(Anti-)Evolution and Evangelical History

Last night I attended a talk on campus here on evolution and intelligent design. It was a non-academic talk aimed at a general audience (actually, it was at a local Sierra Club meeting). The focus of the talk was interesting: rather than diving into the scientific debate, the speaker mostly dwelt on historical information. He told us about Darwin and Russell, Paley and W. J. Bryan, etc. The content of the talk wasn't much to get excited about, but listening to it I realized that there is a common mistake that both evolutionists and ID proponents make in the debate over proper science: while both know the history of evolution, neither knows the history of evangelical Christianity in America. Yet a little knowledge in this area is enlightening and helpful in several respects.

First, it is helpful to know that Darwinian views were not always so outrightly rejected by evangelicals in America. When the theories were becoming widely accepted in the late 1800s and 1910s, Christians in America were split on the question. Even some prominent theologians like B. B. Warfield and many professional scientists who considered themselves evangelical accepted both evolution and natural selection as good scientific theories. In the 1920s, opposition grew, but much of it was a reaction to the cry for social application of Darwinian ideas by men like Huxley and Haeckel. This was William Jennings Bryan's position, for instance. It was only during the 20s, 30s, and 40s when the scourge of fundamentalism and its evil henchman dispensationalism swept through the minds of evangelicals that a literal interpretation of the Bible began to be widely seen as the only interpretation possible. While most evangelicals today probably can't tell you what dispensationalism is, the practice of reading the Bible literally has strongly persisted.

There are lots of details to fill in here, but the main point is that the literal reading of the Bible that precludes belief in evolution for most evangelicals is something that is peculiar to evangelicals and not an essential part of Christianity in general. But I am amazed at how few of those engaged in the debate (both evolutionists and anti-evolutionists) know this. They think that all Christians think this way and that they always have. If a Christian admits to reading the Bible in a non-literalist fashion, they are accused of compromising Christian principles in reaction to scientific challenges rather than returning to a position of Christian orthodoxy.

The end result of this inability to distinguish between the essential and the particular is that evolutionists believe all Christians must be morons while anti-evolutionists believe they are defending the very existence of the Christian faith. Both are very mistaken.