The New York Times
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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."/