Deception by Design

The Intelligent Design Movement in America

by Lenny Flank

Posted August 20, 2006

All Rights Reserved

Dedication

To Matt Duss and Tim Rhodes, who originally leaked the Wedge Document to the Internet. They did far more to protect democracy than they ever could have realized at the time.

Foreword

I first became involved with the creation/evolution fight back in 1982, when several members of a local school board in eastern Pennsylvania attempted to introduce a policy requiring "equal time" for creationism and evolution. A local coalition of teachers, clergy, and business leaders formed to oppose the move, and the policy was dropped. By the time the "intelligent design" movement appeared in the mid-90's to replace creation "science" as the spearhead of anti-evolutionism, I was an active contributor to the Talk.Origins Internet newsgroup, the webmaster for the "Creation 'Science' Debunked" website and, within a few years, had formed the DebunkCreation email list, which quickly gained the largest membership of any evolution/creation list at Yahoogroups. Just before the "intelligent design" trial in Pennsylvania, the DebunkCreation group raised money from activists all over the world to purchase and donate a total of 23 science books, including several that were specifically critical of ID, to the Dover Senior High School Library. Since then, I have also been a regular commentator at the well-respected Panda's Thumb blog, which serves as a nerve center for anti-creationist and anti-ID activists, and I am a founding member of Florida Citizens for Science, which acts as a pro-science anti-creationism watchdog in the Sunshine State.

This book has one very clear objective in mind -- to present a history of creation "science" and its latest reincarnation as Intelligent Design "theory", and to lay bare the political and social roots of this movement. There have already been several excellent books that have dissected the scientific distortions and errors made by the creationist/ID movement and the devastating effects they would have on science education. This book aims to go beyond that, and to instead examine the underlying social/political aims of creationism/ID. It is impossible to fully understand the anti-evolution movement in the US without looking at the political Christian fundamentalist movement of which it is a larger part, and for which it has been selected as the "wedge issue". As a longtime grassroots activist, with decades of experience in the environmental, antiwar, labor and consumer rights movements, I have come to view the ID/creationists as a well-defined political movement, with carefully selected theocratic political goals, and a well-financed deliberately-planned strategy to implement them.

It is my opinion that the ID/creationists (along with the rest of their Religious Right companions) represent, in their attempts to re-mold all of American society in accordance with their own narrow sectarian beliefs, the single greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the United States today.

Introduction

For most of the world, the controversy over creation and evolution was settled way back in the 19th century, after the theory of evolution was presented in a paper by Charles Darwin to the Linnean Society in July 1858. During the five-year around-the-world trip of the Royal Navy ship Beagle, Darwin had collected a variety of specimens from South America and across the globe, including the various finches that inhabited the Galapagos Islands and which now bear his name. Darwin's study led him to conclude that species were not, as was generally accepted at the time, fixed and immutable, but changed over time to become entirely new species, through the process of natural selection. Although he had written about the evolution of species in private notebooks as early as 1844, Darwin did not publish his ideas at first, knowing that they would be highly controversial. Instead, he wrote detailed studies of coral reefs, volcanic islands, and geology -- work which placed him among the best-known and most highly regarded naturalists in Britain. Darwin's hand, though, was forced in 1858, when another naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, working in southeast Asia, independently formed the same idea of evolution through natural selection, and wrote to Darwin asking for his opinion about it. Darwin and Wallace jointly submitted their papers to the Linnean Society, and Darwin followed up the next year with On the Origin of Species, which spelled out his ideas with detailed supporting arguments and evidence.

Within the space of a few years, Darwin's theory of evolution was accepted almost universally by the scientific community. Conservative religious groups, however, particularly in the United States, were outraged by the idea. The wave of religious opposition to evolution peaked in the United States in 1925, when Clarence Darrow eviscerated William Jennings Bryan in a country courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, in the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial". The anti-evolution movement fell to virtually nothing after Scopes.

After decades of quiet, however, the creationist movement surged back into prominence in the 1980s, when the fundamentalist Religious Right took up the anti-evolution cudgel, and allied itself with the conservative elements of the Republican Party to form a powerful political constituency that has dominated American politics for the past 25 years. During this time, anti-evolutionists, first under the name "creation scientists" and then later as "intelligent design theorists", waged pitched battles against evolutionary science, culminating in a series of Federal court fights in Arkansas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. In Arkansas in 1982, a Federal judge ruled that teaching creation "science" was an impermissible violation of the Constitution, a ruling that the Supreme Court echoed in a 1987 case from Louisiana. Within a few months of the Supreme Court ruling, creation "science" was transformed into Intelligent Design "theory" (ID), and the effort to depose Darwin began anew. In 2005, a Federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that ID was nothing but creation "science" renamed, and was unconstitutional to teach. Nevertheless, the campaign against the theory of evolution continues, and new courtroom battles are already shaping up in Kansas and elsewhere.

The popular image of intelligent design/creationists tends to picture a group of rural hayseeds with not much education, who continually thump the Good Book as they speak. This image is completely wrong. Modern anti-evolutionists are very slick, tend to be quite well-educated, and are very well-versed in the tactics of sophistry and debate. Their "scientific" arguments, while nonsensical, are very intricate and detailed, and certainly sound convincing to people who do not have enough scientific knowledge to make a good judgment (such as local school board members). The ID/creationist movement is well-organized, well-financed, and is fanatically dedicated. They also exercise an enormous amount of political influence at the federal, state and local levels.

Although the stated aim of the ID/creationist movement is to oppose what they see as the "godless theory of evolution" and to, quite literally, change the definition of "science" to include the religious and to make science "theistic", it must be recognized that the evolution/creation debate is, at core, not really about science or education. The creationists are not concerned in the slightest about scientific questions, or about correctly interpreting data, or about forming better explanations and understanding of the natural world. Instead, creationism/ID is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fundamentalist Religious Right -- it is a religious and political movement, not a scientific one, and its goals are entirely religious and political, not scientific. The ID/creationists are a part of a larger political movement with radical theocratic aims, and their anti-evolution and anti-science efforts are, as they themselves declare, simply the "wedge issue" which they have chosen in order to gain entry for their wider anti-democratic political agenda. Indeed, the most prominent "intelligent design" group in the United States today, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, is largely funded by a single extremist Christian fundamentalist billionaire who, for 20 years, preached the Taliban-like idea that the US should repudiate the Constitution, dismantle the wall between church and state, and place the country completely under "Biblical law", to include such Biblical imperatives as stoning sinners and executing nonbelievers or heretics.

What is evolution?

The word "evolution" actually means two quite distinct and separate things (and it is a favorite ID/creationist tactic to attempt to blur the distinction between the two). On the one hand, "evolution" means simply that organisms have changed over time, that some organisms have disappeared from the planet and have been replaced by other organisms that did not exist before. In this sense, "evolution" is not a scientific theory or hypothesis; it is an observable fact, in the same way that the life cycle of a frog is an observable fact. The fossil record is very clear in indicating that organisms once existed which no longer exist (dinosaurs, trilobites, pterodactyls, mastodons), and that organisms exist now which did not exist in earlier geological eras (humans, chimps, white-tailed deer, viperine snakes).

On the other hand, "evolution" is also the word used to indicate the scientific theory of how this process of organism replacing organism occurred. In this sense, "evolution" is not an observable fact; it is a scientific model (more later on the definition of a "model") which purports to explain the fact of evolution (changes in species through time).

Most of the time, when a scientist speaks of "evolution", he or she is talking about the currently accepted model of the process through which organisms have changed over time, not about the actual existence or nonexistence of such change itself. The creationists, on the other hand, like to interpret various scientific criticisms of some aspects of the evolutionary model as an attack on the concept of evolution itself. It is important to recognize that scientific arguments over how evolution happens are not the same as arguments over whether evolution happens. While biologists often engage in scientific argument over how particular aspects of evolution operate, there is no scientific dispute at all that life evolves, and evolutionary theory forms the bedrock of all modern life sciences.

The currently-accepted scientific model of evolution was first laid out in Darwin's book On The Origin of Species Through Natural Selection. The Darwinian theory of evolution can be summed up in a number of simple postulates:

1. The members of any particular biological population will differ from each other in minor ways, and will have slightly differing characteristics of construction and behavior. This is the principle of "variation".
2. These variations can be passed from one generation to the next, and the offspring of those possessing a particular type of variation will also tend to have that same variation. This is the principle of "heritability".
3. Certain of these variations will give their possessor an advantage in life (or avoid some disadvantage), allowing that organism to obtain more food, escape predators more efficiently, or gain some other advantage. Thus, those organisms that possess such a useful variation will tend to survive longer and produce more offspring than other members of that population. These offspring, through the principle of heritability, will also tend to possess this advantageous variation, and this will have the affect of increasing, over a number of generations, the proportion of organisms in the population which possess this variation. This is the principle of "natural selection".

These principles are combined to form the core of the evolutionary model. The Darwinian outlook holds that small incremental changes in structure and behavior, brought about by the natural selection of variations, produce, after a long period of time, organisms that differ so greatly from their ancestors that they are no longer the same organism, and must be classified as a separate species. This process of speciation, repeated over the 3.5 billion year span of time since life first appeared on earth, explains the gradual production of all of life's diversity.

In recent years, two new theories have been widely accepted which complement the traditional Darwinian theory of evolution. The first of these is "punctuated equilibria", a theory set forth by Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge in the early 1970s. The original Darwinian theory holds that the incremental changes which produce a new species occur throughout the entire population of the "parent" species, and that the entire population gradually becomes replaced by the new species, a scenario known technically as "sympatric speciation" (sympatric means "same place"). In 1972, Gould and Eldredge proposed that the majority of speciations take place not in the entire population of the parent species, but within a small, geographically isolated portion of it. After this isolated transition to a new species has taken place, the new species moves outward from the area of its birth to replace the older species throughout its range, either by outcompeting it or by moving into a niche that is left empty by the subsequent extinction of the older species. This scenario is known as "allopatric speciation", from the words for "different place".

Gould and Eldredge pointed out that an allopatric mode of speciation, in which the evolutionary transition from one species into another takes place only in an isolated geographic area and over a relatively short period of time, would necessarily limit the number of such transitional fossils that would be found by paleontologists, since these transitional populations would be extremely limited in both space and time, and would not be found unless they were preserved as fossils (itself a rare occurrence) and also unless a fossil hunter happened to stumble onto the specific area where such a transition had taken place (Gould and Eldredge did manage to describe one such area--a single small quarry in New York which illustrated the transition from one Phacops species of trilobite to another; the lower levels contained the parent species of trilobites, the upper levels contained the new species, and in between were a series of transitions leading from one to the other).

Another theory of evolution is called "genetic drift", "neutralism" or "nonadaptive evolution". In the Darwinian view, all of an organism's traits are the result of natural selection, which continuously weeds out unsuitable variations and selects suitable ones to be retained in the next generation. However, in at least some instances, the presence of a particular genetic trait may be solely the result of chance. In a small population in which a portion of the members possessed one trait and a portion possessed another, it is possible for an accidental set of circumstances such as a disease or natural disaster to wipe out all of those possessing one of these traits, leaving only one trait left. Thus, this trait would be retained not through natural selection, but solely because of fortuitous circumstances. The most devastating of these circumstances are the periodic mass extinctions which have occurred throughout earth history -- at least one of which, the Cretaceous extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, was caused by a huge extraterrestrial rock that impacted the earth near the present-day Yucatan peninsula. Under these extreme circumstances, it may be nothing but blind chance that determines which species are wiped out and which are left. This is often referred to as "survival of the luckiest".

There also seem to be a large number of traits which are equal in their "fitness"; none has any selection advantage over the others. In this manner, these traits are said to be "neutral" -- they are neither selected for nor selected against, and the proportion of one trait to another in a population can change haphazardly through purely statistical variations.

Neither the punctuated equilibria theory nor the neutralist theory replaces the Darwinian theory of gradualist natural selection, nor does either consider the Darwinian theory to be "wrong". Rather, both processes are complementary to the Darwinian viewpoint, while at the same time completely separate from it. Thus, it cannot really be said that there is a single "theory of evolution"--there are in fact several. Although much scientific debate today centers around the relative frequency and importance of each of these modes of speciation, none of this debate concerns the actual existence or nonexistence of evolutionary change (although ID/creationists are very fond of citing selected quotations from evolutionary theorists criticizing this or that aspect of evolutionary mechanism theory, in an attempt to cast doubt on the entire model).

It is also important to note here that evolution as a scientific model is completely silent on the ultimate origin of life on earth; although the evolution model asserts that all life is descended from some common source (which may have been a single original organism, or may have been a number of different organisms which appeared at more or less the same time), the model itself has nothing to say about the process through which this original organism or organisms appeared on earth --evolutionary mechanism theory is only concerned with the question of how life can be transformed into new forms of life. There is no evolutionary theory concerning the original development of life from non-living chemicals, since this topic falls outside of the framework of the evolutionary model. The question of origins belongs to an entirely separate biological discipline known as "abiogenesis", which is the province of bio-chemists rather than of evolutionary biologists. In the same vein, the evolution model has nothing whatsoever to do with astronomy or cosmology, and is completely silent about the original formation of the universe.

And, like any other scientific model (gravity, relativity, quantum physics, molecular chemistry), the evolution model presents no moral, religious, ideological, economic or political agenda. Evolution theory does not posit any way that humans "should" act, or any assertions about how society "should" be organized, any more than does the theory of relativity or the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Science is a method; it is not a worldview, not a way of life, and not a philosophy. Science is something one does, not something one believes in.

Evolutionary theory does not assert that history (either human or biological) is inevitably "progressive", moving inexorably from "good" to "better"; all organisms alive today have evolved just as far from life's common ancestor as has any other, and all have reached a level of evolutionary "fitness" to survive and reproduce in their environmental niche. No organism can be viewed as being "more evolved" than any other -- they have all simply evolved in different directions. The process of evolution is totally ad hoc and nondirectional.

Neither does the history of life move from "less complex" to "more complex" -- parasites continually evolve that lose significant portions of their anatomy and are simpler than their hosts, while in the biochemical sense, all the most complex evolution happened in life's earliest stages, three billion years ago, as one-celled organisms. Once multi-cellular animals appeared half a billion years ago, in the pre-Cambrian period, the biochemical story of life became rather routine; life since the pre-Cambrian has consisted largely of relatively simple variations on the same biochemical theme.

ONE: A History of Fundamentalism

In order to fully understand the creation science/intelligent design movement, we must look at the larger movement of which it is a part -- the fundamentalist Christian religious crusade in the United States -- and how the ID/creationists fit into this.

Christian fundamentalism is almost uniquely an American phenomenon. Although most of the development of fundamentalist thought occurs in the United States, this phenomenon was itself, originally, a reaction to a series of intellectual trends that happened in Europe.

From the time of the earliest Christian church in the first century CE, to the time of the European Enlightenment, the dominant view was that the Bible had been directly revealed by God to a small number of authors. The first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), were, according to tradition, all written by Moses during the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai desert.

One of the first criticisms of the traditional view of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was made in Germany in 1520, when the Reformation scholar Carlstadt wrote an essay pointing out that the description of Moses's death (Deuteronomy 32:5-12) shared several literary characteristics with portions of the rest of Deuteronomy. Since, Carlstadt pointed out, Moses could not have written of his own death, he concluded that the same person had written both sections of the book, and that person could not have been Moses. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes, in his book Leviathan, also concluded that several portions of the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses. In support of his hypothesis, he cited several Biblical verses which referred to events that happened after Moses's death. Twenty-five years later, the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza concluded that not only had Moses not written the Pentateuch, but much of the rest of the Old Testament was not written by a single person either, and was probably edited together from pre-existing manuscripts.

The first serious attempt to examine the matter took place in 1753, when a French doctor, Jean Astruc, published a pamphlet (anonymously) titled Conjectures on the Original Documents That Moses Appears to Have Used in Composing the Book of Genesis. Astruc pointed out that many of the incidents and events described in Genesis were "doublets", that is, they often were described twice in back-to-back accounts that differed in details. There are, for instance, two different accounts of the creation story in Genesis 1 and 2, and two different accounts of the Flood story in later chapters. The presence of these repeated but different accounts, Astruc concluded, didn't make sense if, as tradition held, Genesis was a single narrative written in complete form by a single author.

To explain the presence of these doublets, Astruc proposed what later became known as the "Documentary Hypothesis". Using the techniques of literary and textual analysis that had already been used for secular literature, Astruc compared the wording and style of various passages in Genesis and concluded that there were two distinctly different accounts in Genesis which, based on differing literary conventions, were written by two different authors at different times, and then later combined into one book. One of these accounts consistently referred to God as "Elohim", or "The Lord", while the other account consistently referred to God by the name "Jehovah". Astruc labeled these two different sources as "A" and "B".

Within a short time, a group of German scholars expanded upon Astruc's ideas, and produced a school of Biblical study that became known as "Higher Criticism". By taking the linguistic/textual analysis done by Astruc and applying it to the rest of the Old Testament (which also contained doublets or even triplets -- there are for instance three different versions of the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy), the German scholars Eichhorn, Ewal, DeWette, Graf and Wellhausen identified four different sources for the Old Testament. One of these source documents always referred to God by the name "Jehovah", and therefore was labeled the "J" source. The J source was also distinguished by the particular words it used to describe the pre-Israeli inhabitants of the Promised Land, and tended to depict God in anthropomorphic terms. From implicit political assumptions made in the descriptions, it is apparent that the J source was identified with the Aaronid priesthood which was centered in Judah. The second identified source always referred to God as "Elohim", and was called the "E" source. The E source used different words to describe the pre-Israeli inhabitants of the Holy Land, and also tended to avoid anthropomorphic depictions of God. The political opinions implied in the account suggest that this source was allied with the Shiloh priesthood in Israel. The book of Deuteronomy had linguistic styles and topics that did not match either the J or E source, and thus was identified with a different source "D". Literary similarities led to the conclusion that the D source had also written the books of Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, and First and Second Kings. Since the D source makes references to material found in both the J and E source, it was concluded that it had been written later. Finally, there is a fourth source text that seemed to be most concerned with details of rituals and the conduct of priests, as well as a penchant for long lists of dates and geneologies. This has been labeled the "P" source (for "priestly"). This is the source for the detailed laws of Leviticus. The P source is generally held to have been the most recent, chronologically. All of these varying sources were later edited together into their final form by an unknown person or persons known as the Redactor, who probably performed this task in about 400 BC. This view, known as the Documentary Hypothesis, is still held today by most Biblical scholars.

When the Documentary Hypothesis entered the United States during the late 19th century and became widely accepted (under the name "Modernism"), it exploded like a bombshell among the conservative elements of the Protestant churches. Not only did the German school reject the traditional idea that the Pentateuch was the work of a single author who had recorded the words dictated by God, but it concluded that the Bible itself was a collection of different documents by different authors, each with differing theologies and motives. The American conservatives flatly rejected the idea of a Bible that was pieced together years after the events which it describes. William Jennings Bryan, one of the most prominent Christian conservatives, thundered, "Give the modernist three words, 'allegorical,' 'poetical,' and 'symbolically,' and he can suck the meaning out of every vital doctrine of the Christian Church and every passage in the Bible to which he objects."

In response to the Modernist Higher Criticism, conservative Protestants in the United States met, in the Niagara Bible Conference in1897, to hammer out a counter-theology, a process that continued within several of the conservative Protestant denominations for over a decade. By 1910, the conservative traditionalists had settled on a set of five principles which, they argued, defined Christianity. These were (1) the inerrancy of the Bible, (2) the Virgin Birth and the deity of Jesus, (3) the belief that Jesus died to redeem mankind's sin and that salvation resulted through faith in Jesus, (4) the physical resurrection of Jesus, and (5) the imminent Second Coming of Jesus. Between 1910 and 1915, a series of twelve booklets were published, titled The Fundamentals; A Testimony to the Truth, containing 94 articles by 64 authors, setting out and defending these principles. The introduction to the first volume declared, "In 1909 God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free of charge to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday school superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world." From these booklets, the conservative Christians became known as "the fundamentalists". Financed by the wealthy oil businessmen Milton and Lyman Stewart, some 3 million copies of The Fundamentals were printed. In 1919, the World Conference on Christian Fundamentals met in Philadelphia. At around the same time, the Moody Bible Institute was formed to publish fundamentalist defenses of Biblical inerrancy, and fundamentalist theologian Cyrus Scofield published an annotated Reference Bible, with margin notes defending literalist interpretations of Biblical passages. The fundamentalist conviction that they alone were the True Christians led to a long series of bitter fights with other Christians, as fundamentalists sought to take over as many theological institutes as they could in order to purge them of "modernists" and "liberals".

In addition to the five Biblical "fundamentals", the conservative Protestants also came to largely accept and embrace a number of other concepts that had not previously been a tenet of any of the major Christian denominations. These included (1) exclusivity, the idea that only the fundamentalists are able to authoritatively interpret the "true meaning" of the Bible, and thus are the only legitimate "True Christians", and (2) separation, the idea that not only are any other Christian interpretations (Catholic, liberal churches) utterly wrong, but it is the duty of fundamentalists to oppose and overcome them, while remaining apart from their corrupting influence. These characteristics, indeed, have today come to be almost the defining characteristics of any "fundamentalist" church.

The majority of the essays included in The Fundamentals were attacks on Higher Criticism, and defenses of an inerrant Bible that was to be taken as literal history and revelation. Other essays attacked the idea of the "Social Gospel", in which many liberal Christians asserted that Christians should ally with other social groups and become active in political movements to improve the living conditions for all humans. The fundamentalists rejected this idea, arguing instead that, since the Second Coming was imminent, the only task of the church should be to save as many souls as possible in the short time left before the world came to an end. The fundamentalists also did not want to associate with what they viewed as heretical and apostate liberal Christians.

It was the third major target of the fundamentalists, however, which ignited a conflict that continues to this day and is the direct ancestor of the creationist/intelligent design movement -- the political campaign targeting science, and, in particular, evolution.

In the years after Darwin first published On the Origin of Species, there was, as Darwin had expected, a storm of criticism from European religious figures who viewed the idea that humans had descended from animals as a direct attack on the Bible. Anglican Bishop Sam Wilberforce, in a public debate with evolution-supporter Thomas Huxley, famously asked if it was on his father's side or mother's side that Huxley claimed descent from apes. In a remarkably short time, however, religion had made its peace with Darwin, and by 1900, nearly every religious authority in Europe accepted the conclusions of science, just as it had accepted the conclusions of the Bible's literary scholars concerning the Documentary Hypothesis.

In America, however, the situation was quite different. The fundamentalists rejected evolution and the scientific outlook with all the fervor and vitriol that they had aimed at the German Biblical scholars. Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen declared, "The root of the movement (liberalism) is one; the many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism -- that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity . . . our principle concern . . . is to show that the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene. In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend...The plain fact is that liberalism, whether it be true or false, is no mere 'heresy' -- no mere divergence at isolated points from Christian teaching. On the contrary it proceeds from a totally different root, and it constitutes, in essentials a unitary system of its own . . . It differs from Christianity in its view of God, of man, of the seat of authority and the way of salvation . . . Christianity is being attacked from within by a movement which is anti-Christian to the core." Tent revivalist Billy Sunday referred to evolution as a "bastard theory" which was supported only by "hireling ministers".

Fundamentalist religious organizations formed alliances with conservative lawmakers to pass "monkey laws" -- laws which made it illegal to teach evolution -- in almost half of the states. In 1928, for instance, the state of Arkansas passed a law (by referendum) making it illegal to teach "the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals." (Arkansas Initiated Act 1, 1928, cited in Eldredge 1982, p. 15 and LaFollette, 1983, p. 5) Another such law was the Butler Act, approved by the Tennessee state legislature in March 1925. The Butler act stated: "It shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." (Butler Act, Tennessee State Legislature, 1925)

The American Civil Liberties Union decided to challenge the constitutionality of the new Tennessee law, and announced that it would defend any teacher who would intentionally violate the Butler Act to produce a test case. In Dayton, Tennessee, biology teacher John T Scopes volunteered, probably with the encouragement of local officials who wanted to generate some publicity. William Bell Riley, the founder and president of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, asked William Jennings Bryan (a populist political figure and three-time Democratic Party candidate for President) to join the legal team defending the Butler Act, which in turn led Clarence Darrow, one of the most prominent lawyers in the US, to join the Scopes defense team. The result was the Scopes Monkey Trial, perhaps the most famous court proceeding in American history. Amidst the carnival-like atmosphere (aided by the acid commentary of widely-read journalist HL Mencken), the trial degenerated into an attack and counter-attack concerning the influence of fundamentalism on science and education. Bryan himself took the stand as an "expert witness on the Bible", and was grilled by Darrow for two hours concerning his fundamentalist interpretations:

"DARROW: I will read it to you from the Bible: "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?

BRYAN: I believe that.

DARROW: Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?

BRYAN: No, sir.

DARROW: Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?

BRYAN: No, sir. I have no way to know. (Laughter in audience)." (Scopes trial transcript)

Bryan thundered that Darrow's only purpose was "to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible", leading Darrow to shoot back, "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." (Scopes trial transcript)

Although Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution and was fined $100, the case was overturned on appeal due to a technicality, robbing the ACLU of its chance to take the matter to the Supreme Court. For the fundamentalist movement, however, the Scopes trial was a disaster. Sarcastic newspaper articles, by Mencken and others, as well as novels such as Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, depicted fundamentalists as uneducated hicks and backwoods country bumpkins. The political victories won by the fundamentalists, including the monkey laws, died within a few years. The infighting within seminaries and theological institutes between fundamentalists and modernists led to a steep decline in students training for the clergy, and a sharp decrease in church memberships. By the time of the Great Depression in 1929, fundamentalism was all but dead as an effective social or political movement.

After the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union revived the fundamentalist's fortunes. The atheistic Leninists who ran the USSR were a convenient enemy for the fundamentalists, and they quickly entered into alliances with right-wing anti-communist political figures. The era of rampant McCarthyism was a fertile breeding ground for fundamentalist theology, and gave fundamentalists a measure of political influence that they had not enjoyed for decades. It was not until the mid-1970s, however, that the fundamentalist wing of Christianity began to make political influence an aim in itself, and actively sought to use the power of right-wing politicians to enforce their fundamentalist religious and social opinions onto the rest of society. This marked the rise of the Religious Right, the immediate ancestors of the ID/creationists.

Like the fundamentalist movement of the 20s, the Religious Right was a reactionary response to social changes which they found religiously objectionable and intolerable. The late 1960s were a time of intense and far-reaching social change in the US. Within the space of ten years, a new generation had placed all of the traditional American social structures under critical examination, and found them wanting. The civil rights movement broke down traditional social roles and also led to the renewed rise of the Social Gospel advocates, who advocated that Christians work together to improve social conditions for the poor and the oppressed. During the 60s, the anti-war and human rights movements led to questions about patriotism and the role of the US in world affairs; participatory democracy movements challenged traditional political authority; the women's liberation and gay liberation movements challenged sexual mores and family structures; interest in Eastern religious traditions led to skepticism about the role of traditional Christianity in society. All of these were anathema to the fundamentalists.

Fundamentalist hostility was particularly marked towards a number of Supreme Court decisions during the period. The first of these was the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision, which outlawed segregated schools. Southern fundamentalists in particular viewed segregation as Biblically-approved, and bitterly fought desegregation and the civil rights movement. In response to the 1954 decision, many fundamentalist churches set up their own private schools, which were not subject to the Court's decision and were therefore free to continue to practice segregation. (The fundamentalist Bob Jones University would later sue the Federal government in an effort to be allowed to continue to ban Black students; after losing, BJU banned inter-racial dating among its students, a policy that was only withdrawn in the face of public disapproval in the wake of a visit by President George W. Bush in 2000.) In 1961, the Supreme Court dealt the fundamentalists another blow when, in the Engel v Vitale case, it outlawed government-sanctioned prayer in schools, saying, "We think that, in this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government." (US Supreme Court, Engel v Vitale, 1961) In 1968, the Court ruled, in the case of Epperson v Arkansas, that all of the various anti-evolution "monkey laws" were unconstitutional.

The fundamentalists saw their views as coming under attack on nearly every front. In response, as they did in the 20s, fundamentalists in the 1970s sought to gain political influence by allying themselves with politicians. In the 1976 election, presidential candidate Jimmy Carter caught the attention of fundamentalists when he spoke publicly about his religion and about being "born again". Some elements of the fundamentalists saw Carter's candidacy as an opportunity to have their religious concerns addressed, and supported Carter and the Democratic Party. It quickly became apparent, however, that Carter's policies were far too liberal to suit the fundamentalists, and they turned to the Republican Party instead.

As it happened, the right wing of the Republican Party was also looking for allies to help it defeat not only the Democrats, but also the moderate and traditional-conservative elements within their own party. The marriage was made. After the 1976 elections, Robert Grant formed a group called Christian Voice to channel fundamentalist money and votes to right-wing Republican candidates, including Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle. One of Christian Voice's most effective members was Richard Viguerie, who turned direct-mail marketing into an astoundingly effective method of raising money and informing supporters which candidates were "godly" and which weren't. After a falling-out with Grant in 1979, Viguerie left and, working together with conservative political figure Paul Weyrich and televangelist Jerry Falwell, formed the first effective national fundamentalist political organization, Moral Majority Inc. The fundamentalists were instrumental in getting Ronald Reagan elected in 1980, and have not left the fold of the Republican Party ever since. Over the next two decades, under a number of organizations such as Christian Coalition, Concerned Women of America, Focus on the Family, Coalition for Traditional Values, and Eagle Forum, fundamentalist Christians allied with the Republican Party gained unprecedented political power and influence -- which they continue to exercise under the Presidency of George W. Bush.

The Religious Right was also quick to take up the anti-evolution crusade. In late 1981, Falwell telecast an appeal for money to help defend the anti-evolution law in Arkansas -- using as the backdrop for his appeal the very same Dayton, Tennessee, courthouse in which the original Scopes trial was held. Moral Majority also ran a number of ads in various magazines to publicize the trial and raise money. One of the ads took the form of a "survey", which asked the reader (with all the appropriate catch words emphasized) to mail in a "ballot":

"Cast your vote for creation or evolution. Where do you stand in this vital debate?

1. Do you agree with 'theories' of evolution that DENY the Biblical account of creation?

2. Do you agree that public school teachers should be permitted to teach our children AS FACT that they are descended from APES?

3. Do you agree with the evolutionists who are attempting to PREVENT the Biblical account of creation from also being taught in public schools?" (TV Guide, June 13, 1981, p. A-105)

Those who sent in their "ballot" (with the proper answers checked) were put on Moral Majority's mailing list for fundraising and further anti-evolution mailings.

Falwell also turned the resources of Liberty University, a large Bible college which was wholly funded by Moral Majority, towards the fight against evolution. All students at Liberty University, regardless of major, were required to take a semester-long course in creationist biology. The state-approved teacher training program at Liberty was heavily focused on creationism. As a symbol of the close affinities between the creationists and the Moral Majority, Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell himself awarded an honorary doctorate to ICR founder Henry Morris during commencement exercises in 1989.

As researcher Philip Kitcher points out, both the creationists and the fundamentalists gained benefits from this partnership. "Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour offers a forum for broadcasting creationist ideas. On the other hand, Falwell needs concrete issues around which to build his movement." (Kitcher, 1982, p. 2) The televangelists recognized the creation "scientists" as a powerful apologetic tool to bring new people into the Christian political movement, while the creationists came to depend upon the Religious Right as a powerful political and economic ally.

Moral Majority co-founder Tim LaHaye (he later became the author of the fundamentalist Left Behind series of books) had close ties to the creationists. In his influential fundamentalist manifesto Battle for the Mind, LaHaye put the fight against evolution squarely in the middle of the evangelical Christian world-view. The basic enemy of the Religious Right is something they refer to as "secular humanism", which seems to be a catch-all term for any outlook or philosophy which they find religiously offensive--everything from pornography to feminism to socialism to evolutionary science. "Most of the evils in the world today," says LaHaye, "can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV and most of the other influential things in life." (LaHaye, 1980, p. 1)

And a major component of this "secular humanism", LaHaye asserts, is evolutionary theory: "The humanistic doctrine of evolution has naturally led to the destruction of the moral foundation upon which this country was originally built. If you believe that man is an animal, you will naturally expect him to live like one. Consequently, almost every sexual law that is required in order to maintain a morally sane society has been struck down by the humanists, so that man may follow his animal appetites." (LaHaye, 1980, p. 64) LaHaye's book depicts a diagram of "secular humanism", which shows a pyramidical construction in which "evolution" rests on the base of "atheism", in turn supporting "amorality" and, at the top, the "socialist one world view" (LaHaye, 1980, p. 63)

Some of the statements made by creationists reveal the underlying connection between creation "science" and LaHaye's religious crusade against "secular humanism". "Since animals are indiscriminate with regards to partners in mating," says Henry Morris, "and since men and women are believed to have evolved from animals, then why shouldn't we live like animals?" (Morris, Troubled Waters of Evolution, 1974, p. 167) Morris declared that evolutionary theory is literally the work of the Devil -- given to Nimrod at the Tower of Babel -- and that most scientists refuse to accept creationism solely because they are atheists. Ken Ham, formerly of the ICR and now leader of the Answers in Genesis organization, says, "As the creation foundation is removed, we see the Godly institutions also start to collapse. On the other hand, as the evolution foundation remains firm, the structures built on that foundation -- lawlessness, homosexuality, abortion, etc -- logically increase. We must understand this connection." (cited in Eve and Harrold, 1991, pp 58-59) The Creation Science Research Center blamed the scientific model of evolution for "the moral decay of spiritual values, which contributes to the destruction of mental health", as well as "a widespread breakdown in law and order" (Creation Science Report, April 1976, cited in Numbers, 1992, p. 285). Evolutionary theory, the CSRC pontificated, is directly responsible for "divorce, abortion, and rampant venereal diseases." (Segraves, The Creation Report, 1977, cited in Numbers, 1992, p. 285)

The creationists and the Religious Right thus shared a world-view, a world-view that revolves around the supposed evils of evolutionary theory. Both groups see evolution as a major pillar which supports Satanic "secular humanism", and both are determined to do away with that pillar and substitute a "Godly" outlook instead -- creationism. "Although they make every effort to be diplomatic about the subject," notes writer Perry Dean Young, "the religious-right leaders are not speaking of teaching the story of the creation in Genesis alongside Darwin's theory; they want it taught instead of evolution. A headline in Religious Roundtable's newsletter that read 'Get Evolution Out of Our Schools' let that fact slip." (Young, 1982, p. 73) The creationists also occasionally let their ultimate goal slip in print too; while pushing the Arkansas "Balanced Treatment Act" through, creationist Paul Ellwanger, who drafted the original bill, wrote to a supporter, "Perhaps this is old hat to you, Tom, and if so, I'd appreciate it your telling me so and perhaps where you've heard it before -- the idea of killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already." (Attachment to Ellwanger Deposition, McLean v Arkansas, 1981, cited in Overton Opinion)

But "killing evolution" is not their only stated goal. The Religious Right is defiantly open about its ultimate theocratic political aims. As Bob Werner, a leader of the "Christian shepherding" movement, bluntly put it, "The Bible says we are to . . . rule. If you don't rule and I don't rule, the atheists and the humanists and the agnostics are going to rule. We should be the head of our school board. We should be the head of our nation. We should be the Senators and Congressmen. We should be the editors of our newspapers. We should be taking over every area of life." (cited in Diamond, 1989, p. 45) Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of Moral Majority and director of the fundamentalist Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, declared, "We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structures of this country." (cited in Young, 1982, p. 321 and Kater 1982, p. 7) Weyrich added, "We are talking about the Christianizing of America." (cited in Vetter 1982, p. 5) Randall Terry, who founded the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, put it, "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called on by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." (The News Sentinel, Ft. Wayne, IN., August 16, 1993) "This is God's world, not Satan's," declared leading fundamentalist political figure Gary North. "Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians . . . . The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant -- baptism and holy communion -- must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel." (Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism, Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, p.87, p. 102) North continues, "So let us be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will be get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." ("The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right" in Christianity and Civilization: The Failure of the American Baptist Culture, No. 1, 1982, p. 25)

As the fundamentalists pointed out, one of the most important areas in which "Christians" must "govern" are the local school districts -- and they make it clear that creationism is the issue which provided them with the opportunity to do this. As Tim LaHaye bluntly put it, "The elite-evolutionist-humanist is not going to be able to control education in America forever." (LaHaye 1980, p. 3) Pat Robertson said, "Humanist values are being taught in the schools through such methods as 'values clarification'. All of these things constitute an attempt to wean children away from biblical Christianity". (cited in Boston, 1996, p. 168)

Other fundamentalist apologists were just as clear about their ultimate goals for public education:

"Our purpose must be to spread the gospel on the new mission field that the Lord has opened -- public high schools". (Jay Alan Sekulow, American Center for Law and Justice, CASE Bulletin, July 1990)

"To abandon public education to Satan is to compromise our calling. The attitude and approach of Christians should be that they never expose their children to public education, but that they should work increasingly to expose public education to the claims of Christ. Certain specially suited Christians, in fact, should pray and work tirelessly to obtain teaching and school board and even administrative positions within public education. The penultimate goal of these Christians should be the privatization of these larcenous institutions, and the ultimate aim the bringing of them under the authority of Christ and His word." (Rev. Andrew Sandlin, Chalcedon Report, March 1994)

"There are 15,700 school districts in America. When we get an active Christian parents' committee in operation in all districts, we can take complete control of all local school boards. This would allow us to determine all local policy; select good textbooks; good curriculum programs; superintendents and principals." (Robert Simonds, Citizens for Excellence in Education, 1984)

"The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ." (D. James Kennedy, Education; Public Problems and Private Solutions, Coral Ridge Ministries, 1993)

A fundraising letter sent from the Creation Science Research Center seconded these sentiments: "We already have a state-mandated religion of atheism -- of Godlessness -- of Satanism -- and no church training of one hour a week will overcome this onslaught of anti-God teachings in the classroom. The Church must get involved." (Letter from CSRC, cited in LaFollette 1983, p. 126) Gary North frankly pointed out, "Until the vast majority of Christians pull their children out of the public schools, there will be no possibility of creating a theocratic republic." (cited in Blaker, 2003, p 187)

During the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich years, creationists were very active in state textbook committees and curriculum boards, where they attempted to pressure various states into dropping biology textbooks which feature evolutionary theory. In the late 1980s, bowing to creationist pressure, the state of Texas mandated that all biology textbooks carry a disclaimer stating that evolution is "only a theory" and "not established fact". And the GOP was quick to attempt to tap this resource. State Republican Parties in Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa all adopted platform planks which advocate teaching creationism in schools.

Even the national Republican leadership demonstrated a willingness to kowtow to the creationists. In its 1994 "Contract for America", the GOP asserted, of its proposed "Family Reinforcement Act", that it "will strengthen the rights of parents to protect their children against education programs that undermine the values taught at home" -- a code word for removing evolution, sex education, and other things which offend fundamentalist sensibilities. During the 1996 campaign, Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan appealed to fundamentalist support by attacking evolution. When asked by a commentator if he favored the teaching of creationism in public schools, Buchanan replied, "You may believe you descended from monkeys -- I don't believe it. I think you're created --I think you're a creature of God." When asked, "Do parents have the right, in your judgment, to insist, if they believe in creationism, that it also be taught in public schools?", Buchanan declared, "I think they have a right to insist that godless evolution not be taught to their children, or their children not be indoctrinated into it." Several days later, fellow GOP candidate Alan Keyes was asked about creationism and its critics. "I think they ought to take a look at our country's founding document," Keyes replied. "It says, 'All men were created', and 'endowed by their creator with inalienable rights'. . . I don't think it is only a question of Judeo-Christian beliefs. It is of American beliefs."

To the initiated faithful, the creationists also make no secret of their political goals. As Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Science admits, the ultimate goal of the creationists is to bring first science, then the rest of society under Biblical proscriptions: "A key purpose of the ICR is to bring the field of education -- and then our whole world insofar as possible -- back to the foundational truth of special creation and primeval history as revealed first in Genesis and further emphasized throughout the Bible".

In essence, the fundamentalists and their creationist allies want to do for the United States what the fundamentalist Taliban did for Afghanistan and the Ayatollahs have done for Iran -- they want to run the country in accordance with their interpretation of "God's will". As they make clear, they are perfectly willing to dismantle most of American democracy in order to save America from Satan. Rev. James Robison put it like this, "Let me tell you something else about the character of God. If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant -- a man who might not have the best ethics -- to protect the freedom and the interests of the ethical and the godly." (cited in Vetter 1982, p. 6)

In the United States, however, any such attempt to rule in accordance with any "Christian" religious doctrine runs head-on into a solid wall -- the Constitutional wall between church and state.

TWO: Separation of Church and State

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

With those words, in the First Amendment to the Constitution, the fledgling United States of America became the first nation to place into law the notion that religious beliefs were a private matter for individuals who had the legal right to freedom of conscience, and that no government had the right or authority to dictate what religious opinions people shall or shall not hold. Since then, the "wall of separation between church and state" has been a bedrock principle of democracy -- and it is this very principle that has become the focus of attack by the fundamentalist political movement in the US today. The openly-declared aim of the fundamentalist Christian movement is precisely to dismantle the wall between church and state, and to legally establish the US as a fundamentalist version of a "Christian Nation".

In order to understand the significance of the First Amendment's "establishment clause", it is helpful to look at the reasons why it was adopted, and the history that made it necessary. That history begins in Europe.

For 1500 years, the Roman Catholic Church was the only religious authority in Europe. The Papal organization had also come to enjoy a significant secular political influence, as well. By the beginning of the 16th century, the Catholic Church was the most powerful (and wealthy) organization in Europe. Not surprisingly, it had also become riddled with corruption and abuses of both religious and secular power, and these provoked criticism, opposition, and, eventually, outright rebellion.

The explosion happened in 1517, when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the door of the Wittenburg Church in Germany. The Theses protested the corruption and abuses that Luther saw in the Church hierarchy, including such practices as the sale of indulgences, the marriage of priests, and the secular power and wealth of the Pope. Three years later, Luther wrote three books which attacked the doctrine of papal infallibility and the status of priests as intermediaries between humans and God. Instead, Luther argued, every man was entitled to be his own priest, to read and interpret the Bible for himself. The resulting "Protestant" movement soon spread throughout Europe. In 1535, the city of Geneva overthrew the local prince (who was also a Bishop in the Catholic Church) and declared itself a Protestant city. In response, Protestants in Bern sent John Calvin to Geneva to help organize the new churches. Calvin followed a severely strict interpretation of the Bible, and imposed a harsh set of moral laws on the city of Geneva. The citizens of Geneva, in turn, viewed Calvin as no better than the Pope, and exiled him three years later. Calvin settled in the city of Strasbourg, where he wrote "The Institutes of the Christian Church". Along with Luther, Calvin would become one of the most influential founders of Protestant Christianity.

Calvin popularized two ideas which would later become important in Christian fundamentalism (indeed, most modern fundamentalists are heavily Calvinist in their views). The first of these was "biblical literalism", the idea that every word written in the Bible had to be followed totally and unquestioningly, and, conversely, any religious doctrine that was not found in the Bible was false and must be rejected. Calvin's second idea was that of "predestination", the idea that the vast majority of Christians would not be saved and would go to Hell, while only a tiny minority of Christians had already been selected by God to enjoy salvation. While nobody knew who had been predestined to be saved or not, Calvin asserted that, since the truly saved would naturally gravitate towards the correct Christian beliefs, his own church would be made up mostly of the selected elite. They were, Calvin declared, "living saints".

The Protestant Reformation split Europe in two, leading to centuries of political and religious conflicts. Between 1560 and 1715, there were only thirty years during which there were no large-scale wars between Catholic and Protestant rulers. In Germany, various Catholic and Protestant principalities fought each other until the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 divided Germany into Catholic and Protestant regions. In France, a Calvinist group known as Huguenots rebelled against the Catholic king. The French Wars of Religion lasted from 1562 to 1598. The climax of the French Wars of Religion was the St Bartholomew Massacre in 1572, when the French King's troops rounded up over 3,000 French Huguenots in Paris and systematically killed them all. By 1609, Europe was divided into two hostile armed camps, the Catholic League and the Protestant Union. In 1618, all of Europe was consumed by the Thirty Years War, in which Catholics and Protestant slaughtered each other on a scale not seen again in Europe until the Napoleonic Wars. The war ended in 1648, leaving Europe fragmented into over 300 different kingdoms and principalities, each with its own state religion of Catholicism, Lutheranism or Calvinism.

In England, a group known as the Puritans shrilly criticized the Church of England, which, though Protestant, was not "reformed" enough for Puritan taste. The Anglican Church itself had broken from the Catholics in 1534, when Henry VIII, angered by Pope Clement's refusal to grant an annulment of the King's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared himself the head of the Church of England, installed his own bishops and church hierarchy, and made it a crime punishable by death to refuse to acknowledge the King's supreme religious authority.

In 1603, the Puritans (who were largely Calvinists) demanded a set of reforms to be applied to the Church of England which would have imposed Puritan religious opinions onto the entire country. These proposed reforms were rejected, and under Archbishop William Laud, the Church of England attempted to marginalize and repress the Puritans -- a difficult task, since the Puritans made up a large section of the English population. The Puritans, meanwhile, viewed King Charles I with suspicion, pointing to his French wife and his reluctance to enter the Thirty Years War as evidence of his "papist" leanings. When the English Civil War broke out in 1642, the Puritans made up most of the Parliamentarian forces under Oliver Cromwell, which defeated the Royalist armies of King Charles I and beheaded him in 1649.

For the next four years, Parliament ruled England. In 1653, however, Cromwell and his army took over, disbanded Parliament ("in the name of God", he announced to them, "go"), and declared himself the "Lord Protector" of England. Until his death in 1658, Cromwell ruled as king in all but name, and placed England under the harshly strict moral code demanded by his Calvinist faith. Theaters were closed; work on the Sabbath was forbidden; even swearing was outlawed under penalty of a fine or, for repeat offenders, prison. His anti-Catholic stance prompted him to invade Ireland and "tame" it with a large force of troops. By the time he died in September 1658, Cromwell was a hated man. Within two years, England no longer had any functional central government, and in 1660, at the behest of the Army, Charles II, the son of the beheaded Charles I, was restored to the throne. In 1662, the Act of Uniformity expelled all of the remaining Puritans from the Church of England, and other laws outlawed any non-Anglican religious gatherings and required all public officeholders to swear allegiance to the Church of England.

All of this had a direct effect on what would become the United States. In 1608, a sect of Puritans, called the Separatists, were convinced that the Church of England was so corrupt that it could not be reformed, and decided to form their own church. They quickly came to the attention of Anglican Archbishop Laud's efforts to repress religious dissenters, and left England for the more religiously open Netherlands. By 1620, 88 Separatist "Pilgrims" embarked on the ship Mayflower for Delaware, in the New World, where they hoped to establish their own version of the "pure church". By mistake, they landed at a spot in Massachusetts now known as "Plymouth Rock" in December 1620. Within a few years, other Puritans had formed the Massachusetts Bay Company, which obtained a charter from Charles I (who was glad to be rid of them) for a colony in the New World. In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay colony was formed, with John Winthrop as its governor. By 1640, there were some 17,800 Puritan colonists in New England, growing to over 100,000 by 1700. The bulk of immigration from England to North America, known as The Great Migration, took place in the twelve years before the outbreak of the English Civil War. Between the English Civil War and the American War of Independence, the flow of people from England to America slowed to a mere trickle; most New Englanders in 1776 were descendents of ancestors who had come over in the Great Migration.

The Puritans who founded the New England colonies may have fled what they perceived as "religious intolerance" (it was, after all, the Puritans themselves who were attempting to force their religious extremism onto the English state), but this did not prevent them from practicing religious intolerance themselves. The Puritans believed themselves to be God's Elect, and each of their colonies was a tiny Cromwellian theocracy, ruled in strict accordance with Biblical strictures. In most respects, Puritans in America were even stricter and more harsh than their English counterparts. Although ministers were not usually members of the civil government, they exercised enormous influence, and the secular authorities scrupulously enforced Puritan religious ideals. Laws required all colony members to attend Sunday church services, and taxes were used directly for church expenses. Contrary to English law, the Puritan colonists in Massachusetts required voters and public office-holders to be Puritans, rather than Anglican -- a defiance which led the King of England to revoke the colony's charter in 1684.

Religious dissent, however, infested the Puritan colonies, and they reacted in the same manner that Cromwell did -- by repressing it. Quakers, Anglicans and other non-Puritans were denied the right to either vote or hold public office. In 1635, one of the most prominent dissenters, Roger Williams, was banished by the Massachusetts Bay colony. Williams had argued on Biblical grounds that no human government could have any power over the church, and that the Puritan theocracy was heretical. After his banishment, Williams founded his own colony at Rhode Island, and declared that the colonial government there would not support or repress any religious views, including Quaker, Jew or Anglican.

By 1776, economic and political realities had turned most of the colonies away from strict Puritan theocracy. The religious influence of the Puritans, however, continued to be evident, and after Independence was gained in 1783, many state constitutions continued to establish official religions and use public funds to support favored churches. Of the thirteen colonies, eleven had religious requirements for voting or holding public office. Massachusetts, Delaware and Maryland required all public officials to be Christians; Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, North and South Carolina and Georgia all required, more specifically, that officeholders be Protestants. Even Rhode Island, which had been founded on Roger Williams' principle of religious freedom, specified that only Protestants could vote or hold office. At this time, Protestants of various sects dominated the colonies -- the entire United States in 1780 contained only 56 Catholic churches and 5 Jewish synagogues. In the southern colonies, which had all been established by Royal Charter, the state constitutions established the Church of England as the official state church.

These official state endorsements, naturally, were opposed by members of competing sects, and after Independence, the colonies faced the question of how to placate the critics. In New England, several colonies tried to solve the problem by collecting taxes for the support of churches, but allowing each individual taxpayer to decide which church would receive his payment. This, however, produced problems of its own. The Quakers and the Baptists objected on religious grounds to any state involvement in their church, even if the state was giving the money to their own church. The colonial governments responded by allowing Quaker and Baptist objectors to apply for certificates which exempted them from paying these taxes. This, however, provoked even more problems. Members of other denominations could not object to paying these taxes unless they "converted" to Baptism or Quakerism. This led to complaints that many of the objectors weren't really Baptists or Quakers at all, which necessitated the state deciding who really was or wasn't a Baptist or Quaker, and thus "entangling" itself in delicate matters of religious doctrine.

A similar program was attempted in Virginia in 1784. After the Anglican Church was disestablished, a group of Virginian legislators introduced a proposed law that would tax citizens to support all churches in the state equally. According to the proposed law, the result would be "a General and equal contribution of the whole State upon the most equitable footing that it is possible to place it", and "would have no Sect or Denomination of Christians privileged to encroach upon the rights of another." (cited in Feldman, 2005, p 35) This proposal became known as General Assessment.

General Assessment was opposed by many prominent Virginians, including James Madison. Although proponents of General Assessment argued that the bill only supported religion in general, and was "nondenominational" and "nonsectarian" because it did not favor one religious group over another, Madison argued that this was not enough -- the state had no business supporting or interfering with religion at all:

"Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, 'that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.' The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men . . . The preservation of a free Government requires not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people. The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves. . . . Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? . . . Because the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation." (Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrance" 1785)

When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, the topic of religion, and its relation to the government, weighed heavily in the minds of the delegates. The bloody carnage of recent European history, including the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, and the English Civil War, were all directly the result of governmental support for and action on behalf of religions, and the Founding Fathers were determined that the new United States would not fall victim to the same mistakes. As Madison told the Constitutional Convention, ""Religion itself may become a motive to persecution and oppression." (http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_reli.html) Citing the English Test Laws (which required all public officials to be Anglicans), future Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, argued, "The business of civil government is to protect the citizen in his rights. . . Civil government has no business to meddle with the private opinions of the people . . . A test law (is) the offspring of error and the spirit of persecution. Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men." (cited in Kramnick and Moore, 1996, p 42)

The delegates' goal of keeping the Federal Government independent of religion was the topic of very little actual debate at the Convention. The matter of religion was only mentioned twice in the Constitution. The first reference, in Article Six, specifies that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." This was a direct rejection of the European practice (taken up by the Puritan colonies) of requiring public officials to swear loyalty to one religion or another, and to exclude any others from office. The second reference to religion is more obscure -- it occurs in the Oath of Office required of the President: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." The option to either "swear" or "affirm" the oath of office is a direct result of the delegates' desire to avoid government siding for or against any religion. Several colonial churches, including the Quakers, considered it un-Christian to "swear" oaths, and the Constitution therefore protected the right of these dissidents, as well as non-religious people, to instead "affirm" the Oath of Office in a religiously neutral or non-religious form.

When the Constitution was finished and presented for ratification, it did not contain the listing of individual rights and liberties that we now refer to as the Bill of Rights. The Framers had not thought it necessary to specifically list these, but the omission sparked a storm of criticism, including that of religious figures who were alarmed that no specific freedom of religious thought had been enumerated. Influential Baptist minister John Leland objected that the Constitution didn't specifically guarantee freedom of religion, pointing out that "if a Majority of Congress with the President favour one System more than another, they may oblige all others to pay to the support of their System as much as they please." (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06.html)

When the state legislature of Virginia ratified the US Constitution, it did so with the understanding that the new Congress would pass a bill of rights, based on twenty recommendations proposed by the Virginia delegates. One of these was that "no particular religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by Law in preference to others." (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06.html) This proposal was based on a law written by Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson was absent for the entire Consitutional Convention -- he was in France serving as Ambassador), that had been passed in Virginia in 1777, stating "our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry . . . WE, the General Assembly of Virginia, do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."

As a result of the Virginia stipulation and other criticism, the First Congress passed ten amendments to the new constitution, the Bill of Rights. And the first of these amendments took up the topic of the relationship of government to religion. Several different versions were introduced, but they were distilled down to "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", and this was the wording that was codified into the First Amendment. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.

When the new Constitution was presented to the state legislatures for ratification, it came under immediate attack by religious groups and political figures, on the grounds that it did not support religion and did not officially establish the US as a Christian nation. The "no religious test" provision in Article 6 was the object of severe criticism. A critic in New Hampshire argued that the lack of a religious test would allow "a papist, a Mohomatan, a deist, yea an atheist at the helm of government". In North Carolina, one delegate complained that "pagans, deists and Mahometans might obtain offices among us", while another delegate was terrified that "Jews and pagans of every kind" could take office. In Massachusetts, another critic declared that he hoped Christians would be voted into office, but "by the Constitution, a papist, or even an infidel was as eligible as they". In the south, the slavery issue was raised; a writer in Charleston, South Carolina, pointed out that without any religious test for office, anti-slavery sects such as the Quakers "will have weight, in proportion to their numbers, in the great scale of the continental government". A Virginia writer declared, "The Constitution is deistical in principle, and in all probability the composers had no thought of God in all their consultations." (cited in Kramnick and Moore, 1996, p 33-34)

One of the most widely read attacks on the new Constitution was a satirical pamphlet by "Aristocrotis", titled The Government of Nature Delineated, or an Exact Picture of the New Federal Constitution. In it, the writer argued that the Constitution was a godless document, written by a handful of apostates, with the express goal of stamping out religion:

"There has been but few nations in the world where the people possessed the privilege of electing their rulers; of prefixing a bill of rights to their constitutions, enjoyed a free press. or trial by jury; but there was never a nation in the world whose government was not circumscribed by religion. . . .What the world could not accomplish from the commencement of time till now, they easily performed in a few moments, by declaring, that 'no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust; under the united states.' "(Anti-Federalist #51, cited in http://www.members.tripod.com/candst/testban5.htm)

Other opponents attacked the Constitution in the same vein. In New Hampshire, a delegate to the Ratifying Convention argued that under the Constitution, "Congress might deprive the people of the use of the Holy Scriptures". In Massachusetts, another writer declared that "without the presence of Christian piety and morals, the best Republican Constitution can never save us from slavery and ruin". Other Anti-Federalists warned ominously that the godless Constitution would cause God to turn his back on the US, "because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee". (cited in Kramnick and Moore, 1996, p 35-36)

Members of several state ratifying conventions moved to change the Constitution by adding a religious test to it; all these efforts were voted down. Other states tried to add amendments banning only government establishment of a "particularly religious sect or society . . . in preference to others". (cited in Feldman, 2005, p 49)This was rejected on the grounds that it would still allow an unacceptable General Assessment type of government support for "nondenominational" or "nonsectarian" religion. The Constitution, with its explicit rejection of all governmental support for religion, was ratified in 1788, and the First Amendment banning establishment of religion was passed three years later.

Decades later, Jefferson summarized the stance of the Constitution towards religion with a famous phrase: "Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State" (Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1802).

The Courts and Church/State Issues

It is not enough, however, to consider solely what the Founding Fathers intended for the church/state relationship when they wrote the Constitution. After all, those same Founding Fathers also clearly supported and legitimized human slavery in the Constitution, as well as specifically limiting the right to vote to white male property-owners (less than five percent of the colonial population actually had the right to vote under the Constitution). In the centuries since, of course, the American understanding of civil rights and human rights has evolved, and the Constitutional status of voting rights and civil rights has changed in response. Just as no sane person would argue today that slavery should be legalized or that 95% of the US should be denied the right to vote since that is what the Founding Fathers intended, neither can we base current laws concerning the relationship between religion and state solely on the opinions of the Founding Fathers on the matter. As Chief Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1997 essay, "The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it may have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and present needs." (quoted in Washington Post, July 25, 1997, p. A1) In the years since the US was founded, several Supreme Court cases have therefore played major roles in deciding exactly where the wall between church and state lies, and how much, if any, intercourse there can be through this wall.

For its first half-century, the United States was fairly homogenous in its religious outlooks. Protestants dominated every state, and while these all squabbled with each other over doctrinal differences, for the most part they were able to live in harmony with each other. >By the second half of the 19th century, however, serious religious conflicts began to appear in the US. In the 1840s, large numbers of Catholics began emigrating to the US from Ireland. Not long after, the Mormons founded the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. Theological conflict between these groups and the dominant Protestants invariably led to both sides seeking political support for their religious views, and this ran directly into the wall between church and state.

The first major Supreme Court ruling involving church/state issues was the 1878 Reynolds v United States decision. In this case, a Mormon defendant argued that he should not have been convicted of bigamy, since his religion mandated multiple wives, and therefore the state's anti-bigamy law violated the free practice of his religion.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court noted: "Congress cannot pass a law for the government of the Territories which shall prohibit the free exercise of religion. The first amendment to the Constitution expressly forbids such legislation. Religious freedom is guaranteed everywhere throughout the United States, so far as congressional interference is concerned. The question to be determined is, whether the law now under consideration comes within this prohibition." (Supreme Court, Reynolds v US, 1878)

The Court ruled that, although people have the right to hold whatever religious opinions they like, they do not have the right to act upon them if such actions have been banned in the interests of public order or safety. "Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice? So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances." (Supreme Court, Reynolds v US, 1878)

The real basis for most of 20th century law concerning church/state issues was set by the Supreme Court in 1947, in the Everson v Board of Education ruling. In this case, a state law in New Jersey allowed state funds to be used to reimburse parents of children who had to use public transportation in order to get to school. Since a number of parents who sent their children to parochial Catholic schools were also reimbursed under this plan, a resident of New Jersey filed suit, arguing that this practice was an unconstitutional support for religion.

In its decision, the Court spelled out what has become the legal basis for every "establishment clause" case since:

"The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. . . . New Jersey cannot consistently with the "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment contribute tax-raised funds to the support of an institution which teaches the tenets and faith of any church. On the other hand, other language of the amendment commands that New Jersey cannot hamper its citizens in the free exercise of their own religion. Consequently, it cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation." (Supreme Court, Everson v Board of Ed, 1947, emphasis in original)

Oddly enough, the Court then decided, by a 5-4 vote, that the state of New Jersey had not violated this principle by using state funds to transport parochial students to their schools -- it was simply providing public transportation for all. The "establishment clause" test spelled out by Justice Hugo Black in the majority opinion, however, remains as the basis for all subsequent church/state decisions. Specifically, the Everson ruling was the basis for one of the most divisive Supreme Court cases of the 20th century, one resulting in the rise to political prominence of the Christian fundamentalist movement -- the 1962 Engel v Vitale school prayer case.

The New York Board of Regents had issued a "Statement on Moral and Spiritual Training", which recommended daily prayers at the beginning of the school day. In response, a school district in New Hyde Park, New York, instructed its teachers to lead their students in reciting, "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country" each morning.

In its 6-1 ruling, the Supreme Court flatly concluded that state-sponsored or endorsed prayer was unconstitutional and violated the Establishment Clause. "We think that by using its public school system to encourage recitation of the Regents' prayer, the State of New York has adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause. There can, of course, be no doubt that New York's program of daily classroom invocation of God's blessings as prescribed in the Regents' prayer is a religious activity. It is a solemn avowal of divine faith and supplication for the blessings of the Almighty." (Supreme Court, Engel v Vitale, 1961)

The Court concluded by saying:

"It has been argued that to apply the Constitution in such a way as to prohibit state laws respecting an establishment of religious services in public schools is to indicate a hostility toward religion or toward prayer. Nothing, of course, could be more wrong. . . . It is neither sacrilegious nor antireligious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for religious guidance." (Supreme Court, Engel v Vitale, 1961)

The Engel ruling was expanded upon in the Abington School District v Schempp case two years later. The Abington case was actually a consolidation of two different cases which dealt with the same question --- Bible readings in public schools. The Pennsylvania Abington case involved a requirement to read ten Bible verses daily at the beginning of the school day; the Murray v Curlett case involved a Maryland school requiring a passage from the Bible or the Lord's Prayer daily.

In its ruling, the Court cited the Establishment Clause principle laid out in the Engel case, and concluded "In light of the history of the First Amendment and of our cases interpreting and applying its requirements, we hold that the practices at issue and the laws requiring them are unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment." (Supreme Court, Abington v Schempp, 1963) The Court then went on to specify the "secular purpose" and "primary effect" tests to be used in Establishment Clause cases: "The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution. That is to say that to withstand the strictures of the Establishment Clause there must be a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion." (Supreme Court, Abington v Schempp, 1963)

The "purpose" and "effect" tests laid out in Abington v Schempp were expanded upon in the 1971 Lemon v Kurtzman case, in a ruling which has served ever since as the principle guideline for Establishment Clause cases. The Lemon case was a consolidation of three different cases, all of which involved state funds being used to supplement teacher salaries in non-public parochial schools. The Court, in ruling that these actions were unconstitutional, set out what has since been known as the Lemon Test, a three-pronged approach to be used in determining whether or not a law violates the Establishment Clause. As spelled out in the opinion, written by Chief Justice Burger, "First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion." (Supreme Court, Lemon v Kurtzman, 1971) If any of these three prongs is violated, the law is unconstitutional.

In a concurring opinion in the 1984 Lynch v Donnelly case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor reduced the "purpose" and "effect" prongs of the Lemon Test to the single idea of "Endorsement": "The proper inquiry under the purpose prong of Lemon, I submit, is whether the government intends to convey a message of endorsement or disapproval of religion. . . What is crucial is that the government practice not have the effect of communicating a message of government endorsement or disapproval of religion.." (Supreme Court, Lynch v Donnelly, 1984)

In recent years, the Lemon Test has come under fire, mostly from conservative-leaning scholars. Justice Antonin Scalia has been one of the fiercest critics, for instance writing, in a dissenting opinion in the June 2005 McCreary County v ACLU case, "Nothing stands behind the Court's assertion that governmental affirmation of the society's belief in God is unconstitutional except the Court's own say-so, citing as support only the unsubstantiated say-so of earlier Courts going back no farther than the mid-20th century. And it is, moreover, a thoroughly discredited say-so. It is discredited, to begin with, because a majority of the Justices on the current Court (including at least one Member of today's majority) have, in separate opinions, repudiated the brain-spun "Lemon test" that embodies the supposed principle of neutrality between religion and irreligion." (Supreme Court, McCreary County v ACLU, 2005)

Criticism of the Lemon Test has been particularly vocal from the fundamentalist Christian wing and its political supporters, who, in addition to advocating the elimination of the Lemon test, have also argued that the First Amendment does not really require that the government be neutral in matters of religion --- only that it cannot advocate preference for one view over another. As a critic from the religious magazine First Things says, "A good beginning would be to recognize that the First Amendment does not, and never did, require strict neutrality as between religion and non-religion for purposes of the Establishment Clause. Requiring the state to be neutral as between sects is both constitutionally necessary and morally desirable. Requiring it to be neutral as between religion and non-religion generally produces a decidedly unneutral result—the triumph of practical atheism in the public square." (Michael M Uhlmann, First Things, Oct 2005) This assertion is the source of the ID/creationist penchant for labeling evolution and science as "religion" or "materialist philosophy" or "secular humanism".

Fundamentalist Efforts to Undermine Church/State Separation

One of the primary goals of the fundamentalist movement in the US has been to go far beyond merely modifying the legal tests which are used to adjudicate the boundary between church and state -- they openly declare that they want to dismantle that wall completely. And in support of that goal, they have attempted to re-write history by declaring that the Constitution was intended by the Founding Fathers to set up a "Christian Nation", and that it was only after the secular humanists and atheists seized control of the Supreme Court that the concept of "separation of church and state" was allowed to interfere with the original wishes of the Framers.

That this argument is contrary to historical fact has not prevented the fundamentalists from endlessly repeating it. According to the fundamentalists, the principle of separation of church and state is illegal and communistic. Pat Robertson declared: "We often hear of the constitutionally-mandated 'separation of church and state'. Of course, as you know, that phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. . . We do find this phrase in the constitution of another nation, however: 'The state shall be separate from the church, and the church from the school.' These words are not in the constitution of the United States, but that of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- an atheistic nation sworn to the destruction of the United States of America." (Testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee, Aug 18, 1982, cited in Boston, 1996, p. 70) Robertson also said: "They have kept us in submission because they have talked about separation of church and state. There is no such thing in the constitution. It is a lie of the left, and we're not going to take it anymore." (cited in Boston, 1996, p. 71)

The Christian Roundtable, an umbrella group of Religious Right figures, flatly stated, "The Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order." (cited in Vetter 1982, p. 5) "It is time," declares the Moral Majority Report, "to reject the godless, communistic definition of separation of church and state that says there is no place for Biblical moral law in public policy." (cited in Hill and Owen 1982, p. 45) The Colorado chapter of the Christian Coalition echoed: "There should be absolutely no 'separation of church and state' in America. (cited in Boston, 1996, p. 76)

In 1995, a resolution was introduced that would add a statement to the Texas Republican Party's platform, "The Republican Party is not a church . . . A Republican should never be put in the position of having to defend or explain his faith in order to participate in the party process" (cited in Kramnick and Moore, 1996, p 19) The resolution was defeated. Indeed, by 2002, the Texas Republican Party Platform declared instead: "Our Party pledges to do everything within its power to dispel the myth of separation of church and state." At a Christian Coalition rally, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore referred to the separation of church and state as "a fable" that "has so warped our society it's unbelievable." Sen. James Inhofe called church/state separation "the phoniest argument there is." Televangelist Joyce Meyer referred to church/state separation as "really a deception from "Satan", while in 2001, Tom DeLay, former House Majority leader, called for "standing up and rebuking this notion of separation of church and state that has been imposed upon us over the last 40 or 50 years . . . You see, I don't believe there is a separation of church and state." (http://www.theocracywatch.org/separation_church_state2.htm)

The modern fundamentalists have always openly declared that they intended to create a "Christian government" that will make America "godly" again. Jerry Falwell pontificates, "I have a Divine Mandate to go into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that will save America." (cited in Vetter 1982, p. 119) Falwell made his idea of the role of government very clear: "A politician, as a minister of God, is a revenger to execute wrath upon those who do evil . . . The role of government is to minister justice and to protect the rights of its citizens by being a terror to evildoers within and without the nation." (cited in Conway and Siegelman, 1984, p. 89)

The most militant of the Ayatollah-wanna-be's are the members of the "Reconstructionist" movement. The Reconstructionists were founded by Rousas John Rushdoony, a militant fundamentalist. According to Rushdoony's view, the United States should be directly transformed into a theocracy in which the fundamentalists would rule directly according to the will of God. "There can be no separation of Church and State," Rushdoony declares. (cited in Marty and Appleby 1991, p. 51) "Christians," a Reconstructionist pamphlet declares, "are called upon by God to exercise dominion." (cited in Marty and Appleby 1991, p. 50) The Reconstructionists propose doing away with the US Constitution and laws, and instead ruling directly according to the laws of God as set out in the Bible---they advocate a return to judicial punishment for religious crimes such as blasphemy or violating the Sabbath, as well as a return to such Biblically-approved punishments as stoning. In effect, the Reconstructionists are the "Christian" equivalent of the Taliban.

Rushdooney was a guest on Pat Robertson's 700 Club several times. ICR has had close ties with Reconstructionists. Rushdoony was one of the financial backers for Henry Morris's first book, The Genesis Flood, and Morris's son John was a co-signer of several documents produced by the Coalition On Revival, a Reconstructionist coalition founded in 1984. ICR star debater Duane Gish was a member of COR's Steering Committee, as was Richard Bliss, who served as ICR's "curriculum director" until his death. Gish and Bliss were both co-signers of the COR documents "A Manifesto for the Christian Church" (COR, July 1986), and the "Forty-Two Articles of the Essentials of a Christian Worldview" (COR,1989), which declares, "We affirm that the laws of man must be based upon the laws of God. We deny that the laws of man have any inherent authority of their own or that their ultimate authority is rightly derived from or created by man." ("Forty-Two Essentials, 1989, p. 8).

The Discovery Institute, the chief proponent of "intelligent design theory", is particularly cozy with the Reconstructionists. The single biggest source of money for the Discovery Institute is Howard Ahmanson, a California savings-and-loan bigwig. Ahmanson's gift of $1.5 million was the original seed money to organize the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, the arm of the Discovery Institute which focuses on promoting "intelligent design theory". Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist who was long associated with Rushdooney, and sat with him on the board of directors of the Chalcedon Foundation -- a major Reconstructionist think-tank -- for over 20 years In 1995, Ahmanson resigned from Chalcedon, and now sits on the Board of Directors of Discovery Institute.

Ahmanson prefers to work behind the scenes, and does his best to avoid publicity and attention. By 2002, though, his extremist views were becoming more widely known in political circles, and some politicians began returning campaign contributions from him. In October 2002, the Republican candidate for Governer in Hawaii, Linda Lingle, returned a $3,000 campaign contribution from Ahmanson's Fieldstead Foundation after she learned who he was and what his views were.

The incident set off alarm bells for Ahmanson -- as his wife Roberta pointed out, "When a politician sends money back, it's serious". (Orange County Register, August 8, 2004) Ahmanson has therefore tried to backpeddle from his extremist views, and present a kinder, gentler image of himself. With his wife as his spokesperson (Ahmanson suffers from Tourrette's syndrome and avoids public speaking), he went on a media blitz to declare that he's not as nutty as he used to be in his Chalcedon Foundation days. But Ahmanson just could not bring himself to repudiate his Reconstructionist views on such things as stoning sinners: "I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony seemed to think -- and I'm not sure about this - that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned. I no longer consider that essential. It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things." (Ahmanson, quoted in Orange County Register, August 10, 2004)

Among the most prominent Reconstructionist political activists are Randall Terry (founder of Operation Rescue), Gary North (head of the Institute for Christian Economics), David Chilton (the late author of Paradise Restored), David Barton (founder of Wallbuilders), Gary DeMar (founder of American Vision), and Larry Pratt (founder of Gun Owners of America). Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books, has prominent ties to the Reconstructionists, and while he has always been coy about his own sympathies for them, he is considered by most right-wing watchers as a key part of the movement. His wife, Beverley LaHaye, is the head of Concerned Women for America.

While most fundamentalist Christian political figures disavow the radically extremist excesses of the Reconstructionists, most of them nevertheless accept the broad outlines of Reconstructionist ideas that the US is, or should be, a Christian Nation, and that national policies and laws should be based on the fundamentalist version of Biblical Christianity. Although the extremist Reconstructionists and the less radical fundamentalists start from different assumptions, the end result is the same.

But the Reconstructionists are not the only political extremists who find a level of support among fundamentalists and creationists. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, Americans learned of a shadowy network of far-right "patriot" groups at the very fringe of extremist politics, who considered themselves to be at war with the United States government. The "patriot" movement was a loose collection of anti-government activists, including tax protestors, conspiracy theorists, anti-gun-control extremists, radical anti-environmentalists, militias, and a smattering of neo-Nazis and other ultra-right political groups. Much of the movement fell under the label of "Christian Patriots", who believed that the United States had become a godless oppressor, and therefore God wanted the movement to defend themselves from this godless government and ultimately to bring about its downfall, therefore making the US godly again. The more extremist "patriots" armed themselves to form "militias". Some, but not all, of the Christian Patriots followed a particularly virulent form of fundamentalist religion called "Christian Identity", which argued that white people were the true "Chosen People" of the Bible, and that Jews, along with all of the nonwhite races, were descended from the Devil. The various neo-Nazi, Klan, and other anti-Semite and racists who embraced Christian Identity referred to the federal government as "ZOG", or "Zionist Occupation Government".

Many of the people in the 1990's Christian Patriot movement were motivated by apocalyptic fundamentalist Christian notions that the end of the world was near and that the return of Jesus was imminent. The best-known example was a group of religious extremists called the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, led by David Koresh, who stockpiled weapons and waited for Armageddon. Most of Koresh's followers were killed in a confrontation with the Federal government in 1993. The Federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed exactly two years later to the day, by militia-movement supporters Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, in retaliation for the Waco raid.

Several prominent Reconstructionists have had close ties to the right-wing "patriots". Gun Owners of America, a radical pro-gun group (which criticizes the NRA for being too tame) is run by Reconstructionist Larry Pratt, while the US Taxpayers Party, a patriot-type tax protestors organization, was founded by Reconstructionist Howard Phillips. The patriot/militia movement also generated some sympathy from several prominent fundamentalist Christians, who shared the theocratic aims of the Christian Patriots. Pat Robertson invited a guest from the Militia of Montana to serve as an "expert" for a story on the BATF and FBI that ran on The 700 Club after the Oklahoma City bombing. "A lot of it goes right back to what happened with the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver and these other people," Robertson said. "It's reminiscient of the Nazis, and something's got to be done". (700 Club, July 11, 1995, cited in Boston, 1996, p. 141) In his book The New World Order, Robertson manages to parrot virtually every one of the canards tossed around by the paranoid far-right wing of the patriot/militia movement. According to Robertson, a secret cabal of "international bankers and financiers", along with the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and various other groups, is trying to destroy Christianity, take over the world and impose a satanic "one world government". Among other things, says Robertson, these conspirators killed Lincoln, started the First World War, have taken over the world monetary system, and are using the education system to destroy morality so the US can be taken over by UN troops.

Another evangelist with ties to right-wing Christian Patriot and militia movements was Jack van Impe. On several occasions, van Impe presented "news stories" about foreign troops in the US which are training to take over the country at the behest of the UN -- a standard tale of the far right. He further stated that the armed militias were one way to counter the evils of the "one world government". Van Impe's sources for his "news stories" included The Spotlight, the publication of the anti-Semitic and racist Liberty Lobby, and the Patriot Report.

Finally, there was Chuck Missler, founder of Koinonia House in Idaho and a minister with the Cavalry Chapels in california. Missler published the newsletter "Personal Update", which used at its sources The Spotlight and the American Patriot Fax Network, run by various far-right groups. Among other things, Missler suggested that the Federal government itself blew up the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in an attempt to blame the bombing on the militia movement and discredit it.

A number of creationists also parroted a lot of standard militia and "Christian Patriot" conspiracy theories. In a "Back to Genesis" article that discusses the Pope's 1996 announcement concerning evolution, ICR's Henry Morris presents a picture that could could have come from any of a number of far-right loons and militia types. After noting that the Pope had announced that it's not ungodly to believe the theory of evolution, Morris makes the curious statement: "One cannot help suspecting that the recent spate of events and media articles 'puffing' evolution is being orchestrated somewhere to combat the modern resurgance of creationism around the world." (ICR, Back to Genesis, "Evolution and the Pope", December 1996, p. 1)

Veteran right-wing watchers will immediately recognize this schtick -- the "worldwide conspiracy to destroy god, mother and country". The Pope's pronouncement comes as no surprise to Morris, since after all, he< points out, Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest, was an early supporter of evolutionary theory. "Evolution was, to all intents and purposes," says Morris, "Teilhard's 'god', and his goal was globalism, a unified world government, culture and religion, with all religions merged into one." (Back to Genesis, December 1996)

And who is behind this "globalist conspiracy"? Morris declares: "There are more and more signs that such globalism is also the aim of Pope John Paul II and other modern liberal Catholics. If so, this publicized commitment to evolutionism would contribute substantially to such a goal. All world religions -- including most of mainline Protestantism, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism and the rest -- except for Biblical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and Fundamentalist Islam, have embraced some form of evolutionism (either theistic, deistic or pantheistic) and rejected or allegorized the true record of origins in Genesis. The Pope has participated in important meetings with leaders of Communism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Lamaism and others, as well as the World Council of Churches, the Trilateral Commission, the B'nai B'rith of liberal Judaism, and a wide assortment of still others." (Back to Genesis, Decembe