Susan Jacoby, "Caught Between Church and State" (2005)

"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 bęte 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.

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

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company