Fundamentalists' objections to evolution and science aren't based upon science itself - they don't reject evolution because it's not good science. Their objections are, instead, a product of their belief that evolution undermines faith and morality. It's pretty much the same objection they have had to every facet of modern science and culture.

In Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism, Betty A. Deberg writes:

Fundamentalists ... did not attack evolutionary theory so much for its own sake as for the threat it posed to social conventions and mores. Fundamentalists approached evolution in the same way they did higher criticism of the Bible. They postulated a direct and necessary link between faith (their brand of conservative Protestant evangelicalism) and morals, and then proceeded to demonstrate that evolutionary theory destroyed both. ... A constant theme of J. Frank Norris’s during the 1920s was that evolution theory destroyed faith. “Evolution,” he declared, “has our schools by the throat ... destroying the faith of our young people in the faith of our Fathers.

For fundamentalists, Christian faith was impossible without a corresponding affirmation of the inerrant truth of the Bible. Because evolutionary theory posited a “nonbiblical” understanding of the origin of life, particularly human life, the fundamentalists could and did use their entire arsenal of biblical inerrancy rhetoric against it. And like their inerrancy rhetoric, the attack on evolution functioned to reinforce conventional Victorian gender ideology and roles.

Evolution is an established part of science today — there are no valid scientific objections to it on a fundamental level. Curiously, as evolution as grown stronger and more secure, fundamentalists have turned ever more to faux scientific arguments against it. It’s obvious to anyone who looks that their real objections continue to be the same in the early 21st century as they were in the early 20th, but those arguments are downplayed in favor of scientific-sounding arguments.

Evolution may be a part of science for the rest of the world, but for fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, evolution is simply another aspect of modernity which challenges traditional social roles, traditional structures of authority, and traditional religious beliefs. The reaction to evolution is part and parcel of the fundamentalist reaction to all of modernity — and this goes for Muslim fundamentalists as well as Christians.

 

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