The goal of this chapter is to rescue the conception of the evolution-creation conflict from a realm of ideas and pull it into a social realm, replete with identities, commitments, and
relationships among people and things. This move is necessary to understand why the conflict exists at all. As the history presented in Chapter 2 demonstrated, it cannot be explained as an inevitable outcome of a clash of ideas. Furthermore, the controversy has, at least until recently, been restricted almost entirely to the United States. When I worked in Mexico, a nation every bit as “religious” as the U.S., I found myself several times in a situation in which I was explaining to someone why teaching evolution was controversial in the States. Apparent contradictions
between the creation account in Genesis and the scientific account of evolution are not necessarily obvious to people. Even in this country, where most people are aware of the controversy, there are many Christians who insist that evolution and creation are compatible.
Ultimately the conflict belongs to a particular social and political situation, which emerged in a very particular historical context, as described in the previous chapter.
Whereas chapter two focused on the historical events through which this controversy emerged over the course of the 20th Century, this chapter will focus on the quotidian phenomena associated with “beliefs” about evolution. The discourse on evolution and creation is obsessed with beliefs—of the public, of teachers, of students—and how those beliefs might change. There are many who explicitly do not want students to “believe in” or accept evolution, and thus possibly also abandon their belief in the truth of scripture. And there are those who want students to understand that the scientific evidence is strongly behind evolutionary theory, such that any reasonable person ought to accept it as true in all likelihood. In each case, the stakes of the debate are how people choose to believe.
This chapter is organized into four main sections. In the first section, I will explain how the conflict over teaching evolution has been principally understood throughout its history as fundamentally about beliefs, which is to say what people think in their minds about what is true.
The second section will review the ways that anthropologists, going back to Tylor and Durkheim, have theorized about beliefs, particularly in religious contexts. For the most part, anthropological approaches have downplayed belief and focused instead on practices like religious rituals. Much more recent insights from anthropologists studying Christian
communities have sought to develop new understandings of belief that focus on practice and experience rather than cognitive objects in people’s minds. In the third section, I will attempt to apply these insights as I present ethnographic notes on religious life in my field site in eastern Tennessee. Rather than simply and stably residing in people’s heads, where they would be difficult to access, I will show that beliefs are made manifest and public through a range of activities that include group prayer, Bible studies, praise and worship, and expressions of hostility to evolution. The fourth section of the chapter will be concerned with developing and explaining a theory of belief that is inconsistent with these ethnographic observations, over a century of insights from anthropology, and the thesis of the dissertation. It will be illustrated through my own personal experience interacting with self-identified creationists.
Evolution-Creation: Conflicts over Beliefs
As the reader may recall from the historical account, early opposition to teaching
evolution stemmed from concerns over its effect on religious belief. In his 1922 New York Times article “God and Evolution,” Bryan rhetorically asks his readers, “Is it not more rational to
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believe in creation of man by separate act of God than to believe in evolution without a particle of evidence?” (Bryan 1922). After ridiculing evolution in the first half of the article—as a mere guess, without evidentiary support and contrary to the creation account in the Bible—Bryan laments the almost mystical power of “Darwinism” to displace spiritual truth: “Evolution seems to close the heart of some to the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest of guesses advanced in the name of science” (Bryan 1922). It is this power over belief, and not merely the falseness of evolution, that Bryan most forcefully decries: “The objection to
Darwinism is that it is harmful, as well as groundless. It entirely changes one’s view of life and undermines faith in the Bible” (Bryan 1922: 1, italics in original). He then elaborates on how this occurs:
If a man accepts Darwinism, or evolution applied to man, and is consistent, he rejects the miracle and the supernatural as impossible. He commences with the first chapter of Genesis and blots out the Bible story of man’s creation, not because the evidence is insufficient, but because the miracle is inconsistent with evolution. If he is consistent, he will go through the Old Testament step by step and cut out all the miracles and all the supernatural. He will then take up the New Testament and cut out all the supernatural—
the virgin birth of Christ, His miracles and His resurrection, leaving the Bible a story book without binding authority upon the conscience of man. (Bryan 1922:1)
Notably, the reason Bryan gives for Darwinism displacing Biblical belief is out of a pursuit for internal consistency, wherein various beliefs cannot contradict one another. Bryan admits that people’s beliefs are not necessarily consistent, a reality he compares to hypocrisy. In spite of this caveat, however, Bryan returns repeatedly to the “the effect of Darwinism” as though it is
inevitable:
Evolution naturally leads to agnosticism and, if continued, finally to atheism. Those who teach Darwinism are undermining the faith of Christians; they are raising questions about the Bible as an authoritative source of truth; they are teaching materialistic views that rob the life of the young of spiritual values. (Bryan 1922: 11)
Bryan cites two forms of evidence for these “effects of Darwinism.” In a section titled
“Darwin’s Agnosticism,” Bryan explains that as “a young man he [Darwin] believed in the Bible; just before his death he declared that he did not believe that there had ever been any revelation; that banished the Bible as the inspired Word of God and, with it, the Christ of whom the Bible tells” (Bryan 1922: 1, italics added). Based on this account, Bryan concludes:
This is Darwinism. This is Darwin’s own testimony against himself. If Darwinism could make an agnostic of Darwin, what is its effect likely to be upon students to whom Darwinism is taught at the very age when they are throwing off parental authority and becoming independent? (Bryan 1922: 1)
The other evidence he cites comes from a book by Professor Leuba, a psychologist at Bryn Mawr College, presenting findings from a study of American college students, scientists, professors and other Americans on their beliefs about God and immortality. That book reports a correlation between education level and unbelief in a personal God (Leuba 1916). Bryan
mentions particularly statistics from that study that demonstrate disbelief in God increases steadily through college experience, from 15% among freshmen, to 45% among upper classmen (Bryan 1922). While this study does not credit evolution or Darwinism with the rise in disbelief, the connection is made vicariously by Bryan: college professors are teaching the students and these professors believe in evolution.
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We see therefore that Bryan’s concerns are all about beliefs, specifically the effect that Darwinism, itself a set of beliefs, has on the beliefs in the minds of young people. Ideas about evolution are portrayed to have a corrosive effect on belief in God and the authority of the Bible.
These same concerns continue into the present day, reflecting a more general concern with
“belief” within Protestant faith traditions in the U.S. As a recent example, Kevin Shrum, a Baptist minister in East Nashville, wrote an opinion piece for The Tennessean titled “Today, belief is a challenge.” In the article, Shrum recalls a distant past during which it was “impossible not to believe” in a Judeo-Christian worldview, and contrasts it with the present, in which it is
“nearly impossible to believe.” At the heart of the shift, Shrum places “the publications of Nietzsche and Darwin suggesting a Godless, mechanistic world” (Shrum 2016: 11A)
Polls concerned about beliefs regarding evolution reveal a nearly fetishistic fixation. For example, the most recent report from a Gallup poll on evolution, presented under the title “In U.S., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins,” includes a graph showing how beliefs about evolution or creation have shifted over the last decade (Newport 2014). The results of such polls are discussed in new articles and blogs, indicating no small degree of significance. Such polls have a long history. Recall that Bryan cited a study from the 1910s that reported beliefs among college students, professors and scientists.
The obsession is shared not only by participants in the discourse and its public spectators, but also by science education researchers. In the earliest study I found on evolution teaching in Tennessee, the author reported results from a questionnaire conducted with students and teachers in the state regarding their beliefs (Fletcher 1976). The study was centrally concerned with beliefs, as is demonstrated in his “Summary and Conclusions” section, which summarizes the percentages of his sample who believe or do not believe in various things, including the point that “a majority (78.2%) of respondents believe that the Bible is a historically accurate document but are divided in opinion as to its scientific accuracy” (Fletcher 1976: 20). In an argument that is nearly the inverse of Bryan’s claims about Darwinism from a half century earlier, Fletcher
explains how certain religious beliefs can be a problem:
One of the most difficult problems which has faced mankind for many centuries has been the tendency to follow a thinking pattern which is teleological in nature, that is, to believe that all things including natural phenomena are determined by an over-all purpose in nature and all things are directed toward a definite purpose of end. The belief in a God- controlled universe is not the problem as much as the inflexibility in position taken by those who choose to determine what the purpose really is. When groups of individuals decide that they know what is right and refuse to allow any form of new evidence to be considered they will stubbornly defend their thinking at all costs. (Fletcher 1976: 6) Just as Bryan charged that Darwinism destroys belief in a personal God, Fletcher sees belief in a personal God as closing people off to learning about and accepting evolution.
As an anthropologist, this obsession with beliefs presents an interesting, but ultimately useful challenge. In order to give an account of this situation it is essential to establish what it actually means to believe. Is belief a psychological state? Or is belief instead more like an allegiance to a position? Do beliefs follow rational arguments and evidence? Or do people formulate arguments and interpret evidence in order to support the reasonableness of their beliefs? Beginning with Durkheim, anthropologists have emphasized the study of rituals and religious activity rather than beliefs. By the 1970s, the very notion of belief was being rejected by most anthropologists of religion as being too imprecise and impossible to study empirically.
Only in the last couple of decades has the emerging field of the anthropology of Christianity
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confronted the nature of belief in light of its problems. In the next section, I will present this history of anthropological thinking in order to introduce the approach to belief that I ultimately adopted in this dissertation. This review serves two main purposes. First, it demonstrates the long precedent in anthropology to seek out the behavioral dimensions of religious belief. Second, it identifies important insights gleaned through this effort.
Anthropology of Belief
Just what does "belief” mean in a religious context? Of all the problems surrounding attempts to conduct anthropological analysis of religion this is the one that has perhaps been most troublesome and therefore the most often avoided, usually by relegating it to psychology, that raffish outcast discipline to which social anthropologists are forever consigning phenomena they are unable to deal with within the framework of a denatured Durkheimianism. But the problem will not go away, it is not "merely" psychological (nothing social is), and no anthropological theory of religion which fails to attack it is worthy of the name. (Geertz 1973b: 109)
Beliefs, particularly the relatively bizarre type of beliefs classified as “religious,” have long held a central place in scholarly studies of religion. In the 19th Century the Myth and Ritual school examined beliefs, equated with myth, alongside rituals, and saw the two as intimately connected, reflections of one another, with some debate over which was primary (Bell 2009).
Frazer, for example, catalogued myths from around the world, searching for common elements shared across diverse cultures as insights into the nature of religion (Frazer 1894). For Tylor, ritual was merely an expression of religious beliefs, and his definition of religion as belief in spiritual beings makes no mention of religious practices (Tylor 1958 [1872]). By contrast, Robertson Smith argued that rites were primary and more resilient to change over time. Though the debate between myth and ritual was never settled, early 20th Century theorists like Durkheim, Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski preferred to emphasize the latter (Bell 2009).
In his classic work on religion, Durkheim noted two basic categories of religious phenomena: beliefs and rites (Durkheim 2001 [1912]). The feature that distinguishes rites from other actions is their reference to religious beliefs, which are themselves defined by reference to a division between two mutually distinct classes: the sacred and the profane. In turn, rites fundamentally proscribe means of demarcating the sacred and of dividing the sacred from the profane:
Sacred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which such prohibitions apply and which must keep their distance from what is sacred. Religious beliefs are representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they sustain among themselves or with profane things. Finally, rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things. (2001:
40)
Though Durkheim includes both beliefs and practices in his definition of religion, he clearly regards the latter more important than the former. After all, the distinction made between sacred and profane is not simply a conceptual one, but instead a classificatory act, carried out through behavior, by the way that places, things, people, texts, etc. are treated. Furthermore, Durkheim dedicated most of the book to deconstructing various aspects of rituals practiced among
Australian aboriginal groups.
In the concluding chapter of his book, Durkheim summarizes his central thesis, that religious experience is an experience of collective effervescence, the sensation of being part of
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something larger than the individual self (Durkheim 2001). In summarizing this point, he directly criticizes the tendency among most religious scholars at the time to privilege belief over action in studies of religion. He supports this criticism with two arguments. First, for religious believers, the most important thing about their religion is not the knowledge it provides but rather its transformative effects on their lives. Religion does not explain, but rather tells people how to act, how to live. Second, a belief is a part of an individual and could not therefore elevate the
individual beyond himself. In other words, religion has a real effect on people, so the source of its effects could not be beliefs. Its effects come from society:
The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith. But it is hard to see how a mere idea could have this efficacy. An idea is in reality only a part of ourselves; then how could it confer upon us powers superior to those which we have of our own nature? […]
From the mere fact that we consider an object worthy of being loved and sought after, it does not follow that we feel ourselves stronger afterwards; it is also necessary that this object set free energies superior to these which we ordinarily have at our command and also that we have some means of making these enter into us and unite themselves to our interior lives. Now for that, it is not enough that we think of them; it is also indispensable that we place ourselves within their sphere of action, and that we set ourselves where we may best feel their influence; in a word, it is necessary that we act, and that we repeat the acts thus necessary every time we feel the need of renewing their effects. From this point of view, it is readily seen how that group of regularly repeated acts which form the cult get their importance. (Durkheim 2001: 313)
In summary, beliefs, as privately held ideas, are without staying power. Religious experience and the maintenance of religion over time depend on practice.
This sentiment, privileging the social act over private belief, was carried into British social anthropology by Radcliffe-Brown, who is credited with founding the structural
functionalist school, which dominated the field for nearly half a century. In his Henry Meyers Lecture on “Religion and Society,” for example, Radcliffe-Brown outlines an approach to religion that he directly traces to Durkheim, alongside the Old Testament scholar and professor of divinity William Robertson-Smith and the French Catholic theologian Alfred Loisy. He contrasts this approach with an earlier, evolutionist approach to studying religion:
…there is a tendency to treat belief as primary: rites are considered as the results of beliefs. They [Anthropologists] therefore concentrate their attention on trying to explain the beliefs by hypotheses as to how they may have been formed and adopted. […] If we must talk in terms of cause and effect, I would rather hold the view that the belief in a surviving soul is not the cause but the effect of the rites. Actually the cause-effect analysis is misleading. What really happens is that the rites and the justifying or rationalizing beliefs develop together as parts of a coherent whole. But in this
development it is action or the need of action that controls or determines belief rather than the other way about. (Radcliffe-Brown 1945: 34)
The approach he advocates is reflective of the central concerns of structural
functionalism: to locate the “meaning” of various institutions in their social effects or functions.
Regarding rituals, Radcliffe-Brown said that their social function was “obvious,” specifically, by solemnly expressing certain sentiments, “the rites reaffirm, renew and strengthen those
sentiments on which the social solidarity depends” (Radcliffe-Brown 1945: 38). Not
surprisingly, these ideas ran throughout Radcliffe-Brown’s scholarship, appearing as early as his 1922 publication of Andaman Islanders, itself written in 1906. In a later chapter of that