After the Monkey Trial: Evangelical Scientists and a New Creationism by Christopher J. Rios (review)

After the Monkey Trial tells the “story of Christians who remained theologically conservative, but refused to take up arms against modern science—those who sought to show the compatibility of biblical Christianity and mainstream science, including evolution” (ix). The book focuses primarily on two organizations, the American Scientific Affiliation (asa) and the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship (rscf), and the individuals associated with them who exemplified this complex negotiation between conservative Christianity and modern science. From the outset, Rios observes that academic historians of religion and science have moved beyond a conflict thesis in the past few decades. However, he states, many who have debunked science-religion conflict as a general thesis still endorse a vision of inherent conflict between “conservative Christianity and modern science” (10). In giving voice to the history of these organizations, Rios makes an important contribution to the history of evolution and religion in Britain and America.

This account of the asa and rscf is a richly detailed story of religious and organizational complexity. Debates within their own membership and with other evangelical Christians shows a diversity of theological nuance often missing from other historical accounts of evolution and religion. But the story that this book tells is broader than how these groups came into being and remained in existence despite holding unpopular positions; at its heart is the question of who gets to identify as an evangelical, as a Christian, as a creationist, and as a conservative. The asa considered itself “creationist” while accepting evolution as the means by which creation occurs. Arguing that as a result of the 1960s, “the liberal-conservative dichotomy had become the predominant dividing line in American culture” (139), Rios shows that the asa’s continued acceptance of evolution (as a mechanism of creation) caused others to view it as “liberal,” even though it had in fact hewn to the same “conservative” theology that it had advanced since its founding (this conundrum is reminiscent of the comment directed at Matthew Harrison Brady, the William Jennings Bryan-based character in Inherit the Wind: “All motion is relative, Matt. Maybe it is you who have moved away by standing still”). In his discussions about the internal debates within these organizations and evangelical communities, Rios makes only occasional allusions to the wider context of social and political issues that could help to situate this history—identifying who is moving and who is standing still. These organizations existed within, and engaged with, a wider society, but those external interactions and reactions are not often explored or explained in the book.

It begins with a history of evolutionary thought (and evangelical Christian responses to it) from the early nineteenth century, but it focuses primarily on the period from the 1940s to 1980s. Rios credits Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744—1829) with “the first viable theory of evolution,” though he treats Lamarckism as nothing more than an ultimately wrong belief in “the inheritance of acquired characteristics” (16). The view that Charles Darwin rejected both the inheritance of acquired characteristics and teleology is disputed among historians of biology, but Rios presents it uncritically. The statement that “quickly dissatisfied with Lamarckian ideas, Darwin sought a better explanation for evolution” also introduces a triumphalist and individualist tenor to this summary of evolutionary thought, reaching apotheosis with the subsequent claim that “the rediscovery in 1900 of [Gregor] Mendel’s experiments not only vindicated Darwin but also led to the emergence of molecular biology” (17, 35-36). This portrayal neglects most of the historiography of the “evolutionary synthesis,” and it elides the fact that many early twentieth-century religious arguments invoked Mendelian genetics as a refutation of “Darwinism.” Rios’ articulation of theological and exegetical differences among evangelical groups is less developed in his treatment of this earlier era than it is for the mid-twentieth century.

After the Monkey Trial concludes by suggesting that the asa and rscf’s view of “evangelical engagement with science” has come...