Creationism - National Center for Science Education

At the present time there is dire need for all Church and school authorities to drive this vile “doctrines of
devils” (I Tim. 4:1) out of all pulpits and classrooms, and to purge our fair land from this vileness. Let all
lovers of truth and youth unite in a holy crusade for the restoration of the Bible to its rightful place of honor
in the schools and colleges of the nation, and for the eradication of this loathsome mental leprosy which has
recently become a world calamity. Only in Christ is there healing for this deadly disease. [1924:226]
Baptist preacher J. Frank Norris of Texas called evolution “the most damnable
doctrine that has come out of the bottomless pit”; and vowed, in testimony before the
Texas legislature when it was considering a bill banning the teaching of evolution, to
resist “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism
known as evolution,” and to “drive the theory of evolution out of church and public
schools in all states” (quoted in Shipley 1927:171-172,177).
The anti-evolutionist fundamentalists were not engaged as much in a “war against
modern science” as Shipley and others have supposed, but they definitely felt they were
waging a war against something. Shipley’s War on Modern Science (1927), and, before
that, Andrew White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
(1896) and John Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1875),
exaggerated the warfare motif in more ways than one, since many theologians and
religious believers had always tried to accommodate their religion to scientific doctrines,
and even the fundamentalists considered themselves advocates of “true science” (though
they did oppose much of modern scientific theory). But in any case, the fundamentalists
themselves insisted on militant metaphors of warfare and battles to the death against
evolution and other Satanic threats to religion and society.
Meanwhile, throughout the decades which saw the spectacular rise of
fundamentalist influence and activism, George McCready Price, with his insistence on
literal, recent creationism and his re-invention of Flood Geology, was providing a
plausible-sounding basis for a “scientific” strict creationism.