Skeptic Project

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The popular image of the American creationist is a Republican Neanderthal with an IQ in single figures and passages from Genesis tattooed on his right arm. He spends summertime at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he can read all about how Jesus walked with the dinosaurs. If given enough White Lightning, he’ll tell you that fossils are something Eleanor Roosevelt put in the ground a hundred years ago.

Creationists can be their own worst enemies, particularly those that combine several outrageous political agendas at once. But the historical origins of American creationism are far more complex than popular perception suggests. It began life as a noble doctrine of resistance to war and totalitarianism. Some of its earliest leaders were liberal populists and, in many regards, creationism retains an egalitarian streak that has more sympathy with social democracy than free-market fundamentalism.

After the horrors of World War I, many American evangelicals were convinced that German militarism was influenced by Darwinism – or at least a reading of evolutionary theory that saw life as a competition for the survival of the fittest. In the 1920s, they identified a link between the view that man is a prisoner of genetics and the growing popularity of state-sanctioned eugenics. It was during this so-called Progressive era that many state laws enshrining racial segregation and the regulation of the mentally and physically handicapped were passed. One famous example was the Buck vs. Bell Supreme Court ruling of 1927. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that the state of Virginia was right to sterilise Carrie Buck against her will because “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Buck was not mentally disabled; she was just poor. Her sister, Doris, was also sterilised forcibly when she was hospitalised for appendicitis. Similar statutes remained in place well into the 1960s.

In contrast, evangelicals insisted that the equality and sanctity of every individual’s life derived from the literal parenthood of Adam and Eve. One of creationism’s greatest champions was the three-time Democratic Party presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a borderline socialist in his egalitarianism: he once called for the nationalisation of the railroads. Yet 21st-century society would label him a theocrat. In 1925, when a teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism in a Tennessee schoolroom, Bryan volunteered to act as prosecution. He argued that the theory of evolution elevated “supposedly superior intellects … eliminating the weak … paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardising “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society”. Throughout the trial, Bryan equivocated on the matter of science. He said that he did not know whether the Earth was created in six million years six days. For a mix of theological and moral reasons, he thought it infinitely preferable that children were taught the latter.

Aside from the obvious link between Darwinism and eugenics, Bryan also argued that the teaching of evolution in class violated the principle of local democratic control over education. In the 1920s, and today, the debate over creationism is as much about democracy vs. judicial tyranny as it is religion vs. science. If parents pay for schools through their taxes, said Bryan, then shouldn’t they exercise final say over the curriculum taught within them? Bryan’s naïve, pre-Great Society liberalism baulked at the possibility that socially-owned enterprises like schools should be governed by snobbish “experts”. And he saw no need to remove God from the public sphere. If the public believed in God then it made perfect sense that the institutions they financed with money creamed off their wages would reflect that.

Creationism didn’t start out as an expressly conservative movement, but rather an understandable resistance to modernism, the horrors of eugenics and the emergence of an oppressive educational bureaucracy. Alas, creationism has been forced to settle permanently on the American Right because the post-1960s Left – secularised, transgressive and devoid of imagination – refused to have anything to do with it. But creationism and liberalism still share a sense of egalitarianism that is closer than either would admit. For evangelicals, it is the equality that comes from being made in God’s image. For liberals it is the equality of the brotherhood of man enshrined in legal civil rights. Both reject biological determinism and both, by extension, should reject the notion that the value of life should be determined by wealth, health or power. Amen to that.