From the same state legislature that produced the Butler Act 91 years ago comes now a new piece of legislation that would establish the Bible as the official book of Tennessee.
The Butler Act, you ask? Indeed. In March 1925, Rep. John Butler, saying he had become aware that children were coming home from school telling their parents they had learned that they were descendants of monkeys, sponsored a bill making it "unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normal and all other public schools of this state which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of this state, to teach any theory that denies the Story of Divine Creation." The bill became law.
Rep. Butler did not have to specify the source of said Story. All good Tennesseans would have known that it was the biblical document known as "Genesis," which in two interestingly different stories, attempts to account for life on Earth and Earth itself.
About a decade earlier, the legislature had approved the use of a 1914 book by George William Hunter entitled Civic Biology in which an entire chapter was devoted to evolution -- a word and concept not hinted at, much less mentioned, in Genesis.
That was the biology text assigned for high school students in Rhea County, Tennessee, of which Dayton was the seat. It is the text John T. Scopes was required to use as a substitute teacher of science. He was otherwise the football coach.
Local resentment coupled with hucksterism made Scopes a hero -- or a schlimazel -- depending on one's point of view. Rep. Butler's legislation aroused the resentment of people who were ripe for any kind of resentment. Think of those who scream and holler at Donald Trump rallies. The authorities were more or less forced to cite Scopes for breaking the law.
That was fine with the Chamber of Commerce crowd, who desperately wanted to put Dayton on the map. So try the guy for whatever. Let's bring the circus to town.
Their expectations were fulfilled hundreds of times over. The national press and Bible-believers from across the South crowded into trains that theretofore had steamed through Dayton at full throttle. Now those trains had to stop to disgorge the curious and the angry.
As William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow squared off in the courtroom of Judge John T. Raulston, a thoroughly undistinguished jurist, a huge banner with the legend READ YOUR BIBLE was flapping in the breeze in front of the courthouse, lest anyone should doubt that the cards were stacked against Scopes.
Despite Darrow's windy intellectual arguments that were calculated to embarrass Bryan and anyone who believed in any god, he wanted his client to be found guilty so that appeals could be made all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where surely the First Amendment prohibition of religious establishment would nullify Scopes' conviction and put those Darrow thought of as the yahoos of Tennessee and elsewhere out of business.
But, zombie-like, the Bible is back -- back in Tennessee -- and about to join the state bird, the state tree, the state flower and, best of all, the state fish (the small-mouth bass) as yet another symbol of the People's affection.
It is almost assured that neither representative nor senator in the Volunteer State's legislature who signed on to the "Bible is our state book" proposal has the slightest idea of what the Bible actually is. I know I have readers in Tennessee, so please pass this information on to the state capital:
The Bible is an indiscriminate collection of textual fragments that appeared over a period perhaps as long as 1,000 years -- and longer if you count oral tradition. Much of the Bible belongs by origin to the people we call today "Jews." Some of the stories in the Hebrew Bible are some of the best mythology composed in the human epoch. The truths they bear beneath their telling have helped form Homo sapiens' sense of self.
Three different languages are found in the Bible: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Very few passages appear in Aramaic, which is odd since that was the lingua franca among the Semitic cultures during the final centuries of the BCE period.
The Hebrew language has no written vowels, leaving pronunciation and meaning to local usage. A sect of seventh century CE scholars added a punctuation-like code to indicate pronunciation in attempts -- often arbitrary -- to create a uniform text.
The Christian appendices to the Hebrew Bible appear in Koine -- or common -- Greek, though few reputable scholars would say that Jesus spoke or understood Greek or, for that matter, Hebrew itself. The clarity of the Greek in the Pauline epistles and in the writings attributed to an author named Luke rings true.
No rational person would say the Bible that the Tennessee legislature wants to make the official state book is anything but a priceless collection -- some of it miscellany -- of human attempts to wrest meaning out of war and peace, aspiration and disappointment, victory and loss.
Who will say that such knowledge has motivated the solons of Tennessee to confer official approbation upon the Good Book?
If it is understood that granting official status to the Bible will do not much more than make Tennessee the laughingstock it became after the Scopes trial, perhaps the honorable lawmakers there will think twice. If a state book there must be, why not the On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin?
There would be an act of political courage.
