“The devil may quote the Scriptures for his own purposes,” said William Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Just as the devil illustrates in this quote, the Scopes Trial was a battle for control of American society and American culture with fundamentalism as the weapon of choice. At that time, many people were concerned about their position in terms of morality and religion. The prime movers and figures involved in the religiously supported persecution of Scopes were not ignorant or overzealous in attacking the theory of evolution, but were instead opportunistic in taking advantage of this cultural chaos. Today, politicians use geocultural, socioeconomic, and other social dichotomies to align themselves with particular progressive or fundamentalist causes in order to amass support. American society has and will always be an amalgamated and therefore highly unstable culture. It is dynamic and constantly faces changes on political, social and economic fronts that depend on tug-of-war installations between tradition and progress. The social boundaries that exist as a result of this tug of war further dissect parts of America's past and present as people struggle to find the right answer to a particular problem, even as they know where they fall on the spectrum between fundamentalism and modernism. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The Butler Act and the Scopes Trial were both ploys for personal gain or biased agendas and were simply the culmination of a power struggle for control of America's values ​​and therefore the American people. The Butler Act is seen by some as a direct attack on science because it denounces "[the teaching of] any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and teaches instead that man is descended from an animal of a lower order” (Butler). However, the author of the Butler Act, Johns Washington Butler, was a prosperous tobacco farmer who claimed to have read the Origin of Species and was willing to share the information with his children (Bradbury). He opposed the teaching of evolution in public schools as a ploy to maintain favor with the vast majority that had voted him into office. The Scopes trial was itself a test case used by the media for a clash between fundamentalists and modernists. William Jennings Bryan represented the State against John Scopes. Bryan was a fundamentalist who led a systematic crusade against evolution education in American classrooms. This was most likely because he wanted to maintain the traditional values ​​he had long supported and because he wanted to remain in the center of public attention for the sake of his political career ("An Introduction"). Thus Bryan had both fundamentalist and opportunistic reasons for participating in the trial. The ACLU who recruited John Scopes as a guilty offering for the modernist cause initially did not want Clarence Darrow on defense, fearing that his overzealous agnosticism would turn into an unnecessary attack on religion that the ACLU hoped to avoid (“An Introduction"). The ACLU wanted to avoid the offensive argument that Darrow might provoke because the trial was not aimed at attacking religion or science, but rather at trying to regain control of the American attention and maintain the sympathy of the modernist side against the otherwise dominant power of fundamentalists like the ACLU and Bryan, Flannery O'Connor, a born and raised Catholic, created the story of Hazel Motes to warn.those who believed they could escape the traditions and values ​​that are central to America as a nation of Christian origins. In his novel, O'Connor at first encourages Hazel as if he is in control and can get away with rejecting God's light before she slowly destroys him as punishment for his behavior.crusade against Christian teachings. Hazel Motes, even in his namesake, is rendered inaudible as well as incapable of perceiving. O'Connor described Hazel as someone with an “expression [that] seemed to open into a deeper void” (162) and as an almost invisible figure for whom “the doorman did not stop” (11). O'Connor created Hazel to be mistakenly obsessed with materialism, and as part of his punishment, she takes away his essex, the symbol of his power and emerging religion. With this he instills the sense of inevitability that even Hazel, one of the most despicable Christians, is unable to face anything other than redemption. The novel is yet another example of an attempt to control the American population who are close to or have already distanced themselves from the traditions of the Christian faith. We can see much of the same wily phenomena from the passage of the Butler Act and the Scopes trial in today's political arena. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his campaign featured little to no support for gay rights. In fact, in a pre-election interview he expressed his personal definition of marriage as “the union between a man and a woman” and that “for [him] as a Christian it is also a sacred union [and] of God in the fray . " Once elected and two years into his first term, Obama displayed a half-hearted attitude in attempting to appease both conservatives and progressives by stating that "[he] [has] not been willing to accept same-sex marriage primarily because of [his] understanding of the concept of same-sex marriage” while meekly acknowledging “that attitudes evolve, including [his] However, when he ran for a second term in 2012, Obama appeared to have a complete reversal of opinion five months before the election, stating that "[He] just concluded that it's important to [him] personally that [he] goes ahead and says that same-sex couples should be able to have each other." marry” (Weinger). Optimistically, critics would say that Obama has had a personal change of heart as his opinion has evolved in office. However, realistically, we are faced with the most likely scenario that Obama, like many presidents before him and most likely many future ones, used the gay rights agenda as leverage in both of his elections. He took completely different positions to follow the wave of majority votes. In the first election, he tried to gain the support of conservatives on the Republican side and in the second election he focused on maintaining a strong Democratic vote with his Hail Mary to switch to the progressive platform. Obama is an example of many politicians and influential figures who actively obscure their personal values ​​to appeal to the majority of voters and supporters. Instead they align themselves on the spectrum between conservative and liberal, hoping to find the perfect balance for victory. Ultimately there is unlikely to be any concern about morality among politicians, rather what becomes important is the elections of political offices. An important and continuing divide represented by the Scopes trial is the long-standing cultural regionalism between rural versus urban, and to some extent North versus North. South. In the 1920s, urban America was changing. Most of this development also occurredin the northern parts of the United States than in the south. Huge numbers of immigrants poured into American cities, rapidly changing demographics as a result. Technology has further accentuated the rural and urban divide. City dwellers had electricity, running water, radios and cinemas. As lifestyles changed, so did values. Urban America became the center of innovation, cultural celebration, and intellectual experimentation with a place for jazz and flappers. He moved away from the traditional values ​​that still dominated the countryside. The Scopes trial, however, took place in a rural area of ​​Tennessee. The Butler Act banning the teaching of evolution was intended to support traditional religious ideas against their spreading influence of modernist ideals of science on religion. This law was one aspect of the fundamentalist attempt to maintain the supremacy of their beliefs and a revival of control over American values. The Scopes trial itself also highlighted the differences between rural and urban America. City newspapers and radio reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the trial. Many of them, particularly H. L. Mencken, described the prosecution and the people of Dayton as backward and narrow-minded. Mencken described Bryan, who led the persecution, as a “pathetic man” whose “cruel mouth was sealed shut” (Mencken). The media conspicuously sided with the modernists and thus helped propagate the idea that there were fundamental cultural differences between rural and urban communities (“Introduction”). The Scopes trial was the turning point in the struggle between rural fundamentalist values ​​and those of scientifically inclined urban dwellers. He could have been responsible for preventing the passage of laws similar to Tennessee's in other states that did not want to endure the ridicule that had been heaped on Dayton (“The Scopes Trial”). The divisions that exist in America, even the political and social separations between young and old stem from a weak sense of national identity, something that most other nations hold in high regard. Often these American characteristics are seen as an advantage as they are a fusion of many cultures and philosophies. However, despite the sentiment, this quality also serves to exacerbate a form of cultural and social chaos. After World War I, this aspect of American society exacerbated morally anxious and restless youth. In the wake of these two factors erupted a mass cultural revolution and a complete shift away from the values ​​of the Victorian era. They were instead exchanged for the pursuit of experimentation and intellectual stimulation (“An Introduction”). As a result, many of the older generation saw their values ​​and traditions become a wasteland abandoned by the youthful recklessness and moral ambiguity of the younger generation who were becoming young and politically evident in the 1920s. Jazz music, flapper culture, birth control for women, and anti-Prohibition were embraced by younger generations while the older generation watched in horror as institutions had slowly crumbled (“An Introduction”). often with a religious topic in the mix, they are still seen today in the form of many issues including gay marriage rights and abortion. On the anti-gay marriage front, one of the key arguments remains that in Leviticus 20, the Bible states that "If even a man lie with a man, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall certainly be put to death." ; their blood will be on them." Many of those who refer to the Scriptures against..