The Buckle of the Bible Belt and the Trial That Tested It

Nashville earned the nickname the buckle of the Bible Belt from the sheer density of religious institutions headquartered there, anchored for most of the twentieth century by the Southern Baptist Convention and a cluster of gospel music publishing houses that made the city a center of both Protestant organization and Christian popular culture at once. That institutional weight made Tennessee a natural stage for one of the century's defining confrontations between conservative Protestantism and scientific modernism. The Scopes Trial, held in the small town of Dayton in 1925 over a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, pitted the celebrated orator and three time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution against the defense attorney Clarence Darrow, and the trial's national newspaper coverage turned a local test case into a referendum on how far a state could go in legislating what science teachers could say.

Scopes was convicted, a verdict later overturned on a technicality rather than on the constitutional question itself, so the case settled less in the courtroom than in public memory, where it became the standard reference point for the fundamentalist versus modernist divide in American Protestantism for the rest of the century. Tennessee's religious landscape also holds a much smaller and more controversial tradition entirely apart from that mainstream fight. In the Appalachian hollows of the state's east, a Holiness practice of serpent handling, taking up venomous snakes during worship as a literal enactment of a New Testament promise, survives in a small number of rural congregations, a tradition scholars describe as marginal even within Pentecostalism but continuously practiced since the early twentieth century.