Why So Many Find the Anti-Evolution Argument Appealing
After the recent court ruling ordering the removal of evolution disclaimer stickers from district biology textbooks, the Cobb County (Ga.) School Board denounced the case as “an unnecessary judicial intrusion into local control of schools.” The case is currently under appeal to the 11th Circuit.
The stickers in question were placed in the books in 2002 when the district finally bought texts actually describing evolution. Under pressure from parents (in the form of 2300 petitioners) to deemphasize evolutionary teaching, the board resolved to affix stickers to the books stating: “Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
Taken literally, the sticker instructions give good advice to students: learning requires critical thought and should be applied not just to these particular textbooks but also to a whole range of items. Just think of the revolution if our students—and we too—would approach more things with an open mind and critically consider them! But the sticker language has a different, ideological, goal than its brief two sentences suggest. Because it singles out evolution alone for critical consideration, a “reasonable observer” may conclude that the stickers are intended to weaken the teaching of evolution, not to improve the overall pedagogy of the public schools.
I’m not a scientist, so I do not think I should launch into an editorial complaining about the disclaimer’s misuse of the terms “theory” and “fact” or a lengthy lament about the state of science education in America. But having recently completed a book on the anti-evolution controversy of the early twentieth century, I was struck by the familiar tone of the Cobb County School Board’s argument for “local control of schools.” Indeed, the school board’s language reinforces my belief that we need to understand the contests over the place of evolution in the public schools in a different framework than the old “warfare of science and religion” paradigm bequeathed to us by Andrew Dickson White in his 1896 book of a similar title.1 Ever since publicly funded education grew in the 19th and 20th centuries to reach more children, keep them longer, and teach them far more than simple reading, writing, and arithmetic; parents, teachers, preachers, politicians, and others have often disagreed about what or how the schools taught. In the past we have seen controversies about what schools should teach about sex or history and over the place of the Bible, prayer, or the Pledge of Allegiance in the classrooms. But evolution has proven particularly effective at mobilizing parents and other interested parties to assert their control over the public schools.
The driving force of the anti-evolution controversy is and has been control of children, their education, and, through these means, controlling the future of society. This central theme of controlling children to control the future was splendidly stated by the southern Methodist weekly paper, the Nashville ( Tenn.) Christian Advocate, in 1880 when it warned: “Those who educate the present generation of children in these United States will hold the reins of power when they are grown. Therefore if we turn over the education of our children to others, we renounce our hold upon the future.”2 Supporters of Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute and the prosecution of high school teacher John T. Scopes in 1925 were the intellectual heirs of this argument for control. The real issue in Dayton was not Darwin, but who got to decide what the students were being taught. Tennessee Governor Austin Peay, the man who signed the anti-evolution bill into law, argued that “The people have the right and must have the right to regulate what is taught in their schools.”3 Peay was not the only one singing this tune. He joined a chorus led by William Jennings Bryan, volunteer prosecutor in the Scopes trial, who had barnstormed the state in 1924 to secure a legislature friendly to the anti-evolution cause. Repeating themes he had stressed elsewhere, Bryan told an audience in Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium that “the hand that writes the [teachers’] paycheck rules the school.” Parents and taxpayers indirectly write those checks, therefore according Bryan’s logic, they should set the curriculum.
Bryan’s majority rule argument proved persuasive to the vast majority of Tennessee religious and political leaders. In the weeks leading up to the Scopes Trial, the editor of the Nashville Baptist and Reflector charged his readers to remember that the question was control, not evolution. “Let every preacher and layman keep before the public the fact that the thing on trial is not a doctrine, not a scientific hypothesis, but a fundamental principle of Democracy. If Tennessee has no right to pass a law preventing the teaching of Darwinian Evolution in its public schools, then it has no right to pass any law regulating its public school system.”4 Some academics, preachers, and parents protested the law and denied that evolution was necessarily in conflict with religion. But even M. M. Black, an outspoken proponent of evolution and a frequent contributor to the Methodist newspaper, bowed to the argument for democratic control of the classroom, conceding in the summer of 1925 “that a State has the right to forbid any form of teaching or instruction in its schools and colleges which the majority of its citizens regard as hurtful to morals and the Christian religion.”5
Bryan’s crusade against evolution, couched in the language of popular control of the schools, is in fact a perfectly pitched argument for a democratic society. Perhaps this explains the continuing power of the anti-evolutionist appeal. Whether arguing majority rule, protection for their own free exercise of religion, or simply leaning on an appeal to American fairness (if you teach this it is only fair that you teach that too so as not to offend or privilege one group’s opinion), anti-evolutionists appear to be gaining strength and political acumen. Polling on the eve of last November’s national elections found 65 percent of respondents in favor of teaching both evolution and creationism while more than one third favored teaching creationism alone.6 While science most definitely does not work on a vote system, school boards and state legislatures are subject to majority rule.
The history since 1925 has shown us that there are in fact some limitations on that concept of majority rule. Clarence Darrow and the ACLU lawyers representing John Scopes in 1925 took his case with visions of riding it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their mission was ambushed when a non-compliant Tennessee appellate court overturned Scopes’s conviction on a technicality. No new test cases appeared in Tennessee, but the federal courts have consistently ruled since 1968 that anti-evolution legislation and its more modern descendents Creation Science, Equal Time Laws, Intelligent Design, and Evolution Disclaimers, are unconstitutional.
The Cobb County sticker (and in fact similar stickers have in the past appeared state-wide in Texas textbooks and are currently featured in Alabama) fails to pass constitutional muster because it singles out evolution as apparently the only item in the textbooks that should be regarded with suspicion. Such specificity, according to the January 2005 ruling in the Cobb County case (Selman v. Cobb County School Board), reveals “to the reasonable observer” its religious intent and thus the sticker violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Of course, this does not mean that the anti-evolutionists will go quietly. They have adapted their arguments to changing conditions since 1925, first arguing for majority rule to ban evolution or to offer religious challenges to it, at times claiming minority status for their religious beliefs and demanding protection from evolution education supposedly challenging those beliefs, at other times attempting to label evolutionary science itself a form of religion and thus inappropriate for the public schools, and now professing to have only “scientific” objections to evolution.
Still the legal evolution continues. Already in the wake of Selman we have seen Alabama’s disclaimer stickers subtly altered in the hopes that they would withstand the appellate ruling from the Georgia case. Clarence Darrow once remarked “History repeats itself. That’s the problem with history.” The tactics change, but in the end the battle is still about who is controlling the schools.
1 Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1896)
2 [Oscar Penn Fitzgerald], Nashville Christian Advocate (July 17, 1880), 8.
3 Gov. Autin Peay, “Peay’s Special Message of March 23, 1925,” in Ash, ed. Messages of the Governors of Tennessee Volume X 1921–33 (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1990), 173.
4 O.E. Bryan, Nashville Baptist and Reflector, May 28, 1925, 2-3.
5 Black, “Christianity and Evolution,” Nashville Christian Advocate, July 31, 1925, 8-9.
6 Jon Hurdle, “Politics and Religion enter into evolution debate.” Reuters newswire, reported on MSNBC.com (2/10/2005).
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