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norms—tended to embrace fundamentalism as a bulwark against further social change.
    The liberal-fundamentalist war came to a head in the summer of 1925, when a group of local boosters in Dayton, Tennessee, persuaded a young high school science teacher, John Scopes, to violate the state’s antievolution law. They originally intended to draw attention to their economically depressed crossroads town. Instead, what followed was a sensational show trial that pitted the famous “lawyer for the damned,” Clarence Darrow, a committed civil libertarian and almost fanatical atheist, against Williams Jennings Bryan, the famously eloquent Nebraskan who had thrice failed to attain the presidency but who remained a hero to rural fundamentalists in the South and Midwest.
    The trial’s climax came when Darrow unexpectedly called Bryan to the stand as a biblical expert. Darrow posed a series of questions designed to cage a biblical literalist like Bryan. How did Jonah survive inside a whale for three days? How did Joshua lengthen the day by making the sun— and not the earth—stand in place? These were not original inquiries. But, as Darrow later boasted, they forced “Bryan to choose between his crude beliefs and the common intelligence of modern times.” 13
    “You claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?” Darrow asked.
    “I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there,” Bryan answered, though “some of the Bible is given illustratively.…”
    Already, he was on shaky ground. If some of the Bible was “illustrative,” could it be liberally construed? It was Bryan, after all, who had audaciously claimed that “one beauty about the Word of God is, it does not take an expert to understand it.” Now he was admitting otherwise.
    “But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale, …” Darrow continued, “how do you literally interpret that?”
    “I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what he pleases.”
    Darrow was having the time of his life.
    Did Bryan believe that in the book of Genesis “days” truly represented twenty-four-hour periods of time? “Have you any idea of the length of these periods?” Darrow asked.
    “No; I don’t.”
    “Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?”
    “Yes.”
    “And they had an evening and morning without sun?”
    “I am simply saying it is a period.”
    Bryan had committed a fatal error. He had conceded the necessity of at least some interpretation in reading the Bible. It was a slight admission, and one that wouldn’t have bothered a religious moderate. But it unnerved Bryan, who lost his composure. “I am simply trying to protect the Word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States,” he cried. “The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur the Bible, but I will answer his questions.”
    Although Scopes was convicted and slapped with a small fine, liberals declared victory. Mark Sullivan, a popular journalist of the day, boldly concluded that the “Scopes trial marked the end of the age of Amen and the beginning of the age of Oh Yeah!” 14
    In fact, the conservatives were far from licked. In the decades following the trial, they withdrew from the public eye and retrenched. Fundamentalists chartered missions, publishing houses, and radio stations; they founded seventy bible institutions; and they strengthenedexisting fortresses of traditional Evangelicalism like Riley’s Northwestern Bible Training School in Minnesota and Moody Bible Institute in Illinois. In the 1940s, they began to reappear in public life, and by the 1980s, they once again assumed a prominent place in political and cultural debates.
    Yet something important did change on the courthouse lawn in 1925. The contest over religion, much like the brief glory of the Ku Klux Klan, spoke to the profound sense of dislocation that accompanied the rise of modern America. By and by,