Creationism - National Center for Science Education

adhering to true biblical principles, but that their Northern counterparts were not.
Evolutionism and other forms of liberalism were at this time spreading in the North, and
so, by this reasoning, such attitudes must be un-biblical. Marsden points out that
Northern criticisms of Southern slavery were interpreted in this fashion, as being opposed
to true biblical principles. Northerners interpreted the Bible as being against slavery, but
Southerners argued that a more literalistic interpretation seemed to condone or even
command it. Marsden suggests that, having felt obliged to defend the literalist
interpretation regarding slavery, there was a tendency to extend this defensive reliance on
the more literalist interpretation into other issues as well (1983:573).
Many modern Christian Reconstructionists employ much the same reasoning (see
later). Reconstructionist John Whitehead, following Rushdoony, switches the order
around: he argues that the South defended slavery only because the heretical,
revolutionary abolitionists sought to destroy the whole Christian, Calvinist, Southern way
of life, of which slavery was but a part. In order to prevent this anti-Christian attack,
Southerners were obliged to defend slavery. “The abolitionists, while utilizing the slave
issue as a base, had a more fundamental motive than slavery for attacking the South”
(1977:70): namely, destruction of the Calvinist, Bible-based society of the South.
Whitehead, quoting a Calvinist theologian and historian, writes:
The leaders of the South and the Democrats in the North opposed the abolitionist movement, not because of
slavery per se “but because of the philosophy and theology which it represented and because they clearly
saw that if this radicalism were to gain supremacy in the national government then there must certainly
come in its wake a radical political and social program which would threaten the established order and
constitutional government for the nation as a whole.” [1977:71]
Rushdoony himself praises the Christian culture of the South prior to the Civil War,
claiming, like other Reconstructionists, that although slavery had some evil aspects, it
was no worse than the statist economic subjugation of blacks which was the consequence
of Northern victory. Because of the Civil War, “The old [Christian, Calvinist] order was
overthrown by ‘a great domestic tragedy that synchronized chronologically with an
intellectual revolution overseas’ [i.e. Darwinism]” (Rushdoony 1978:79).
At any rate, this popular nineteenth-century Southern anti-evolutionism did not
pretend to be based on any scientific opposition to evolution, but rather on the fact that
evolution was perceived as Northern and unbiblical.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the theological and doctrinal
strands which came to characterize fundamentalism (the pre-millennialist emphasis,
Protestant scholasticism, Common Sense epistemological traditions, Princeton theology
and the formal doctrine of biblical inerrancy) merged together in a militant anti-modern
coalition to become the fundamentalist movement. This fusion was precipitated by a
perception of social and cultural crises: a feeling that modernistic practices and ideas
were assaulting the traditional, Christian basis of society, and that civilization was
decaying and on the verge of collapse.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, and “higher criticism” of the Bible (which
originated about the same time), were obvious targets for blame. “Higher criticism”
involved study of the historical, cultural, and literary context of the Bible. To these new
scholars, the Bible was no longer considered simply a supernatural revelation exempt
from comparative study. To conservative believers, this represented a degradation of the