The film “Inherit the wind” is about a young schoolteacher who dares to introduce his students to Darwin’s theory of evolution in Hillsboro. Hillsboro is a small bible town whose citizens not only reject the evolutionist point of view but deny the existence of evolution itself. They have been taught that the universe and all it contains was created by God; that any other point of view is blasphemous. In Hillsboro, it is unlawful to teach other than what is in the bible. The people there are very old fashioned and not open to questioning what has been written. Thus, the story surrounds the trial of the State vs. a schoolteacher; evolution vs. creation; religion versus science.
The film was originally written as a play in 1955 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. The focus of the story mirrors the events of what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan squared off in a small town to determine the guilt or innocence of a schoolteacher, Scopes, who attempted to teach evolution in his science class. The movie’s characters a
This kind of narrow-minded ignorance can be equated to Queen Isabella preventing Christopher Columbus from discovering that the world was not flat; that we would not fall off the planet if we kept sailing toward the horizon; or the ostrich who, when confronted by an enemy or the unknown, buries its head in the sand thinking that the danger will just go away or that it ceases to exist. The source for the film’s title was taken from Proverbs 11:29 in the bible and reads, “He who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind,” meaning that to question the bible is a sin. Throughout most of this country, it is widely accepted that all substantial theories of how the universe was created should be questioned. This film, the Scopes Trial, and the ruling in Kansas are constant reminders that the pockets of ignorance and fear that pervade our society need to be dealt with and cannot be ignored. There needs to be constant education in books, films and all media. It should be taught that all ideas can coexist among each other without necessarily making a determination about which one is the truth.<
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