Tom Baldwin, "Religious Right evolves tactics to fight Darwin" (2005)

CONNIE MORRIS took LSD at her high school graduation, posed nude as a model and frolicked in free love before suffering sexual abuse and descending into drug addiction. Then she found God.

“My life would have been better — anyone’s life would have been better — if I had committed to Christ earlier and followed His way,” she said.

Mrs Morris has positioned herself firmly on the front line of the latest battle being waged by America’s religious Right against the forces of secularism and liberalism. Her lurid account of how she escaped from a personal hell is relevant because it gives a flavour of the born-again passion with which the war is being fought.

She is an elected member of the Kansas State Board of Education, which is seeking to change the school science curriculum so that children are taught criticism of evolution. This autumn the board is expected to approve new standards that describe Darwin’s theory on the origin of the species as “controversial . . . based on inferences from indirect or circumstantial evidence”.

More than twenty similar challenges to scientific orthodoxy are being mounted in state legislatures and on school boards across the country. In Cobb County, Georgia, disclaimer stickers have been placed on textbooks stating that evolution is “theory, not fact”.

Earlier this year President Bush threw his weight behind such efforts, saying that he thought lessons should include arguments for and against natural selection, “so people can understand what the debate is about”.

This seemingly fair-minded approach is known as “teach the controversy” and is buttressed by studies from the Discovery Institute in Seattle. The think-tank has been proposing “intelligent design” as a middle way between Darwin and those creationists who still believe that the world was made by God just a few thousand years ago.

In the same way that Mrs Morris, 43, recognises that she made “past mistakes”, so has Discovery realised that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is not going to get very far. It has gone to great lengths to present scientific rather than religious arguments, saying that Darwin cannot explain how life began — or how it got to be so complex. It claims that some biological features, such as the mutual dependency of the proteins needed for blood clotting, are just too amazing to be explained without acknowledging at least the possibility of intervention by a higher — supernatural — hand.

This debate is not raging on university campuses, where the overwhelming majority of scientists reject the intelligent design thesis. They regard it as a part of an assault by the US Right on science in general: other fronts including stem-cell research, climate change and Nasa’s space-exploration budget. Instead, the intelligent design “controversy” is apparent mainly in state legislatures — on education and local school boards.

People such as Mrs Morris are not scientists, they are politicians thrown up by the US system of holding direct elections for almost everything. She recently made plain her feelings towards evolution in a letter to her constituents in rural west Kansas — describing Darwinism as “biologically, chemically, metaphysically and, etc, wildly and utterly impossible”.

In an interview with The Times Mrs Morris said: “I’ve read stacks of stuff . . . which refutes evolution.” She confirmed that, along with two-thirds of the US public according to a recent opinion poll, she believed that mankind was created directly by God. How long ago — 5,000 years? “I’m not sure that matters,” she said.

Creationism has never really gone away in America. In 1925 John Scopes, a biology teacher in Tennessee, was successfully prosecuted, during the so-called Monkey Trial, for introducing evolution into classrooms. That was overturned by the US Supreme Court only in 1968. Attempts to teach “creation science” alongside evolution were banned by subsequent rulings in the 1980s on the ground that they violated the Constitution’s first amendment, which separates Church and State.

It is Kansas that has been in the vanguard of recent attempts to circumvent the law. In 1999 the education board tried to remove all references to evolution from its books before being booted out of office. Mrs Morris is one of a second wave of conservatives, elected in 2004, who have learnt to box cleverer than her predecessors. Critics suggest that the intelligent design argument may itself be evidence that the creationists are evolving.

Mary Viveros is the principal of Sumner Academy in Kansas City, which was rated one of the 100 best high schools in America by Newsweek magazine. “This is a thinly veiled attempt to impose a literal interpretation of the Bible on the wider world. I was a biology teacher myself and I can’t ask other teachers to do this,” she said. “It’s ludicrous. It might be part of our theory of knowledge lessons but intelligent design cannot be part of a science lesson.”

She is worried for her largely Baptist students because the curriculum being proposed by the education board will not “prepare them for the outside world”. Dr Viveros, a Catholic, suggested that schools could ignore the instructions. “I suspect we’ll all be too busy to get around to implementing anything new like this in the curriculum,” she said.

Mrs Morris said that such views were the result of media distortion. “This will help students to be more intelligent and more critical and that will help them in life — God is pleased when we are successful and intelligent,” she said.

ALTERED DEBATE

Creationism: The belief that the Universe was created by a supreme being or deity, as described in the Book of Genesis or the Koran

Darwinism: explains life exclusively through natural processes, such as random mutations and natural selection

Intelligent design: Movement born out of opposition to the theory of evolution. Proponents, essentially creationists, believe that some parts of the Universe were made by an intelligent cause or agent and that it was not an undirected process