In 1836, after nearly five years at sea, Charles Darwin returned to British shores in the midst of a storm.1 The HMS Beagle, fighting hard against heavy winds, arrived in Falmouth and anchored for the night. It would leave for Plymouth come morning, but the young naturalist departed from the ship that had been his home for almost a half-decade that same evening, in the same storm, on a mail carriage towards his family home in Shrewsburyâquite literally post haste. In his absence, Darwin had become something of a minor celebrity in the scientific community. His former teacher, John Stevens Henslow, had published his letters from the Beagle on geology and naturalism as a pamphlet, fostering his reputation as a scientist. But the man who would become the father of modern evolutionary theory was still tucked neatly away in the many pages of notes and journals from his voyage. Upon his return, Darwin had little conception of the gravity of his observations. It was only after he began sharing his notes and sketches with specialists in the scientific community that the pieces began to come together. The different physical traits in the species he had observed were not mere variations, he concludedâthey belonged to distinctly different species. At the urging of his mentor, Darwin began to share his observations with specialists.2 Scientific authorities on anatomy, botany, zoology, geology, and a host of others soon began to help him correlate the observations in his journals. If his voyage aboard the Beagle had seemed long, it was nothing compared to what lay ahead. It would take Darwin the next twenty years, working in relative privacy, to build the theory that would become the backbone of modern biology. But the storm that Darwin rode home, by ship and carriage, never really settled. It followed wherever his ideas went, and found perhaps its most tempestuous skies far across the Atlantic, in America, where the new biology and ideologies on race clashed in bloody civil war. The war would end, but the storm would not. Darwinâs ideas would be abused by those who would see hierarchy in humanity, rejected by those who saw threats to their stations in life, and would take decades beyond his death to be synthesised with scientific fields that did not exist in his lifetime. The storm continues today, most conspicuously in the form of anti-evolution movements.
The concept of evolution, or the âtransmutationâ of species over time, was well-accepted by the time of Darwinâs publication of On the Origin of Species (1859).3 The publisher and geology enthusiast Robert Chambersâ publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), though highly controversial among clergymen, was received with great enthusiasm by the wider public.4 Darwin himself credited the work with having prepared the scientific community for the reception of the Origin, along with having begun the shift away from natural theology. Darwinâs contribution in the publication of the Origin was his proposal that natural selection acted as the primary mechanism for change, and it forever altered the field of study. He was not the first to encroach on territory traditionally reserved for religious discourse, though the consequences of his invasion still, in many ways, dominate the discourse between science and religion.
Perhaps as provocative as what Darwin had explicitly posited at the time of his initial publication was what he had only hinted atâthat humanity was no exception to evolutionary forces and consequences. The more alert theologians certainly suspected the implication.5 The later publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) proved popular, but only because of Darwinâs reputation. The ideas it contained were just an explicit formality; the Origin had already implicated humanity in the evolutionary process. Religious reactions to natural selection ran the gamut from cautiously supportive to downright hostile. In the long history of theological responses to Darwinian theory, the trope of âscience versus religionâ tends to be reserved for more sensationalised accounts than many would guess. In the modern United States, the chronological and geographical context with which this book is concerned, it is often assumed that American evangelicals have always stood against evolution. This does a double disservice to evangelicalism in the United States, both because some of Darwinâs early defenders were prominent evangelical theologians and because it frames the evangelical community as involved in one long, stubborn crusade against the rather obvious proposition that life changes over time. This crusade has a name in the popular imagination which means something quite different to the general public than to those who have historically embraced itâand that name is âcreationism.â
âCreationism,â as an umbrella term, has been stretched to the breaking point over the last few decades. Serious historical and anthropological study of creationism, and anti-evolutionism in general, is a relatively young field. So young, in fact, that the term âcreationismâ has only recently begun to evidence its limitations as a term for evangelical religious origin narratives. Used as a term of both defamation and self-identification, it has meant different things to different people at different times. Before Darwinâs publication of the Origin, âcreationismâ was used mostly as a theological term describing the belief that oneâs soul was uniquely created by God, rather than simply inherited from oneâs parents.6 Post-Origin, it was simply (and rather scantly) used by Darwin and his contemporaries as a kind of derogatory label for those who opposed evolutionary theory, and to deride an individual who rejected a by-then mostly mainstream biological construct, opting instead for an origin narrative which included miracles and the suspension of natural laws. The popular use of the term by evangelicals today can trace its roots to Seventh-Day Adventism in biologist Harold W. Clarkâs Back to Creationism (1925), which posited a recent creation and a global flood which accounted for all fossil deposits.7 This concept of âflood geologyâ was borrowed from his teacher, George McCready Price, an amateur geologist with a great zeal for reconciling the Bible with scientific thought, but little to no interest in field work.8 Nevertheless, Price was accepted as a scientific authority among fundamentalists. By the early 1960s, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr. (an engineer and theologian, respectively) had taken Priceâs and Clarkâs Adventist flood geology and retooled it for the evangelical community. Morrisâ and Whitcombâs 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, was an enormous success among evangelical fundamentalists, who began to use the terms âcreation scienceâ and âscientific creationismâ to describe the scientific descriptions of their young-earth interpretation of the Genesis creation account.9 Other evangelicals, most of whom held old-earth interpretations of the Genesis narrative in line with contemporary geological time-scales, soon began competing with their young-earth counterparts for fair-use of the term âcreationist.â They cited a shared belief in a creator, a shared Christian (and evangelical) faith, and a shared opposition to the descent of humanity from âlowerâ forms, and therefore felt equally entitled to the label. However, over the next few decades the young-earth creationists spent far more time than their old-earth counterparts advertising their position to the public in waging their opposition to evolutionary theory. Old-earth creationists were begrudgingly forced to admit by the 1980s that the label had been won by the young-earthers, at least culturally. Morris finalised the sentiment in his 1989 book, The Long War against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict, claiming that true creationism was flood geology and that all other interpretations (especially old-earth) were creationist in name only.10 In popular vernacular, âcreationismâ became a subscription to a 6000â10,000-year-old earth and a literal 6-day creation. While many old-earth creationists still use the term to self-identify, they have, in recent years, admitted that the public largely associates the terms âcreationism,â âcreation science,â and âscientific creationismâ with young-earth flood geology, with the latter two admittedly interchangeable by their own proponents.11 But this does little to explain why, in the face of overwhelming mainstream scientific consensus, it continues to be an active deterrent against the acceptance of evolutionary theory within evangelicalism. Unless the idea of âcreationismâ is re-examined in the context of its social function, it is unlikely that anything new will be gained from continued scholarly exploration of the communities involved. Such re-examination is not a commentary on the shortcomings of previous scholarly works, but simply a tilting of the lenses through which these communities are viewed, in order to gain a more complete picture.
Interpretations of Genesis and Creationist Kinds
Modern-day creationismâs origin among Seventh-Day Adventists tells a corollary tale about how denominations tend to have similar beliefs about the beginning and end o...
