Does It Matter if the Anti-Evolution Rightwingers Win in Kansas?

Recently in Kansas the nation’s eyes turned once again to the State Board of Education, which sponsored hearings on the merits of evolution. In 1999, the same board voted to eliminate the subject of evolution from the state’s science curriculum and standardized exams. The result was an outcry from scientists nationwide, and the election of a more moderate board in 2000, which promptly rescinded the 1999 decision. Yet last November, a strong Republican showing in state elections helped conservatives to recapture a majority of seats on the board, prompting it to re-examine evolutionary theory and its place in science classes this spring.

While these hearings were being sold as an opportunity for the board to examine and debate the soundness of evolution, the debate was one-sided. Supporters of evolution—including most national and state science organizations—boycotted the event, as they believe the scientific evidence that supports evolution is beyond dispute. As Jack Krebs, vice president of Kansas Citizens for Science explained to the Washington Post, the hearings did not represent “a real science discussion. This [was] a showcase for intelligent design.” Proponents of intelligent design, a theory that posits the Earth and its development are too complex to be explained by evolution and instead must have been guided by a Creator, have participated in the hearings, trying to point out weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Many believe the hearings are pointless, as the board’s majority has indicated its desire to remove evolution from Kansas schools once again.

Debates in the public schools that pit religious traditionalism versus modern science, however, are nothing new. And they typically end in favor of science, at least in the long run. Take, for example, the first widespread battles concerning evolution in the 1920s. About a decade before, fissures appeared among most major Protestant denominations, splitting many Protestant groups into separate fundamentalist and moderate factions. Moderate denominations embraced a more liberal view of biblical interpretation and as a result, accommodated evolutionary theory within their own religious doctrines. By contrast, fundamentalist Protestants argued that evolution was antithetical to their own beliefs in the inerrancy of the Bible, instead maintaining that the Genesis account describing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was a more accurate explanation of the world’s origins.

This debate among Protestants spilled over into the public schools as evolutionary theory was being introduced into the classroom. (Catholics largely avoided this debate as many Catholic children attended parochial schools; further, Catholic teaching is not necessarily opposed to evolution.) Between 1921 and 1929, fundamentalist Christians organized politically and succeeded in proposing more than forty anti-evolution bills in twenty-one state legislatures, primarily in the South. Yet these religious groups were only successful in passing five such bills, most of which lacked severe consequences. For example, in 1923 in Florida, in order to attract as much political support as possible, the state legislature forbid the teaching of evolution only “as fact” in public schools and carried no legal penalties for those who broke the law. In other states, the scientific community successfully challenged anti-evolution statutes as an affront to academic freedom. In North Carolina in 1925, for instance, a state bill that would have outlawed any teaching linking “man in blood relationship between any lower forms of life” was successfully defeated due to the efforts of the charismatic president of the University of North Carolina, Harry W. Chase—despite its having the backing of the state’s governor.

In that same year, the famous Scopes trial took place in Tennessee—one of the few states that had managed to pass a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution—and attracted hundreds of reporters from around the world. On trial was John Scopes, a science teacher who had once taught Darwinism in the classroom, and who was willing to be put on trial because he believed the law infringed upon academic license. Defending him was the legendary attorney Clarence Darrow of the American Civil Liberties Union, while prosecutors were aided by William Jennings Bryan, the perennial Democratic presidential nominee and devout Evangelical Christian who had led the national effort against evolutionary theory. Ill-advisedly, Bryan agreed to take the stand to defend the law, where Darrow succeeded in making Bryan’s testimony look foolish, at one point grilling Bryan about how Jonah had ended up in the belly of a whale. Ultimately, Bryan conceded in his testimony that not all of the words in the Bible should be taken literally. The jury found Scopes guilty of violating the new Tennessee law, and he was fined $100--but he faced no jail time. A year later, the verdict was overturned by the state Supreme Court on a technicality.

After the Scopes trial, the anti-evolutionary forces died down and many fundamentalists retreated from politics. While conventional wisdom holds that such forces were not successful, and that the Scopes trial marked the end of the battle against evolution, the reality was more mixed. While few states banned the teaching of evolution, at the local school board level, many boards decided to choose science textbooks that either omitted or downplayed the significance of evolution. As a result, large numbers of school children did not learn about evolution for many decades in American schools. That changed as a result of the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, which forced American schools to re-examine their science programs. Due to the Cold War “space race” high schools moved toward stricter science standards, resulting in updated curriculums nationwide that incorporated evolution.

In the 1960s, conservative Christians again became active in school politics as many school districts began to incorporate comprehensive sex education programs into the public schools as a response, in part, to shifting sexual mores of the time. One of the first big battles concerning sex education occurred in 1965 in Anaheim, California, where conservative parents were angry over the sex ed curriculum. Students were not taught that sexual activity outside of marriage was wrong; nor were they taught that homosexuality was deviant behavior. Protestors organized like-minded parents by handing out newsletters at Anaheim churches on Sunday mornings, leading the anti-sex education movement to win a majority of seats on the Anaheim school board. Conservative forces were not only successful in this instance in rewriting the curriculum to reflect their views more accurately, they were also successful in having the state legislature make sex education voluntary—not mandatory—in local districts. This battle was replayed in many school districts throughout the country in the next decade as traditionalists fought progressives in introducing a more inclusive sexual education curriculum. Similar to the evolution battle, however, in which conservatives were successful in some cases in the short term, increases in pregnancy among unmarried teens, combined with the AIDS epidemic, eventually opened the door to sexual education in most public classrooms. For example, Jeffrey Moran’s book on the history of sex ed, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century, found that by 1990, all fifty states either mandated or recommended AIDS education in public schools.

Currently, while newspaper headlines report that anti-evolution forces are gearing up in many school districts in the nation, and the latest development in sexual education focuses on teaching “abstinence only” sex education policies (with the encouragement and funding of the Bush administration), reality has a way of catching up with these so-called trends.

While the space race has ended, Americans are about to face a new crisis when it comes to science, as other nations, particularly in Asia, are churning out students with more technological expertise and basic scientific know-how than the United States—which threatens to challenge America’s preeminent global economic position. Similar to the threat posed by the Soviet Union almost half a century ago, such pressures will force American schools to re-examine their science curriculum, and no doubt lead to the instruction of a more rigorous and accurate scientific program—including the teaching of evolution—in public classrooms.

When it comes to sex education, programs that emphasize abstinence as the only means of preventing or reducing pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases will also likely be scaled back as the most recent research indicates that such programs have largely not met their goals. Studies show that students who receive abstinence-only education are no more likely to abstain from sex than students who receive a more comprehensive sexual education in public schools—but they are more likely to practice sex without birth control or using safer sex practices. Moreover, a recent study commissioned by Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman found that more than two-thirds of federally-funded abstinence-based sexual education programs used nationwide contain false, misleading or distorted information about reproductive health. Finally, the conservative Christians who support abstinence-only sex education in public schools are largely outnumbered: last year a poll sponsored by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that just 15 percent of Americans support a curriculum that teaches only about abstinence from sexual intercourse outside of marriage and refrains from informing students about birth control or methods of keeping safe from sexual diseases, including AIDS.

History shows that battles about curriculum issues in public schools are cyclical in nature. When conservative forces do well nationally, Christian Right activists are often inspired to mount similar grassroots campaigns. At the school board level, conservative Christians do, from time to time, organize politically to express their opposition to evolution, sex education, and other curriculum issues, such as criticism of history books and literature that they deem too politically and socially liberal (one recent target has been the popular Harry Potter series, which some Christian Right activists believe promotes witchcraft).

While such movements are successful on occasion, more often then not, conservative Christian activists tend to overreach and make decisions that are not reflective of majority opinion—which often results in the reversal of such decisions later. So, while anti-evolution supporters may win the battle in Kansas, the odds of them winning the war against evolution nationally in the long run are not high.