Paul Anthony

Few issues have presented so succinctly the tension faced by colleges and universities affiliated with the Stone-Campbell Movement than Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Among those institutions, Abilene Christian University has experienced a remarkable evolution of its own in dealing with the subject. As viewed through the writings of its faculty and other affiliated voices, the university's sixty-year struggle with Darwinism provides an example of how one academic institution attempted to balance its faith tradition with its academic calling.

In 1964, Firm Foundation editor Reuel Lemmons, for decades one of the most powerful voices in Churches of Christ, created something never before seen in the United States – a public battle over whether a state should adopt textbooks that accept evolution as fact. Although mentioned briefly in several accounts of the history of the American creationist movement, a full accounting of the 1964 Austin, Texas, textbook controversy has not taken place before now.

This paper shows that although other figures more commonly associated with broader American fundamentalism eventually became national representatives of the Texas anti-evolution movement, Lemmons and the Churches of Christ in fact led the charge in this groundbreaking moment. The paper shows how Lemmons provided the infrastructure to mount a statewide, and eventually national, campaign against the adoption of new science texts, and how his supporters leveraged resources from the newly established Creation Research Society to articulate a series of then-novel arguments describing creationism as a scientifically supported notion deserving equal time with evolution in public schools.

In 1985, Abilene Christian University was rocked by a controversy over the alleged teaching of evolution by two biology professors. The two-year conflict was an existential crisis for the university, which relied on students and donations from many of the rural Texas Churches of Christ most opposed to evolutionary theory.

A review of hundreds of letters, internal memos and other materials – as well as interviews with students, faculty, administrators and board members from the era – allows historians for the first time to assess the accuracy both of the allegations themselves and of the university’s blanket denial of them.