Butler Act

The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the Genesis account of humankind's origin. The law also prevented the teaching of the evolution of humans from what it referred to as lower orders of animals in place of the Biblical account. The law was introduced by Tennessee House of Representatives member John Washington Butler, for whom the law was named. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 (Education) Section 1922, having been signed into law by Tennessee governor Austin Peay.

The law was challenged and upheld later that year in a famous trial in Dayton, Tennessee called the Scopes Trial which involved a raucous confrontation between prosecution attorney and fundamentalist religious leader, William Jennings Bryan, and prominent defense attorney and religious agnostic, Clarence Darrow.

It was not repealed until 1967.