History – Secular Hub Blog

The Scopes Trial: When Science Went on Trial

100 years ago, in July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee, a sleepy rural town, became the epicenter of a dramatic showdown over science, religion, and education. What was meant to be a modest legal test balloon turned into a national—and international—spectacle. (Encyclopedia Britannica, HISTORY)

The Butler Act: Setting the Stage

The spark was the Butler Act, passed in March 1925 by Tennessee lawmakers. This law made it a misdemeanor for public school teachers to teach that humans evolved from lower animals, directly contradicting the Biblical creation story. Violators could be fined between $100-500. (Wikipedia)

A Town’s PR Stunt

Local business leaders and school officials in Dayton deliberately sought a test case to draw attention. They recruited John T. Scopes—a 24‑year‑old science teacher who typically taught math and physics—to admit teaching evolution. He was arrested, and the media storm began. (TLSA)

The Players Enter the Fray

Picture of Darrow and Bryan — Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan (right) during the Scopes Trial in 1925.

Prosecution: William Jennings Bryan, celebrated orator and three‑time Democratic presidential nominee, championed biblical literalism. He argued evolution threatened religious moral order. (American Civil Liberties Union)
Defense: Clarence Darrow, renowned defense attorney and ACLU member, took up Scopes’s defense pro bono, seeking to challenge the Butler Act under the Constitution. (American Civil Liberties Union)

A Media Circus

Dubbed the “trial of the century,” the case drew over a thousand spectators, hundreds of reporters, and even broadcasts on live radio—America’s first. Dayton was flooded with journalists, thrill‑seekers, and circus‑like attractions. (HISTORY)

Courtroom Drama

Picture of outdoor proceedings of Scopes Trial — Because of the extreme heat, Judge Raulston moved court proceedings outdoors

The trial began on July 10, housed in the Rhea County Courthouse under sweltering heat. (HISTORY)
The judge forbade scientific expert testimony. In a bold move, Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand, forcing him into a cross-examination over his interpretation of the Bible—a media moment that became legend. (American Civil Liberties Union)
Darrow even asked the jury to find Scopes guilty so the defense could immediately appeal. On July 21, 1925, after less than nine minutes of deliberation, the jury did so, and Scopes was fined $100. (PBS)

Aftermath: Verdicts, Appeals, Legacies

Scopes’s conviction was overturned in 1927 on a technicality (the judge imposed the fine, not the jury). But the Butler Act itself was upheld—and remained law until its repeal in 1967. (HISTORY)
Bryan died just five days after the trial, reputedly worn out by the ordeal. Darrow, meanwhile, had helped shift public sentiment—many saw Scopes and his supporters as moral victors. (American Civil Liberties Union)

Cultural Significance & Ongoing Relevance

The trial highlighted a deeper conflict between modernism and fundamentalism, between urban progress and rural conservatism. It changed perceptions about academic freedom and the proper role of religion in public schools. (Live Science)
Its legacy endures. The debate over teaching evolution—or more religious perspectives—continues in many parts of the U.S., with fresh controversies in states like West Virginia, Texas, and Louisiana. (AP News)

Myth vs. Reality

Popular dramatizations like Inherit the Wind (1955 play and 1960 film) took liberties that altered key details for dramatic effect—such as creating fictional characters and exaggerated confrontations. While they brought the story to a mainstream audience, historians emphasize the importance of distinguishing fact from fiction. (Wikipedia, The Christian Science Monitor, Live Science)

Conclusion

The Scopes trial transcended a small‑town legal skirmish—it became a defining moment in American cultural history, plotting the turbulent crosscurrents between science, religion, law, and media. Though Scopes lost the verdict, the broader argument was won for evolution and academic freedom. Its echoes still shape debates on education and belief in the 21st century. (AP News)

Secular Hub Information Technology Committee 2025

The Secular Hub Information Technology Committee is just one part of the Secular Hub volunteer army. We meet weekly (with a few exceptions and sometimes more) and as needed to keep the technology working (with a few exceptions).

In 2024-2025 the S.H.I.T committee worked on and accomplished the following:

Developing and maintaining documentation and a team to allow the team to deal with issues.
Keep the Hub’s email infrastructure maintained by adding email accounts and maintaining the email forwarding lists.
Keep the Hub’s email domain (secularhub.org) from being labeled as SPAM to make sure our messages are getting delivered.
Configure our email infrastructure is maintained to accomplish #2 by using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards. Google has been enforcing this standards and bouncing or deleting email that does not conform.
Maintaining the Hub’s web site as needed to keep up with technology and the Secular Hub’s Board directives.
Maintain several servers (2 cloud, 2 physical) that are used for administrative functions of the Secular Hub.
Maintain a membership application that is used to track membership dues payments, voting eligibility, donation emails, and family connections. Providing various reports to better understand membership constitution.
Maintain a online walled garden for members only (Hub Online) to allow members to interact virtually when not at the Secular Hub. This is also a forum for information about the Secular Hub activity that is not subject to random trolls and adversaries. We maintain access to this resource for all current members.
Respond to issues related to our Meetup account that has been a moving target and Meetup morphs depending on their current owner. This includes efforts by Meetup to monetize the platform.
Maintain a calendar feed from our Meetup calendar to our web site. This recently changed to require us to develop an application that uses OAuth2 and GraphQL protocol standards that Meetup has moved to, but supports poorly.
Maintain a mailing list application to disseminate information, such as newsletters, news, and meeting notices. Maintaining this using our domain to prevent these messages from being labeled as SPAM.
Maintain a statistical survey application to develop and publish online surveys, collect responses, review statistics, and export the resulting data to other applications. This has been used several times in the past to survey Hub membership.
Maintain a repository of Hub documents that can be managed by this committee. This includes Board meeting minutes, forms, bylaws, policies, etc. This is not Google Docs which is virtually unmanageable.
Maintain an electronic mailing list which allows a sender to send one email to a list, which then transparently sends it on to the addresses of the subscribers to the list. This allows people in a group (for example Book Club) to interact without knowing or seeing the other group members email addresses.
Keep this Hub’s information and electronic infrastructure secure for hacking and data breaches.
Use open-source free software to reduce IT costs and to prevent vendor lock-in.
Handle various and numerous technical issues that are brought to us by Board members and Hub members.
Help Hub members access our technologies.
Learning and exploring new technologies and applications that will help the Secular Hub community.

As for the future, I am announcing a competition to redesign the Secular Hub Home Page. This is open to anyone, not just Hub members, but must meet the following requirements:

Must be viewable in recent versions of Firefox or Chrome web browsers.
Must be mobile friendly. This means the page must adapt to the screen size of the view device.
Must provide navigation elements to move to other areas of the web site including, but not limited to: About, Contact, Calendar, Hub Online, etc.
Should provide a template for other pages on the web site.

This competition will be open until July 31, 2025 and will be judged by the Secular Hub members. For more information, watch this blog post or contact the committee via our Contact Page.

The Reason For The Season

Winter Solstice on earth As our ancestors huddled around their fires on dark and cold winter nights, some of them noticed patterns in the sky that repeated as the seasons changed. One of the patterns noticed was days grew shorter and nights longer as winter progressed and then reversed. Over time they measured this phenomenon and created observatories to mark when this moment of reverse happened. They held feasts and celebrations to mark the day the sun would return to melt the snow, grow their crops, and warm them.

The winter solstice event has be documented as early as 432 BC in ancient Greece and in China from about the 4th century BC. Celebrations or festivals around the winter solstice include Saturnalia (Rome, from 479 BC), Yule (ancient Germanic tribes), Yalda Night (502 BC, Iran), and Dongzhi Festival (China, about 500 BC).

The knowledge the winter solstice is probably even older than the written record shows. Newgrange is a huge tomb located in County Meath in northeastern Ireland with a history of more than 5,000 years, which is even older than Stonehenge. Only the first sunshine of the Winter Solstice can shine into the inner chamber of the tomb. The most popular way to celebrate Winter Solstice here is the annual lottery draw, and the only 60 lucky fellows can enter the Newgrange tomb at sunrise to welcome the only sunshine of the year.

Newgrange tomb

It was not until 354 AD that a Festival of the Nativity was documented which eventually became Christmas. So Christmas is a relative recent holiday this time of year.

So no matter what your beliefs or traditions, the winter solstice is an indication of the coming of spring and that is a reason to celebrate!

The Real Origins of the Religious Right, and Why It Matters

The Religious Right is flexing its powerful muscles these days; in the last month alone they have gained the right to prayers at school, forced public funding for religious institutions, and repealed a half-century-old right to choice for women. The tradition of separation of church and state espoused by our founding fathers seems to be in deep jeopardy. How have we arrived at this juncture?

One of the enduring myths in recent history is the fiction that the Religious Right galvanized as a political movement in response to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Evangelicals, however, considered abortion a Catholic issue throughout the 1970s. Most evangelicals were silent when the Roe decision was handed down, and those who did comment actually applauded the ruling. The real origins of the Religious Right may surprise you.

Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College, the oldest endowed professorship there. He has followed an interesting trajectory in life. He is an Episcopal priest who was born into a Evangelical Christian family and raised in that subculture, which was constructed defensively to avoid interaction with people outside of the subculture. His education exposed him to wider worldviews. He grew away from that subculture and became a recognized expert on American religious communities.

Two days ago, he gave a talk to the Columbia University community titled The Real Origins of the Religious Right, and Why It Matters.

Click here to view a YouTube recording of his talk.

Butterfly McQueen – Free from the Slavery of Religion

Butterfly McQueen picture Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen, known for her role in the as Prissy, Scarlett O’Hara’s maid, in the film Gone With The Wind, was a outspoken atheist most of her life. She was featured in a bus ad campaign by the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) in 2009.

In 1989, the FFRF honored her with its Freethought Heroine Award. She told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion. I’m an atheist, and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I’m puzzled that so many people can’t see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry.”

She railed against being typecast as a maid and roles that were demeaning to African-American actors. Even though she could not attend the premiere of Gone With The Wind in 1939, held at a whites-only theater, she was a guest of honor at the 1989 50th anniversary event of the film.

Butterfly McQueen never married and split her time between New York City and Augusta, Georgia. At aged 64, McQueen received a bachelor’s degree in political science from City College of New York, in 1975. In an tragic accident with a kerosene heater, Ms. McQueen was burned and died December 22, 1995, at age 84.

A Youtube video recorded in 1989, shows a profile of McQueen. In Celebrities In Hell (Warren Allen Smith, sequel to Who’s Who In Hell) she is quoted “They say the streets are going to be beautiful in Heaven. Well, I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here … When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.”

Religious Freedom Day

January 16th is the 236th anniversary of the adoption of Thomas Jefferson’s landmark Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom on January 16, 1786. That statute became the basis for the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and led to freedom of religion for all Americans.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom reads in part:

… that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical;
…
II. Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities. …

For the full text, see the Founders Online page.

Happy Juneteenth!

On June 19, 1865 — nearly nine decades after our Nation’s founding, and more than 2 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally received word that they were free from bondage.

June 19th was declared a federal holiday, the newest federal holiday since 1983, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on June 18, 2021. Juneteenth National Independence Day is

to acknowledge and celebrate the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of Black Americans, and commit together to eradicate systemic racism that still undermines our founding ideals and collective prosperity.

Juneteenth has been observed by various communities since 1866 as Jubilee Day, Black Independence Day, and Emancipation Day. Celebrations include picnics, rodeos, street fairs, cookouts, family reunions, park parties, historical reenactments and blues festivals.

In 1997, activist Ben Haith, founder of the National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation (NJCF), created the Juneteenth flag, which was further refined by illustrator Lisa Jeanne Graf. In 2000, the flag was first hoisted at the Roxbury Heritage State Park in Boston by Haith. The star at the center represents Texas being the last state where its local African American slaves were freed, and the extension of freedom for all African Americans throughout the whole nation. The burst around the star represents a nova and the curve represents a horizon, standing for a new era for African Americans. The red, white, and blue colors represent the American flag, which shows that African Americans and their enslaved ancestors are Americans, and the national belief in liberty and justice for all citizens.

As President Biden remarked when he signed Senate Bill 475:

It’s a reminder that our work to root out hate never ends — because hate only hides, it never fully goes away. It hides. And when you breathe oxygen under that rock, it comes out.

And that’s why we must understand that Juneteenth represents not only the commemoration of the end of slavery in America more than 150 years ago, but the ongoing work to have to bring true equity and racial justice into American society, which we can do.

In short, this day doesn’t just celebrate the past; it calls for action today.

As many of us first learn of the Tulsa race massacre and the Red Summer, it is obvious there is much work to be done. Celebrating Juneteenth is a step in the right direction.

Persistence

Percy Lavon Julian was the embodiment of persistence. Julian was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine, plus a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry’s production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.

Julian attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, when the college and town were segregated, graduating in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian. He attended Harvard University and obtained an M.S. in chemistry, but the school withdrew his teaching assistantship, preventing him from completing a Ph.D. there. Later while teaching at Howard University, Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1931.

Returning to a teaching position at Howard University, Julian became embroiled in university politics and a personal scandal that forced him to resign. He accepted a position at DePauw University where he completed the synthesis of physostigmine, a drug for treating glaucoma. He left DePauw in 1936 when he was denied a professorship because he was African-American. After being denied jobs with DuPont and the Institute of Paper Chemistry, Julian was offered a position of director of research at Glidden’s Soya Products Division in Chicago.

In 1950, Julian moved into Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, the first African-American family to do so, but not before his new home was fire-bombed! Later his home was attacked with dynamite. Soon after these incidents the community rallied behind them.

Julian’s work yielded over 100 patents and he work includes synthesis of cortisone, producing hormones including progesterone, steroids, vitamins, amino acids and other chemicals mostly from soybean extracts.

The PBS series Nova produced a docudrama about Percy Julian called the Forgotten Genius. In the film, historian James Anderson says “His story is a story of great accomplishment, of heroic efforts and overcoming tremendous odds…a story about who we are and what we stand for and the challenges that have been there and the challenges that are still with us.”

Darwin Day 2021

The Secular Hub held it’s grand opening on February 12, 2013. Eight years later we could not have our traditional Darwin Day/Hub Birthday event. 2020 was a strange year for the Hub, stopping all in-person events at the 3100 Downing St. location in March. We let our lease expire and moved into a storage Pod in December – our last event at 3100 Downing St.

Of course February 12, 1809 was Charles Darwin’s birthday as well as Abraham Lincoln (same year) and Olivia Hooker. Who???

Olivia Juliette Hooker was born February 12, 1915 in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Hooker was one of the last known survivors of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, and the first African-American woman to enter the U.S. Coast Guard in February 1945.

In 1947, she received her master’s from the Teachers College of Columbia University, and in 1961 she received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Rochester, with her dissertation on the learning abilities of children with Down syndrome.

On February 9, 2015, Kirsten Gillibrand spoke in Congress to “pay tribute” to Hooker. In the same year, the Olivia Hooker Dining Facility on the Staten Island Coast Guard facility was named in her honor. A training facility at the Coast Guard’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. was also named after her that same year. On May 20, 2015, President Barack Obama recognized Hooker’s Coast Guard service and legacy while in attendance at the 134th Commencement of the United States Coast Guard Academy. On November 11, 2018, Google honored her by telling her story as part of a Google Doodle for the Veterans Day holiday. Hooker died of natural causes in her home in White Plains, New York on November 21, 2018, at the age of 103.

Officially Homeless!

As of January 1, 2021, the Secular Hub is homeless! Since we have not met at the Secular Hub’s location since March 2020 and our lease was expiring at the end of 2020, the Board of Directors decided that it was best to save our funds for a new location.

A team of volunteers braved the COVID-19 virus to pack the Hub’s belongings into a storage pod. Thanks to Bill, Ron, Becky, Dana, Marty, both Joes, Jesse, Jonathan, Danelle, Steve, Brandon, Jeff, and Richard. Forgive me if I did not mention your name because you all look alike in masks! Thank you again for your help in dislocating the Hub.

Packing our belongings into a Pod was kind of like doing a 3D jigsaw puzzle. I hope it does not end up looking like multiple puzzles in the same box.

Then a couple of days later, Paul and I said good-bye to the Pod as it was loaded on a truck to be stored elsewhere.

Our last act of helping the homeless at this location was two people that showed up asking for help. We gave them some sweaters and blanket from the AHH barrel. They also received a box of water and food.

It is sad to see the Hub emptied out. But it is a step to moving to a new location. My hope is next year at this time when we can gather in person, we can be in a new larger location that better accommodates our goals. You can help us reach this goal by donating to our Building Fund.