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Your hypothesis that U.S. religious groups have a bigger beef with evolution because they came of age at the same time that Darwin did is plausible, but I'd hesitate without doing some historical research on the topic -- which I'm not at liberty to do right now. From what I do remember of the history of American Christianity, decisive events like the Great Awakening happened almost a generation before Darwin's work was published, so I'm not sure if the chronology works. Also, there was great furor and controversy over Darwin's ideas in Victorian England itself, much of which came from the clergy, which might count against your proposed distinction between American and European Christianity in this regard. I tend to think of the resistance to evolution as having a more general origin in the anthropocentric view of the cosmos. In the case of the U.S., which is undeniably the most fertile soil for Creationism in the technologized countries, it may have to do with the American tradition of anti-intellectualism. But this is all very speculative, and explanations of social phenomena are very hard to evaluate in any case, so I'll let the matter lie until I can conduct a little study. But you have given me an interesting alternative hypothesis. —Michael Rooney top |
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