Mencken's 'The Hills of Zion'

 In 1925, H.L. Mencken reported that he’d gone to watch the people of Dayton, Tenn., try the infidel Scopes.

John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, against state law. (In Texas, the current Legislature frowns up the teaching history and literature.)

Scopes was tried during Prohibition, and Mencken claimed he went to Tennessee because he wanted to try the bootleg whiskey. He also said he wanted to see “evangelical Christianity as a going concern.”

Accompanied by a newspaperwoman from Chattanooga, he witnessed a camp meeting. The worshippers were overcome by the spirit, as they say.

Mencken said the experience of watching people in a religious frenzy would have been comic but was not. Witnessing it was, he wrote, like peeping through a keyhole and seeing someone writhing in pain.

Mencken reported that the people of Dayton had a good time with the trial. But real religion was up in the hills, not in the town.

• H.L. Mencken, “The Hills of Zion,” Prejudices, Vol. 2; New York: Library of America, 2010, pp. 221-27. Library of America offers a free story of the week here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/p/stories-sorted-by-author.html