Scopes' Legacy of Silence

Published on January 19, 2005

“Intelligent Design” is not the child of the Christian right politicization in the 1980s, but rather the product of 80 years of quiet fundamental- ist campaigns against evolution and pressure on textbook makers and schools. Likewise, argues freethinker extraordinaire Susan Jacoby, the 1925 Scopes trial resolved nothing about the Darwin-Creationist conflict, but instead undermined attempts […]

“Intelligent Design” is not the child of the Christian right politicization in the 1980s, but rather the product of 80 years of quiet fundamental- ist campaigns against evolution and pressure on textbook makers and schools. Likewise, argues freethinker extraordinaire Susan Jacoby, the 1925 Scopes trial resolved nothing about the Darwin-Creationist conflict, but instead undermined attempts to create the type of middle-ground compromise that exists in many other countries today and convinced fundamentalists that accepting the teaching of evolution led inevitably to the weakening of faith. Jacoby smartly explores the real legacy of the infamous “monkey trial”: the alteration and censorship of textbooks to accomodate a newly-politicized group of Christian mothers; the ghettoization of evolution to a separate, optional section in many science texts; and the silencing of teachers “who know better” but are afraid of conflict with fundamentalist teachers and so avoid the subject altogether. “Only now,” writes Jacoby, “when the religious right is no longer satisfied with avoidance but is demanding that schools add anti-Darwinist intelligent design to the curriculum, are defenders of evolution fighting back against the intimidation that has worked so well since the premature declaration of the death of fundamentalism in the 1920’s.”

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