A family divided on origins and united in practice: creation-science institutions, the BioLogos wing of evangelical scientists, and a majority that uses every technology on this register while arguing about the first chapters of Genesis.
‘Evangelical’ names a family, not a position. One wing — the young-earth creationist movement consolidated after 1961 (Whitcomb and Morris, The Genesis Flood), the Institute for Creation Research, and Answers in Genesis — reads Genesis as a science text and builds a parallel scientific establishment. Another wing, equally evangelical in doctrine, accepts the mainstream conclusions: the American Scientific Affiliation (founded 1941) of evangelical scientists, BioLogos (founded 2007 by Francis Collins), and the evolutionary creation it advocates.
Between and beneath them sits the majority practice of evangelical congregations: medicine, engineering, and technology used without controversy, cosmology and origins argued about when they are argued about at all. The intelligent design movement of the 1990s — philosophically distinct from young-earth creationism and at war with it in print — was ruled a religious position for constitutional purposes in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), a judgment its proponents dispute and the scientific establishment treats as settled.
Any register that recorded ‘the evangelical stance’ on any science would be fiction; this site records the factions separately wherever the evidence allows.
Recorded Stances in the Register
Contraception Embraced
Evangelical acceptance followed the mainline pattern within a generation for contraception as such; the contested edge is again post-fertilization methods, which groups holding the person-from-conception premise classify with abortion.
Embryonic stem cell research Contested within the tradition
Evangelical bodies divide with the embryo premise: the Southern Baptist Convention condemned embryonic research while endorsing adult stem cells; evangelical scientists are found on both sides of the funding question and agree on the adult-cell alternative.
Evolution by natural selection Contested within the tradition
The tradition is publicly divided: young-earth creationism (consolidated after 1961), old-earth and intelligent-design positions, and evolutionary creation (BioLogos) all claim the evangelical name, and all cite Scripture as their warrant. The register records the division rather than an average of it.
In vitro fertilization Contested within the tradition
No central evangelical authority exists: the Southern Baptist Convention moved from early acceptance to increasing reservation, many evangelical ethicists permit IVF within marriage while opposing the destruction of surplus embryos, and practice in evangelical congregations is widespread. Positions track the embryo’s status more than the technique.
Surgical and medical abortion Condemned
The evangelical mainstream since the 1970s holds the person-from-conception premise and refuses abortion except (in most formulations) to save the mother’s life; the movement’s own history records a more permissive evangelical consensus before Roe — the 1968 Christianity Today symposium and the Southern Baptist resolutions of 1971–74 — which its historians do not hide.
The automobile Embraced
Progressive Mennonite bodies adopted the car with the rest of America while arguing about consumerism; the Mennonite Church’s twentieth-century debates were about wealth display and war taxes, not the machine itself — a within-family divergence the Amish case usually hides.
References
- Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (expanded ed., 2006)
- Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994)