Fundamentalist worldview is rigid and binary. It opposes public education and treats government as a tool for moral coercion.
By Eric Lane, For the Express-News, July 24, 2025
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “monkey trial,” the courtroom
spectacle in which a young teacher in Tennessee was put on trial for teaching evolution.
Though John Scopes was convicted, the trial has long been remembered as a turning
point — a cultural victory for science, reason and secularism in the face of religious
fundamentalism.
Today, we are watching that same battle unfold — not just in one local courtroom but
across school boards, statehouses and Supreme Court chambers. The issue is no
longer just evolution. It’s the survival of secular democracy.
Christian nationalist lawmakers are imposing their theology on public schools. They
are forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms, requiring Bible readings and
banning books that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+, systemic racism or
reproductive autonomy.
What’s happening is not cultural drift. It’s theocratic design.
The modern Christian nationalist movement has learned from the past. It can win
court cases by securing control of the courts rather than presenting sound legal
arguments. It doesn’t need to protest public schools when it can defund them,
undermine them and redirect taxpayer money into religious institutions.
In many states, public education has become the battleground for an authoritarian
theology. Educators are no longer trusted professionals but suspects under ideological
surveillance. School libraries have become evidence lockers, their contents scrutinized
not by educators or scholars but by politicians and pastors.
And this movement isn’t working alone. It’s bankrolled by billionaires and coordinated
by networks such as the Federalist Society, Alliance Defending Freedom and the
Council for National Policy.
Together, they’ve created a pipeline of political power that flows from evangelical
pulpits into the judicial, legislative and executive branches.
This is not about “values.” It’s about control.
The fundamentalist worldview is rigid and binary: saved or damned, man or woman,
believer or heretic. It rejects pluralism, opposes public education, and treats government
as a tool for moral coercion. That’s why its roots are authoritarianism. It thrives on
religious certainty, submission and sanctioned fear.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
In the 1920s, fundamentalism surged as a reaction to modernity, urbanization and the
perceived fear of moral decline. Today’s movement echoes that anxiety — but with
more money, better messaging and political power.
The original Scopes trial was about the right to teach evolution. Today’s battle is
about the right to think.
The Enlightenment gave us more than science. It gave us the framework for
democracy. That framework is under coordinated assault.
The press has rightly focused on the rise of authoritarianism and oligarchy in
American politics. But it has mostly ignored the theocratic engine powering much of it.
The alliance between Christian nationalism and capitalist elite is not incidental — it’s
strategic.
Together, they are building a new America — one where public life is ruled by the
private faith of a select few, where rights are conditional on doctrine and where dissent
is blasphemy.
So what now? We stop pretending this is just another front in the culture war. It’s a
fight for the soul of the republic. We name what’s happening: a religio-political
counterrevolution against modernity, science and pluralism. We organize not just to
defend public education and reproductive freedom but to preserve the very idea that
belief is a private choice, not a public mandate.
We are 100 years past the Scopes trial, but the questions remain the same: Who
controls knowledge? Who defines truth? And will we allow theology to dictate policy in a
secular nation?
And unless we fight back — with clarity, outrage and unwavering secular resolve —
reason won’t just lose a trial.
It will lose the country.
