Chapter 3: The Theory of Evolution in Alabama during the 1920s

Often called the “Heart of Dixie”, Alabama has always had a cultural connotation of a rural, uneducated community where God is king, and football is second. A state that often blurs the line between “piety and politics,” Alabamian politicians have propagated the state’s reputation to the rest of the nation, often the first to back and sponsor religiously based culture wars. This has not always been the case explains Jacob Gross. Alabama’s religious communities during the 1920s often took a more progressive view in the dissemination of new scientific information regarding the origin of man. Nearly everyone with a microphone in Alabama’s churches supported the separation of church and state at the time of the Scopes trial (1925), the first major court case regarding whether the theories of evolution should be taught in school. This sentiment left fundamentalist Alabamians dissatisfied and it seems to have made the religious communities of our time more obsessed with the Darwinist culture war.