Elitist ridicule fuels Palin's faithful base

It's not easy being Sarah Palin. Just ask her. On any given day, the former Alaska governor is busy punching back at liberal elites, media elites, Hollywood elites, Republican Party elites, and conservative intellectual elites for attacks real and imagined.

Not since Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew— who sneered at "the effete corps of impudent snobs" who criticized their administration — has a major American politician been so fueled by resentments. Palin's fans love her feistiness and embrace her persona of embattled heroine. (One admiring conservative journalist titled his 2009 book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star. )

But for the conservative evangelicals who make up her base, Palin's brand of politics holds a special appeal. They, too, have felt mocked and derided by mainstream elites and culture. And the roots of their resentments go back nearly 100 years to a court case that captivated the nation.

How Scopes changed things

When the Scopes trial began in the small town of Dayton, Tenn., in 1925, evangelicals were still grappling with their changing place in American society. For most of American history, Protestantism had been a powerful culture-shaping force, and its character was overwhelmingly evangelical. Pockets of liberal dissent existed here and there, but most believers subscribed to an orthodox theology.

That began to change in the late 19th century as two intellectual developments from Europe made their way to the USA. The first was the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and the second was the rise of methods of scientific inquiry used to challenge the historicity of the Bible. Not surprisingly, both ignited heated debates that split Protestants. The more traditional saw Darwin's theory as a direct assault on the authority of Scripture and its account of creation and miracles.

Many liberal Protestants, however, were attracted to the idea of a less literal way of reading the Bible. They also recognized that secularization was taking hold in the major institutions — from high education to the legal world to journalism — that formed the American establishment. Protestantism could adapt and maintain its respected place in society or be marginalized in a culture that rejected religion altogether. For liberal Protestant leaders, the answer was to develop a new theological framework, the social gospel.

Meanwhile, traditional Protestants — now calling themselves fundamentalists — rallied together to stop the spread of Darwin's dangerous theory. They launched a nationwide campaign to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. Proving that they still had numbers and clout, fundamentalists found success with their effort. From 1923 through 1925, about a dozen states introduced bills to prohibit the teaching of evolution, and five of those states put laws on the books.

One of those states was Tennessee, where a teacher named John Scopes purposely broke the law to test the statute with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. The trial pitted two giants against each other —William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee, and Clarence Darrow, one of the nation's top defense lawyers. Bryan was a fierce opponent of what he saw as social Darwinism, a survival of the fittest mind-set that could be used to justify eugenics and racial cleansing. For his part, Darrow wasn't interested in winning the case but in putting fundamentalism on trial in order to demonstrate the absurdity of literalist beliefs and opposition to evolution.

The matchup was uneven and painful to watch. When Bryan — who was past his prime — volunteered to do double duty and testify as a biblical expert, Darrow lit into him, posing questions about biblical contradictions that flustered his opposing counsel. "You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion," charged Darrow. When Bryan shot back that the questioning was intended "to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible," Darrow had the last word: "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States."

This sort of humiliation of religious adherents was new. Americans had engaged in fierce theological disagreements, and were still in the midst of decades-long anti-Catholic bigotry. In those previous religious disputes, however, combatants accused each other of being wrong or misled — not stupid. So while Bryan ultimately won the case, fundamentalists lost in the court of public opinion.

A triumph of science over faith

A new breed of secular journalists, led by H.L. Mencken, joyfully mocked the religious "yokels" and "hookworm carriers," and newsreels carried Darrow's demolition of Bryan to Americans in movie houses across the country. In the popular memory, the Scopes trial stood for the triumph of science over faith.

When President Obama said in his inaugural address that his administration would "restore science to its rightful place," the approving roar of the crowd indicated that this cultural divide is still with us. The bitterness and distrust sown among evangelicals and fundamentalists during the Scopes trial never faded. If anything, the gulf between religious conservatives and mainstream society widened.

When Jimmy Carter told a group of voters during the 1976 presidential campaign that he had been born again, mainstream journalists were perplexed. Kenneth Briggs, who was then chief religion reporter for The New York Times, later recalled that the political press corps "didn't really know what an evangelical was. And what they did know harkened back to the days of the Scopes trial and fundamentalism and a kind of backwoods yahooism that they found very distasteful."

More recently, political reporters tittered when George W. Bush answered a question about his favorite political philosopher in a 1999 GOP primary debate by naming Jesus. The statement was all the proof any journalist needed that Bush was an intellectual lightweight and a Bible-thumper to boot. And just this winter, an article on The Atlantic's website included this sentence about Mike Huckabee: "People are sometimes caught off guard by Huckabee's intellectual competence because of his rural Arkansas habits (he and his wife lived in a trailer while the governor's mansion was being renovated) and his outspoken evangelical views."

Given this history, it's not terribly surprising that Palin spends much of her time in a fighting stance. No slight is too trivial to merit a furious response from Palin. In late March, she blasted the conservative news outletThe Daily Caller for not doing more to highlight a lengthy statement she had insisted be tacked onto an article for which she commented. She's fond of invoking the term "lamestream media" to mock the journalists she thinks blatantly misrepresent her. And she is locked in a tussle with leading conservatives who have accused her of "playing the victim card."

All of which is of a piece with the way evangelicals chafe at their coverage by the elite news media. They still routinely cite a 1993 Washington Post article that described them as "largely poor, uneducated and easily led." It's the kind of unthinking ridicule that reinforces their perception of cultural isolation.

And it's all the ammunition a politician such as Palin needs to attract evangelical voters to her victimized everywoman candidacy.

Amy Sullivan is a contributing writer at Time and author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap.