of the Dark Ages. 

            The latest Smart Set, however, echo the sentiments and tone of one of their more famous and notorious predecessors, Clarence Darrow.  The schoolteacher John T. Scopes was among Darrow’s defendants.  Unlike Darrow’s other, murderous, clients, Scopes in 1925 was persuaded by the American Civil Liberties Union to simply defy Tennessee state law against the teaching of evolution as it applies to man.   He willingly complied, though his case never reached the outsiders’ goal of making the case a Constitutional test.

            The public at large has inherited the terms of the evolution debate as handed down in the play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind.  That was the experience of one of my freshmen, who from his high school English class saw the conflict according to the play’s simplistic and polemical outline: a brave, young open-minded biology teacher fights like David against the mob of small-town, ignorant fundamentalists.  Certainly, the play’s stage directions and the movie version show a town as if in the grips of fundamentalist hysteria: The film opens with a veritable mob of Fundamentalist zombies, singing hymns and waving Bibles.  The town’s minister hypocritically promotes Biblical lessons while treating his own daughter, the fiancée of Scopes, with very un-Christian harshness and coldness.  Clarence Darrow (named Henry Drummond in the play) provides a marked contrast to all this hysteria, by his courtroom demeanor, reasoned arguments, and sardonic revelations of how little the townspeople know. 

            But what about the real Clarence Darrow?  Is he the spokesman for reason and light against the onslaught of ignorance and fanaticism?

            A 1927 book review of his, of the now-forgotten The War on Modern Science, provides insight.  Darrow seems to use the review as occasion to continue the arguments from the Scopes trial.  After quickly describing the purpose of author Maynard Shipley’s project of exposing the campaign of “Fundamentalists”--“to make education and life correspond to the weird fables found in Genesis and other parts of the Bible,”--Darrow launches the attack:

            “No more brazen and dangerous attempt to control thought can be found anywhere in history.  The campaign is simply an effort by organized ignorance and bigotry to destroy the learning of the modern world.  Under the leadership of the late William Jennings Bryan [Scopes’s primary antagonist], the forces of ignorance and intolerance were marshalled (sic) from Maine to California, and from Canada to Mexico.”

            The review continues in the same attack mode using the rhetoric of a call to arms with words and phrases like “inquisition,” “campaign,” “onslaught against science” by the “half-educated,” “ignorant minority” to deny what in Darrow’s estimation “every scientist in the world has accepted”: that “evolution [is] a fact beyond dispute.”

            Similarly, in the play, Darwin is presented as a bold thinker, a daring scientist, whose new, daring truths frighten Bible-thumpers.  But what Darrow and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (authors of the play) and most promoters of Darwinism don’t know is that the “bold” and “new” theory of evolution was being promoted more than 2,000 years ago by the Roman philosopher Lucretius. 

            And Darrow’s fiery rhetoric in this review is not atypical of those like him who are on a mission to wipe out religious influences across the globe.  One of my college freshman students after reading this review jokingly called Darrow a “fundamentalist evolutionist.”  The student is not a Christian. 

            Darrow’s rhetoric is mimicked in the more recent atheist jeremiads by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris.  A susceptible public, exposed to one side of the debate in public schools, brought their recent tomes—God Is Not Great, The God Delusion, and The End of Faith, respectively--to the best seller lists. 

            Another perspective that those among our college-educated public will not receive is that of Richard Weaver to whose writing I was introduced while in the master’s program at Georgia State University.  In a seminar on classical rhetoric I found myself the only one in the room supporting the worth of Socrates’ exploration of truth (sophistry being the latest topic of “cutting edge” scholarship).  After several weeks of engaging in discussions where the professor and my fellow students would have forced the hemlock on Socrates (and Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian), the professor remarked to me that I was so far to the right that I might even agree with Richard Weaver, on whom he cast fascistic aspersions.  Immediately, after class, I went up to the library stacks and walked out with his volumes in my arms.  Continued...