I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

The Scopes trial becomes this kind of fulcrum where you have, you know, fear, fear of immigrants, of professionals,

of experts, of science, of rationalists, of, you know, black people, of women, you name it.

And so in that context, religion serves or that kind of putting forth of religion seems to suggest,

oh, we could go back to a, you know, a more peaceful time. We can turn back

the clock to something that we believe, you know, even if it's a fantasy, we want to go back

to a simpler, pure, whiter world. That's Brenda Wineapple. She's an author with a knack for making history come alive,

and she's done just that in her latest book, Keeping the Faith. It's the story of the trial in

1925 of a young man called John Scopes, accused of what was then a crime in the state of Tennessee,

the teaching of evolution.

The trial riveted the nation, and it echoes eerily today.

This is a remarkable book you've written about a remarkable event that occurred almost 100 years ago, and yet we're still feeling reverberations.

And it kind of shocks me that a lot of us don't know about the Scopes trial. It was known at

the time as the Monkey Trial. There was a play written about it, about 30 years after the trial

of play, and then a movie that a lot of people watched and yet it's gone out of our minds

well i think there is a group of people who still remembered the movie a couple of attorneys have

actually told me that they became lawyers because they saw the movie the movie itself covertly

referred to the McCarthy era, but now I think

that obviously that movie has disappeared. And as you say, a lot of information about the

Scopes trial has disappeared. I think I might have learned, I must have learned about it

in high school. I had never seen the

movie when I started the book, and I didn't want to see it until I finished the book.

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