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   The New York Times
------------------------------------------------------------------------


         January 19, 2005

*OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR*


   Caught Between Church and State

*By SUSAN JACOBY *

SHORTLY after the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," the usually astute 
historian Frederick Lewis Allen concluded that fundamentalism had been 
permanently discredited by the prosecution in Dayton, Tenn., of John T. 
Scopes, who had taught his biology students about Darwin's theory of 
evolution. "Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws," Allen 
wrote, "and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion 
locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized 
opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and 
amusement, and the slow drift away from fundamentalist certainty 
continued."

This was a serious historical misjudgment, as most recently demonstrated 
by the renewed determination of anti-evolution crusaders - buoyed by 
conservative gains in state and local elections - to force public school 
science classes to give equal time to religiously based speculation 
about the origins of life. These challenges to evolution range from 
old-time biblical literalism, insisting that the universe and man were 
created in seven days, to the newer "intelligent design," which 
maintains that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained 
by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at 
every stage by an omniscient creator.

Kansas, where evolution opponents regained control of the state board of 
education in November, is likely to be the first battleground. Proposals 
to modify the state's recommended science curriculum with alternatives 
to Darwinian evolution will be an issue at statewide public hearings 
scheduled in February. In Georgia last week, a federal judge ordered a 
suburban Atlanta school board to remove stickers labeling evolution "a 
theory, not a fact" from high school biology textbooks, but an appeal 
seems likely. Other states where the teaching of evolution is on the 
2005 legislative or judicial calendar include Missouri, Ohio, 
Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Many liberals mistakenly believe that these controversies are largely a 
product of the post-1980 politicization of the Christian right. In fact, 
the elected anti-evolutionists on local and state school boards today 
are the heirs of eight decades of fundamentalist campaigning against 
Darwinism through back-door pressure on textbook publishers and school 
officials. Even efforts to cloak creationism with the words "science" 
and "scientific" - as in "creation science" - is an old tactic, 
reminiscent of the Soviet Union's boasting about "scientific communism."

More sophisticated proponents of intelligent design, those who are 
religiously conservative but not insistent on literal adherence to the 
biblical creation story, use anti-Darwinist arguments from a tiny 
minority of scientists to bolster their case for a creator. Last month, 
a group of parents in Dover, Penn., filed the first lawsuit to address 
the issue, challenging the local school board's contention that 
"intelligent design" is a scientific rather than a religious theory and, 
therefore, does not violate the separation of church and state.

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, America was well on its 
way to an accommodation between science and mainstream religion, now a 
fait accompli in the rest of the developed world, that pleases neither 
atheists nor theocrats manqués but works for almost everyone else. A 
growing number of Americans accepted both evolution and religion but 
considered it the responsibility of the church, not public schools, to 
sort out the role of God. This view was expressed in 1904 by Maynard M. 
Metcalf, a zoologist and a liberal Christian, who praised the move to 
exclude religious speculation from the teaching of life sciences.

The Scopes trial changed all that. Instead of being the nail in the 
coffin of creationism as many believe, the trial undermined the emerging 
accommodation between religion and science by intensifying the 
fundamentalists' conviction that acceptance of evolution would 
inevitably weaken any type of faith.

When the 24-year-old Scopes was charged with violating a state law 
forbidding the teaching of evolution, his conviction by a jury (later 
overturned on a technicality) was a foregone conclusion. Clarence 
Darrow, the nation's most famous lawyer and most famous agnostic, turned 
a jury defeat into a public relations victory (at least among scientists 
and intellectuals) by goading William Jennings Bryan, who was assisting 
the prosecution, into taking the stand as an expert witness on the Bible.

Bryan, in the view of the Northern press, made a fool of himself. 
Opponents of evolution, however, lauded Bryan, and the press's ridicule 
of their hero helped to create the enduring fundamentalist resentment of 
secular science and secular government that has become such a 
conspicuous feature of our culture.

Between the Scopes trial and the early 1930's, "science-proof" 
fundamentalists pressured publishers into excising discussions of 
evolution - and often the word itself - from biology textbooks. The 
nature of that success is literally illustrated by a change between the 
1921 first edition of "Biology for Beginners," a standard text by Truman 
Moon, and the second edition, published in 1926. The 1921 edition 
appeared with a portrait of Darwin on the frontispiece. Five years 
later, Darwin had been replaced by a drawing of the human digestive tract.

Texas, then as now one of the largest textbook purchasers, led the drive 
to extirpate evolution. "I am a Christian mother," said Gov. Miriam 
Ferguson of Texas." "And I am not going to let that kind of rot go into 
Texas textbooks." Mrs. Ferguson personally censored textbooks while 
presiding over the statehouse from 1924 to 1926. Censorship was soon 
institutionalized in a state commission that scrutinized all potential 
textbooks.

The caution inspired by such pressure extended beyond the Bible Belt and 
persisted for decades. In 1959, the Harvard University paleontologist 
George G. Simpson (a bête noire on creationist Web sites today) noted 
that most American high school science texts relegated evolution to a 
separate, optional section.

Perhaps the most insidious effect of the campaign against evolution has 
been avoidance of the subject by teachers, who, whatever their 
convictions, want to forestall trouble with fundamentalist parents. 
Recent surveys of high school biology teachers have found that avoidance 
of evolution is common among instructors throughout the nation.

The singular achievement of the fundamentalist minority has been to 
render evolution controversial enough to silence many teachers who know 
better. Only now, when the religious right is no longer satisfied with 
avoidance but is demanding that schools add anti-Darwinist intelligent 
design to the curriculum, are defenders of evolution fighting back 
against the intimidation that has worked so well since the premature 
declaration of the death of fundamentalism in the 1920's.

/Susan Jacoby, director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York, is the 
author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism."/


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