DAYTON, Tenn. — A statue of Clarence Darrow appeared in front of the historic red brick courthouse here this week, just within spitting distance of the banner for the Scopes Bluegrass Festival and its logo featuring a banjo-picking chimpanzee.

Some have taken grave offense at the addition. After all, Darrow, an agnostic and the most famous lawyer of his day, was the man who lost the famous Scopes “monkey trial” at the Rhea County Courthouse in 1925, though not before denouncing what he called the “fool ideas” of biblical literalism. Since 2005, a statue of Darrow’s sparring partner at the trial, the orator William Jennings Bryan, has graced the courthouse lawn.

At a County Commission meeting here on Tuesday, a resident named Ruth Ann Wilson suggested that the $150,000 statue of Darrow, being funded by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, might unleash a local plague or a curse.

“I rise in opposition to this atheist statue, all right?” she said. “This is very serious, folks.”

Such reactions are unsurprising in Tennessee, and in a nation where, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, 34 percent of the population continues to reject evolution outright. Nearly a century after the Scopes trial, an aversion to scientific findings continues to shape American public policy, with skeptics of the scientific consensus on climate change taking a number of top jobs in President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.