A Dangerous Idea: How the Scopes Trial Still Shapes Our World

ARLINGTON, Va. - Rezul -- Debbie Levy received a 2025 Grateful American Book Prize Honorable Mention for her A Dangerous Idea: The Scopes Trial, the Original Fight over Science in Schools. This award-winning work chronicles the century-old debate sparked by John T. Scopes, a small-town science teacher whose prosecution for teaching evolution incited a national controversy about what students should learn.

Levy's book is not just a historical account—it draws powerful connections between the past and present, revealing how the campaign against scientific knowledge and the rejection of uncomfortable facts continue to shape public discourse.

In this interview Levy reflects on how the Scopes Trial can be seen in current debates about education, science, and truth, reminding readers that the struggle to balance knowledge, belief, and critical thinking in schools is as urgent now as it was a hundred years ago.

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Have kids ever heard of John T. Scopes? Is he studied in school?

Some kids have, sure. Some adults, sure. But I don't think Scopes or the trial is universally known. As for whether the trial is studied in school, I haven't done a survey, but again I'd say—in some schools.

I think this is one of those stories that has been gradually fading from the public consciousness. For a writer like me, this is what made it an irresistible story to share. It's about the people, passions, and ignorance that led, in the summer of 1925, to the prosecution of a teacher in Tennessee for the crime of teaching evolution. It's about how the campaign against knowledge—and its aftermath—reverberate.

But apart from these top-line narrative arcs, readers see how badly adults can behave when they want to keep young people in the dark about the real world. They meet a first-year teacher, John Scopes, not much older than they are, volunteering to be prosecuted. Readers are in the stifling courtroom to witness a trial gone completely, and frequently hilariously, off the rails.

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Readers also encounter nuance, and while I don't like to anoint a theme in my own book "important"—I do think nuance, a cousin to empathy, is so important. There is nuance in seeing how ordinary people as well as luminaries defy expectations of what villains and heroes are about. I draw these contrasts in sharp relief, because I want my readers to understand that our world is rarely black and white.

Read the full interview on the Grateful American Book Prize website. https://gratefulamericanbookprize.org/2026/02/26/interview-author-debbie-levy/