In July 1925, John Scopes faced a jury in a stifling courtroom in Dayton, Tenn. A 24-year-old teacher, Scopes stood accused of violating the Butler Act, a recently enacted state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution because it contradicted the Bible. He was convicted, fined $100 and basked in the renown of the case for the rest of his life.
Despite its rather genial outcome (the Tennessee Supreme Court even overturned Mr. Scopes’s conviction on a technicality), echoes from the “trial of the century” still resound in American culture and politics a full century later. The Scopes trial was a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity, represented by two of the most famous attorneys in the country: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense. Broadcast on the radio, it exposed the horror many urban liberals felt toward people they deemed dogmatic and uneducated. H.L. Mencken, the eloquent if arrogant critic of unrefined America, attended the trial and hissed to his many readers that Bryan was “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning” — “a peasant come home to the barnyard.”
A hundred years on, many voters in rural areas still feel that the cosmopolitan politicians and advisers who run the Democratic Party look down on them. Because those voters have an outsize influence on the makeup of the Senate, Democrats will have to reckon with that perception, accurate or not, if they hope to dominate American politics again.
While teaching evolution has been legal in every state for decades, the larger antagonisms revealed by the Scopes trial persist. Americans in rural areas are more likely to identify as Christian than their urban counterparts. Those who are white overwhelmingly back politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who says he takes his “worldview” from the Bible, and President Trump, who claims he was “saved by God to make America great again.” Americans with a strong rural identity are also more likely to bear a grudge against experts and intellectuals, heirs of the evolutionists who came to Scopes’s defense.
Who should decide what schools teach remains as intensely disputed as a century ago. Bryan believed that “the people,” not teachers, had “the right to control the educational system which they have created and which they tax themselves to support.” If they wanted to ban the teaching of evolution with a bill like the Butler Act, they should be able to. A similar logic drives the contemporary crusade by Moms for Liberty and other right-wing groups to ban courses infected by D.E.I. and to toss books about L.G.B.T.Q. people out of school libraries.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s compendium of conservative ideas, called for parents to decide what students would learn. It even favored publicly funding private schools, including religious schools, that could teach children to doubt the existence of climate change, the persistence of racism and, yes, the theory of evolution.
All this strikes the secular cosmopolitan base of the Democratic Party as dangerous babble by people who abhor expertise and intellectualism — often to their own detriment. Such Democrats deem Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unqualified to run the department tasked with protecting the health of the nation. They predict that the Medicaid cuts in Mr. Trump’s domestic policy law will force the closing of rural hospitals that serve many who voted for him. And they are appalled by government censorship in the classroom.
But simply denouncing anti-intellectual views, harmful as they are, will not convince those who hold them to change their minds. Nor, for that matter, will a vigorous defense of freedom of thought sway conservative parents who fear their children are being persuaded to reject principles they learn at home. Democratic politicians will have to figure out how to work around such wrongheaded notions.
Of course, there are fundamental differences between now and a century ago. Back then, many Bible-believing rural and small-town people supported the progressive populism of Bryan, who had run three times as the Democratic candidate for president. Throughout his career, he had denounced corporate power and big financiers like J.P. Morgan while championing crop subsidies, labor unions, a ban on large donations to campaigns and higher income taxes on the rich. That may point a path forward for Democrats grappling with how to reach rural voters today.
If Democratic politicians proposed economic programs as ambitious as Bryan’s to help the devout inhabitants of small-town America — and acknowledged, in their own way, the moral virtues in sacred texts — they might have a chance to break through to millions of people who now mistrust them.
The income of rural people routinely lags behind that of city dwellers, a gap widened by decades of losing union jobs in extractive industries like coal. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was a belated recognition of this inequality, but many of its benefits were slow to materialize. That left the law vulnerable when Republicans swept back into Congress and vowed to undo many of its best provisions, even the ones intended to create jobs in rural areas. Unsurprisingly, many rural inhabitants whose lives have gotten worse under Democratic and Republican administrations respond with what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “stolen pride.” They resent prosperous urbanites and metropolitan politicians who appear to blame them or at least not care about their plight.
Some Democrats in both the progressive and moderate wings of the party grasp this dilemma and are proposing ways to resolve it. Bernie Sanders, who represents a rural state (albeit a rare liberal one), has largely skirted battles over issues like gun rights and gender-neutral language to stump for policies like universal health coverage and higher taxes on the wealthy that poll well all over the country. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a former car repair shop owner who represents a rural district in Washington State that Mr. Trump carried, focuses on practical issues she knows her constituents care most about, like access to reproductive care and stopping imports of fentanyl. Recently, she warned that as a result of Mr. Trump’s big bill, thousands of people in her district “stand to lose health care — and rural hospitals across southwest Washington are expected to lose tens of millions of dollars.”
In 2026, Democrats running in other swing House districts and purple states would do well to emulate the empathetic populism Mr. Sanders and Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez preach and practice. And progressive activists in the trenches of the culture wars should give such politicians room to do this kind of campaigning. Effective politics is not missionary work that burns to convert people’s souls. It requires getting enough people on your side to win elections.
Of course, rural and small-town voters may appreciate the talk of populist-minded Democrats but still decide to stick with the right-wing party that flatters their religious and racial worldviews. Less than a decade after the Scopes trial — during the Great Depression — rural Christians made common cause with liberal Democrats. They voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt and welcomed his New Deal programs that brought electricity to their homes, as well as relief and a measure of security to their families.
Barring another economic calamity under the Republican Party’s watch, a cultural divide that has endured for most of the past century may be impossible to bridge. But for a political party whose very name means “rule of the people,” it would be a serious mistake not to try.
Michael Kazin’s latest book is “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.” He is also the author of “A Godly Hero,” a biography of William Jennings Bryan.
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