ABSTRACT
Viewed from a twenty-first century perspective the battle lines in the Scopes Trial are at once familiar and confusing. They are familiar insofar as they pit an avowed evangelical and adoptive Southerner against a militant skeptic from the urban North in a battle over the proper place of religion in the public life of the United States. The political coalition on which the Republican Party has been based at least since the election of Ronald Reagan is often described as a three-legged stool because it assembled three constituencies: neo-conservatives who favor a strong national defense and a hawkish foreign policy; business conservatives who favor free markets and easy taxes; and religious conservatives who favor traditional morality and public religion. The biggest American bestseller of the late nineteenth century was a now forgotten book, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. It followed in the old utopian tradition of Thomas More and the emerging science fiction genre of H. G. Wells.
