American Genesis

Two decades have passed since the appearance of James Davison Hunter’s acclaimed volume Culture Wars, a seminal consideration of the American “struggle to control the family, art, education, law, and politics.” Since 1992, culture warriors have been lumped and split geographically into “red states” and “blue states,” politically into “tea partiers” and “liberals,” and theologically into “conservative” evangelicals and “liberal” secularists. The scholarly efforts to slice and dice the culture wars according to such categories as gender, race, and region continue unabated as an academic cottage industry.

Witness the latest unnecessary monograph to issue from this scholarly sausage machine, Jeffrey Moran’s slim volume assessing one perennial battlefield in the wider American culture war: the antievolution theater. Moran’s objective in American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science is to provide perspectives—particularly concerning gender, region, and race—often sidelined in other historical accounts of the “creation-evolution” debate. While books assessing the post-Darwinian controversies abound, most approach the quarrel with an arsenal of arguments mustered from science, law, theology, or philosophy. And while several excellent historical accounts have been written—none, by the way, rivaling Ronald Numbers’s definitive treatment, The Creationists—this one is tailored to view the evolution wars through the restricted lenses of gender, region, and race. Moreover, along the way Moran adds his own assessments of antievolutionism as it has evolved in various contexts, especially in that highly contested space, the American classroom.

Moran is a Harvard-trained professor at the University of Kansas and a cultural and intellectual historian with a particular fondness for sniffing out hot spots in the American culture wars. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, appeared in 2000 as Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century. In that volume, he correctly concluded that American sex education “became a potent symbol of contention in the ‘culture wars’ over the moral direction of the United States.” After surveying this ground of adolescent-development Kulturkampf, Moran turned his attention to other battlegrounds. This led him, perhaps predictably, to the Scopes trial of 1925, the event that most touched every sensitive cultural nerve of the roaring twenties, be it religious, political, educational, or scientific.

Since Edward Larson had already won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his definitive study of the trial and its legacy, there was little of substance left for historians to add. Undeterred, Moran published a little book in 2002, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, that offers college professors a useful classroom tool for teaching Scopes and its cultural contexts. He followed this with two respectable scholarly articles, appearing in The Journal of American History (2003) and The Journal of Southern History (2004), that dealt with race and regionalism as they pertained to the Scopes Trial. These articles became the basis for American Genesis, this new brief monograph of five loosely related chapters, each of which attempts to deal with an allegedly heretofore understudied dimension of what the book’s subtitle calls “the evolution controversies.” Moran asserts, reasonably, that “the fight over evolution in America has been a mirror . . . of the culture itself” (24), and he surmises that three principal features of American culture have determined the course of the nation’s antievolutionary activity: “the dominance of Protestantism, the traditions of democracy, and the unique cultural diversity of the nation itself” (17).

Sex, Region, Race

The book’s opening chapter, “Monkeys and Mothers,” considers the role of gender, asserting that opposition to evolution in the culture and the classroom was the labor of a “female-dominated reform movement that enlisted the state as an extension of maternal influence” (40). From “the crisis in sex roles” of the 1920s, during which thousands were “propelled” (38), according to Moran, into the fundamentalist ranks, through the 1970s, under the influence of Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye, “gender continued to play a critical role in the antievolution movement” (45).

If sex roles influenced the shape of American antievolutionism, so did region and race, as the second and third chapters respectively report. “Regionalism,” explains Moran, “has always been a significant factor in the struggle over evolution” (48). This was due, in no small part, to the South’s relative isolation from the influence of elite northern urban culture, university learning, and modernist theology. The connection between racial attitudes and evolutionary ideas was more nuanced. While many black evangelical preachers championed an antievolutionary biblicism, black intellectuals often embraced Darwin. These black elites discerned ways that evolutionary theory called for racial unity and undermined white racist ideology that denied the common ancestry of humans. The result was that the evolution warriors did not separate along racial lines. Instead, black intellectuals allied with white scientists against antievolutionists whose ranks included both white racists and black fundamentalists. Moran’s account is fascinating as he weaves into the discussion numerous colorful personalities ranging from H. L. Mencken to Billy Sunday and from Aimee Semple McPherson to J. Franklyn Norris.

Three Sets of Flaws

And yet, the book suffers from no fewer than three sets of flaws. First, while not devoid of archival or original research, too much of the scholarship is a rehash of other secondary literature, nearly all of it well-known to those versed in the cultural history of antievolutionism. Why, the reader might wonder, was this book needed with so much else already written? Second, for all the interesting historical generalizations and the intriguing stage appearances by crusaders from the battle’s frontline, the narrative thread is far too thin. Good history books tell a story. The reader wants to know what happens next. This volume has insufficient narrative horsepower to drive a good read.

Finally, the book has just too many mistakes. These range from sloppy inconsistencies to simple errors of fact, from glaring omissions to confused generalizations that can leave the reader wondering how much homework was left undone. Although not limited to the final two chapters, these weaknesses are most evident there. Chapter four, “Descent with Modification,” is an attempt to show ways antievolutionary tactics have evolved from Bible-based antievolutionism to “creation science” to “Intelligent Design.” Here topics range from the Dover, Pennsylvania, “Intelligent Design” school board trial to Kentucky’s young-earth Creation Museum to the “Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” which Moran gets exactly wrong, as he calls it the brainchild of “antievolutionists” (114). The final chapter, “Creationism on Campus,” ostensibly considers “the complexities of the antievolution struggle in higher education” (125) by selectively touching on or omitting key players in the recent evolution kerfuffles.

Permit an incomplete, but representative, roster of problems the reader will meet. One repeatedly encounters the term “the antievolution movement,” despite the author’s prefatory explanation that “the book refers to the antievolution ‘impulse’ rather than the antievolution ‘movement’” (x). A small point, perhaps, but it is indicative of the loose way in which labels are used. Although Moran promises that the term “creationists” will be used “to designate those who specifically disallow the Big Bang theory and evolution” (xi), the text permits readers to regard spokesmen for the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, such as Michael Behe—who affirms both evolution and the Big Bang—as a kin with their “creationist brethren.” Further, “the ID community” is referred to as a group of “Christian conservatives,” an odd moniker for a group embracing theological liberals, non-Christians, and agnostics (134). In the chapter on regionalism, Moran lumps the two separate movements of Southern intellectuals, the “Fugitives” (fl. 1921–1925) together with the “Agrarians” (fl. post-1930). The two groups, despite a few common members, were entirely distinct in time and focus, a fact one could never know from the text’s repeated confusion and misidentification the two (63, 65–66).