In recent years, evangelicals have become the largest and most powerful multi-issue interest group in the Republican Party. Historians have long focused on the Scopes Trial as the start of evangelical political engagement, setting the trajectory that runs through the 2024 presidential campaign. Sutton will argue that Scopes marked an important turning point, but not necessarily for the reasons we usually think.

Matthew Avery Sutton is the Berry Family Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts and the chair of the Department of History at Washington State University. His most recent book is Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War (Basic Books, 2019). He is also the author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), and Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007). He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Republic. In 2016 he was appointed a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.