Arguably the biggest trial of public opinion in Western history arose from the ground upon which humanity walked and into the minds of seemingly everyone. In the blink of time’s eye, the long-veiled secrets of rocks — fossils — spilled forth for all to see, humanity’s origins emerged from darkness into the light, and the Bible’s foundational Genesis creation accounts eroded and crumbled.
In 1855 — four years before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species popularized evolutionary science — and amid solid geological evidence of a very old Earth, Scientific American noted that “the age of our planet” is “a question of great importance” related to “the first chapter of Genesis.” One “class” of “divines and men of science” maintain “that all things were made out of nothing” in “six solar days” some 6,000 years ago. “Another class,” the article continued, “believe that our planet was in existence for thousands of years prior to Genesis.”
As additional geological evidence expanded the Earth’s age to millions [and eventually billions] of years, educated Christians were forced to reassess. Were the “days” of Genesis 1 long periods of time? After all, the word “yom” — translated in Genesis as “day” — could be interpreted in that manner, thereby supporting evidence of an ancient Earth.
Like many Christians caught up in the escalating tension between Genesis and science, journalist James William Buell, in his 1889 book The Living World: A Grand Pictorial History of the World’s Creatures, chose both. Extolling “the wonders of creation” over an ancient period of time as revealed by science, he acknowledged geological evidence of an old earth and the extended evolution of plants and animals, which he attributed to God’s directive. Humans, though, were “of recent origin,” as Genesis taught.
One year later, scholar C. L. Abbott published a booklet titled Evolution: True or False? Penning one of the earliest printed uses of the term “creationism” as descriptive of a formal defense of Genesis as superior to science, he dismissed the Bible-based belief system, which, in the absence of “facts, makes the absence of evidence its building material.”
With science clearly on the offensive, creationists needed help. Stepping forward to assist, theologians in the northern United States introduced “inerrancy” into public discourse. Evoking the preciseness valued by science, the term assumed a perfect God as author of a perfect biblical text literally accurate in all matters. “The evidence for evolution,” fundamentalist George Frederick Wright of Ohio’s Oberlin College declared in the early 1910s, “does not begin to be as strong as that for the revelation of God in the Bible.”
Not so fast, critics of creationism replied: Religious faith is a belief system. Believing that the Bible is perfect does not make it so. You have no evidence.
Checkmated by reality, fundamentalists turned southward to friendly legislatures and courts within the most religious section of the country: the Bible Belt. In 15 states (all but one in the South) from 1921-1929, they introduced anti-evolution bills challenging constitutional church-state separation. Three states either enacted legislation (Tennessee and Mississippi) or passed a ballot initiative (Arkansas) forbidding public school teachers from denying the biblical account of creation. Additional legislative attempts in five northern states failed to make it out of committee.
Tennessee’s 1925 Scopes trial, sensational and nationally publicized, set the tone. Pitting biblical literalism against scientific evidence, the prosecution charged John Scopes, a high school teacher, with teaching evolution in violation of the state’s newly enacted state law — the Butler Act — forbidding public school teachers from denying the biblical account of creation. As Rob Boston examines in depth in “An evolving struggle” (pages 7-10), The trial, though a win for creationism over science, was more sensation than substance.
Nonetheless, 1920s creationist fervor slowed science’s public momentum. In 1930, Maynard Shipley, president of the Science League of America, lamented that “the proponents of Babylonian–Chaldean–Hebrew mythology have made great progress during the past few years. Nothing can be taught in 70 percent of the secular [public] schools of this Republic today not sanctioned by the hosts of Fundamentalism. Even in some of the more advanced eastern and western States the free discussion of man’s origin and evolution … is taboo, except in the larger cities.”
Many school boards in the South, Shipley observed, had “passed anti-evolution rulings.” In some instances only textbooks “written in conformity with Fundamentalist beliefs” were allowed in classrooms. Numerous textbook publishers omitted “all discussion of evolution”; others produced “two editions, one for the regions where Fundamentalists are in control, the other for more intellectually matured communities.”
The September 1929 Quarterly Review of Biology, reviewing two new biology textbooks for use in public schools, noted they were “clearly … written with the statutes of Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas in mind, as well as the … Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals. The word ‘evolution’ has been carefully omitted from the index, and we have not found anything in the books which a Baptist Sunday School teacher could not reconcile with Genesis.”
As many public schools abstained from teaching evolution, scientists within the field firmed up the underlying mechanisms of evolutionary processes. Finally, driven by the late 1950s’ discovery of DNA and Americans’ fears of Soviet superiority in the space race, the teaching of evolution — the “warp and woof of modern biology” in the words of one scientist of that day — largely escaped the historical gravitational pull of fundamentalism. Many Christians, having come to acknowledge the vast contributions and value of science, no longer viewed evolution negatively.
Aghast, a new generation of white fundamentalist thought leaders renewed the battle against evolution and church-state separation — and for a white Christian nation grounded in a biblical worldview, of which Genesis was the beginning.
A fanciful 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, proved foundational to their cause. Falsely claiming that “evidences of full divine inspiration of Scripture are far weightier than the evidences for any fact of science,” the authors — the most prominent, Henry Morris, a dogmatic and racist hydraulic engineer; the other, John Whitcomb, an obscure theologian — discarded some Christians’ earlier acceptance of an “old Earth.” In their telling, the biblical flood took place about 5,000 years ago, and the Earth itself was but a few thousand years older. Echoing the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages that had pronounced as heresy the reality that the earth rotated around the sun, The Genesis Flood condemned undesirable truth, masked religious beliefs with a transparent veneer of fake evidence, and held up the Bible as the one true book of science.
Unconvinced, the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts from the 1960s onward have repeatedly swatted aside efforts to implement the teaching of creationism in public schools, a practice clearly in violation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.
Undeterred, white Christian Nationalists remain committed to forcing creationism into public school curriculum. Their anti-truth agenda is as dangerously wrong as ever. “So-called young earth creationism,” a National Public Radio podcast noted in 2024, “is a fundamental idea in Christian nationalism and one that could threaten the very foundations of scientific research if it ever becomes government policy.”
Other Christian Nationalists push equally dangerous old earth creationism under the guise of “intelligent design” — “intelligent” being a veiled reference to God as creator of all. In 2024, West Virginia’s governor signed an “intelligent design” law that could open the door to creationism being taught in the state’s public schools. Nationally, Project 2025 — the white Christian Nationalist manifesto for transforming the United States into a theocratic state — is grounded in the “Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis.” The influential creationist Discovery Institute, in sync with Project 2025, has a “Governing Goal” of replacing evidence-based science in public schools with biblical [old earth] “intelligent design theory.”
Echoing Dominionist theology that seeks to forcefully implement a theocracy in America, the Discovery Institute is determined to capture the fields of “molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities” and enact “its influence in the fine arts.” All told, the Christian Nationalist organization envisions a day when biblical creationism will “permeate” America’s “religious, cultural, moral and political life.”
Adhering to unsubstantiated religious claims is a freedom enjoyed by many Americans. Utilizing government to force one’s religious beliefs on others, however, is both tyranny and unconstitutional — as none other than President George Washington understood long ago.
Praising constitutional church-state separation and committed to protecting actual religious freedom, Washington in 1789 and in response to a letter from Baptists of Virginia — a religious minority who had suffered great persecution under the tyranny of a state church during the colonial era — was unequivocal. “[N]o one,” he declared, “would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”
Today’s Scientific American editorial team agrees. “Religious freedom — actual religious freedom — depends on preventing the incursion of any and all religious beliefs, whether they are masquerading as alternative scientific theories or blatantly evangelizing, into public schools,” the editors stated in the July 2025 issue of the storied periodical. “We must protect every child’s right to a public education that is free of religious indoctrination and prepares them to navigate the many challenges of the real world as modern science understands it.”