Some will tell you that the culture wars began in the 1960s battles over sex education or the 1970s abortion fights. I’m convinced that the origins of today’s red-versus-blue troubles lie in the theological feuds of the seventeenth century. That’s when the ancestors of today’s evangelicals developed a powerful—and intellectually hazardous—way to defend their interpretation of scripture against empirical evidence. 

The Texas textbook wars have finally yielded a win for the Enlightenment. In November, the state school board delayed final approval of a biology textbook that explains evolution as fact, but last month an expert committee overruled all objections and gave the book the green light for sale to the state’s public schools.

When Ide Trotter, a member of the board’s initial review panel, objected to Texas schools’ adoption of Biology on grounds of the book’s confident description of evolution, he expressed the views of many Americans. Either one third or nearly one half of all Americans deny evolution, depending on whether you favor Pew or Gallup poll results. Pew’s most recent study indicated that white evangelical Protestants make up a significant portion of that figure: 64 percent say they believe that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Survey results like this are enough to convince many observers that conservative evangelicalism is an anti-intellectual faith with no respect for modern science. But is this a fair charge? The truth is that the cultural power of the creationist movement—and creationism’s more respectable cousin, intelligent design—began in a particular corner of the evangelical community, at a particular moment in history, among thinkers who did not speak for all evangelicals. The story of how a small number of obscure theologians developed a theory of biblical authority that still shapes polls and educational debates centuries later tells us something about the power of ideas—and the intellectual diversity of a community ruled, supposedly, by the Bible alone.

Trotter is not the anti-science hayseed that liberals might expect. He is a former chemical engineer with a PhD from Princeton. (He worked for Exxon for many years; his other beef with the textbook was its account of manmade climate change.) Trotter is also a deacon at First Baptist Church of Dallas, an influential Southern Baptist megachurch and a longtime bastion of fundamentalist religion. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist, has called evolution a “myth” and a “religious philosophy that makes no allowance for God in either the origin of life or the diversity of life.” According to the church’s articles of faith, the Bible is “inerrant and infallible.” This seems, at first, to be an obvious point. Don’t all conservative Christians think the Bible contains no error? Yet the doctrine of “biblical inerrancy”—whose rule has extended beyond the evolution debates to disputes over gender roles, homosexuality, and nearly every other corner of the culture wars—is not as straightforward as it appears.

Some will tell you that the culture wars began in the 1960s battles over sex education or the 1970s abortion fights. I’m convinced that the origins of today’s red-versus-blue troubles lie in the theological feuds of the seventeenth century. That’s when the ancestors of today’s evangelicals developed a powerful—and intellectually hazardous—way to defend their interpretation of scripture against empirical evidence. The basic idea of biblical inerrancy is ancient. Christians have always been eager to defend the Bible as a source of perfect truth. But they did not necessarily use scripture to explain the intricacies of the natural world.

The Protestant Reformer John Calvin believed that God created the earth in six days, but at the same time he discouraged Christians from trying to extract scientific details from the Bible: “Nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world,” he wrote in his commentary on Genesis. “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.” A couple of generations later, conservative Protestant theologians—mostly Reformed Christians who followed the teachings of Calvin and his colleagues—found themselves hemmed in by intellectual challenges on both sides. Catholic theologians critiqued Protestantism using the relentless logic of scholastic theology, while philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment debunked Christ’s miracles.

These embattled Protestants responded by trying to out-rationalize both the scientists and the scholastics in order to solve the great epistemological problem of modern times: to keep faith and reason fused as one single way of knowing the world.  This same problem animates the creationist/evolutionist fight today. “It comes down to how we know things,” said Robert Sloan, president of Houston Baptist University. “Ever since the scientific revolution, the approved way of knowing has been limited to a kind of positivism, a scientistic model which by definition brackets out larger questions of meaning and God’s interaction with the world.”

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