Remembering that time in America when it was illegal to teach kids anything that deviated from the Biblical fairy tale of creation - and when teachers who dared to tell kids about evolution were brought to courts.
And to be honest, in many parts of America this deep bigot sentiment still runs deep, 100 years later.
We’re often told in school that America was a nation built on the values of Enlightenment. That the American revolution was spurred by the ideas of folks like Benjamin Franklin, who built on top or the political doctrine of Rousseau and Montesquieu, on a strong belief in science, freedom and liberalism.
The truth is that there’s always been another America that couldn’t be more antithetical to those values.
The America of the rural religious fanatics who migrated to the New World from Germany, England and the Netherlands because their ideas made them mavericks even in their own countries at the time.
The America of those who believed in the imminent end or the days, of those who fought science and the values of Enlightenment because they denied their beliefs, those who still in the 17th and 18th century would hunt witches, and who believed that it was their God-given right to enslave “inferior” human beings.
A synthesis between these two completely opposite visions of America was never found. Even after the Civil War the defeated southerners didn’t acknowledge their loss - they just retreated to their rural havens and built up more and more grudge towards the perceived “urban elites” that stole their vision of a theocratic promised land founded on dogma and exploitation.
America will always be a very sick country that will keep destabilizing the rest of the world until it solves this structural contradiction.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/08/nx-s1-5430760/evolution-scopes-creationism-monkey-trial