Monkey trials: Dayton vs St. Petersburg

Introduction. The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of two “monkey courts”: held in America in 1925 and in Russia, St. Petersburg in 2007. The author analyzes the data of the court in the context of the specifics of religious fundamentalism and its literal hermeneutics of Scripture. The article analyzes the methods of PR technologies used by the parties of both processes, advertising strategies aimed at attracting public attention in the participants of court hearings. The background of the trials and the decisions taken are described, which in both cases testified to the defeat of the radical creationists. Methods. The article implements the methodology of religious studies based on the methods of hermeneutic research and comparative historical analysis. Results. Studies have shown that both trials unite not only the carnival character, a certain provocative lack of seriousness, a priori present in both precedents, but also a close pragmatic focus: the participants tried to use the judicial incident for advertising purposes, as an informational occasion, to draw attention not so much to socially important issues, which in the course of the courts more and more receded into the background, but to specific actors of this public script, which is pronounced modernist in nature. Conclusions. Both processes caused some damage to the public image of religious circles that were associated in public consciousness with the plaintiffs - however, in this respect, the negative effect of the Dayton process turned out to be more significant. The phenomenon of “monkey processes” argues in favor of the assumption of the ambivalent nature of religious fundamentalism and modernism.