The historiography on religious reactions to the teaching of evolution has focused almost exclusively on America, but controversy also occurred elsewhere. This paper broadens our perspectives by examining how Religious Education (R.E.) classes in England’s state secondary schools negotiated Darwinism from the 1930s to the 1970s. It argues that although English religious educators accepted the general notion of evolution—the common descent of man and all other organisms—they evinced a remarkable reluctance to embrace the Darwinian mechanism of change. Many found the haphazard, trial-and-error method of random variation and natural selection discordant with the benevolent, purposeful God of Christianity. They preferred a teleological theory of evolution—or one directed towards a divinely predetermined goal.

Unlike the U.S., the existence of a state church in England meant that R.E. was a mandated part of public schooling. With both science and religion taught in the same state institution, educators sought a harmonious narrative; yet with Darwinism this often proved elusive. From the 1930s on, each county produced a non-denominational ‘Agreed Syllabus’ of religious instruction in state schools; such syllabuses commonly addressed science and religion. Yet while they gave lip service to modern evolutionary theory, they often objected to ‘chance’ explanations, vaguely stressed divine design, and recommended textbooks which opposed evolution by random mutation and natural selection with arguments tantamount to those of modern-day Intelligent Design (such as ‘Irreducible Complexity’). Remarkably, Agreed Syllabuses promoted such anti-Darwinian books well into the 1960s, long past the establishment of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1940s. At the same time R.E. organizations presented such teleological theories at student conferences. Not until the 1970s did the R.E. establishment fully accept the neo-Darwinian mechanism, but it now believed the only recourse for a religio-scientific ‘harmonization’ was a vague approach which compartmentalized science and religion into separate spheres, ignoring the potentially offending philosophical and religious implications of modern evolutionary theory. This paper thus presents a revealing case of how scientific knowledge travels and is reinterpreted across disciplinary boundaries, how ideas considered ‘science’ and ‘pseudoscience’ interact in different disciplines, and how science is communicated to the greater public.