Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Asserting that “Darwinism degrades God and man,” Beach concludes that “The teaching
of Darwinism, as an approved science, to the children and youth of the schools of the
world is the most deplorable feature of the whole wretched propaganda” (1912:48).
Other authors included in The Fundamentals, while not addressing evolution directly in
their contributions to that series, opposed it in their other works (Pierson, J.M. Gray of
Moody Bible Institute, Bettex, Dixon, Scofield, Gaebelein).
However, the fundamentalist campaign against evolution did not really capture
the attention of the public until after The Fundamentals. When it did, fundamentalists
renounced all forms of compromise, and insisted on as strict a creationism as possible
(though even then, most felt that science proved it impossible to give up the geological
ages). Among the factors which intensified this focus on evolution were the dramatic
increase in public secondary school enrollment and the shock and horror of the Great
War.
In 1890 barely 200,000 pupils attended high school—oonly 3.8% of the nation’s
high-school-age population. This number doubled every decade up to 1920, at which
time there were 1,851,968 high-school students (E. Larson 1985:26). By the 1920s,
evolution was being introduced into many high-school curricula. As Hofstadter put it,
evolution had reached the high schools, and the high schools had reached “the people”
(1962:126). Previously, relatively few people had been exposed to evolutionist teaching,
but now, many students were being exposed to evolution in the high schools, as the
fundamentalists realized, and they quickly began to sound the alarm.
T.T. Martin, who once taught science at a Texas Baptist college, was Director
General of the Bible Crusaders of America and Field Secretary of the Anti-Evolution
League of America, was the author of Hell and the High Schools: Christ or Evolution,
Which? (1923). Martin demanded that public school boards refuse to employ “any
teacher who believes in evolution,” and that all teachers be required to attack evolution
and “expose it every time it comes up in any textbook.”
It will be shown…that the teaching of evolution is being drilled into our boys and girls in our high schools
during the most susceptible, dangerous age of their lives. .. Ramming poison down the throats of our
children is nothing compared with damning their souls with the teaching of evolution, that robs them of a
revelation from God and a real Redeemer. [Quoted in Gatewood 1969:238]
Martin flatly rejected the “whining” argument that evolution should not be banned
because doing so would violate academic freedom. Evolution eternally “damns the
souls” of those who believe it; thus, there must be no freedom to teach it.
Fundamentalists were convinced that the World War was caused by the Germans’
enthusiastic adoption of an all-encompassing evolutionist philosophy. Germany was also
the home of “higher criticism” of the Bible, and of Nietzsche (whose vision of an
“Übermensch” “beyond good and evil” and the “Will to Power” was largely
misunderstood by both the majority of his German proponents and fundamentalist
opponents). It was in the years immediately following World War One that
fundamentalism became an aggressively militant movement.
In The Menace of Modernism, W.B. Riley complained that the universities were
saturated with destructive, antibiblical German philosophy and theories (1917:90-91),
chief among them evolution.