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while swimming and most assumed she had drowned. But a month later she
appeared claiming she had walked 13 hours out of the desert after having been
kidnapped, drugged, and tortured. It was a hoax, and many people turned on
her and left the church. Even though she was discredited, fundamentalist
preachers continued to travel the country with their “old-time religion” message
of accepting the Bible and rejecting modernity and science [not just Darwin,
but also Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist who spoke of, among many
things, the sexual urges driving human behavior].
The crusade of Sunday, McPherson, and many others peaked in 1925 in
Dayton, Tennessee, during the infamous “Monkey Trial.” With Darwinism
become more widely accepted and the science of evolution more frequently
taught, fundamentalists began a campaign to reform education. In March
1925, the Tennessee legislature passed a law to make it illegal for any public
school teacher to offer “any theory that denies the story of the divine creation
of man as taught in the Bible” [states like Louisiana and Kansas have attempt-
ed to pass similar laws in the past few decades].
John Scopes, a young substitute science teacher in Dayton, met with local
supporters and lawyers who opposed the law and agreed to openly violateFIGuRE 3-2 Aimee Semple McPherson