A Slow Loss and a Long Reception

Darwin's own movement away from Christianity was gradual and he described it that way. He had trained for the clergy and had once not doubted the strict truth of the Bible; the disbelief crept in, on his account, at a rate so slow that he felt no distress at it. Two things weighed as heavily as the science. One was the difficulty of a benevolent design that includes suffering, which he raised again and again in letters. The other was the death of his daughter Annie in 1851. He settled on calling himself an agnostic, using the word his defender T. H. Huxley had coined, and declined the label of atheist.

The religious reception was never one reaction. Some Anglican and Catholic writers accepted evolution within a decade and read it as the manner of creation rather than its denial; others held the line at the special creation of the human soul; the fiercest organised resistance came later and elsewhere, in the American movement that produced the fundamentalist pamphlets after the First World War and the Scopes trial of 1925. That timing matters. The argument now heard in public is not the Victorian dispute resumed. It is a twentieth century American argument with a history of its own, and treating the two as one makes both harder to follow.