Young Christians don’t know much about evolution.  As a result, they are either turning away from the faith or embracing a distorted hellfire theology.

That’s the diagnosis, anyway, from two academics at Bryan College.  Brian Eisenback and Ken Turner describe the problem of teaching evolution to young people who have spent their youth in Christian schools, nervous public schools, or Christian homeschools.  Eisenback, an entomologist, and Turner, an Old-Testament scholar, offer a new curriculum that promises to teach real evolutionary science without pushing students away from the faith or into bad theology.

As the authors describe, too many of their Christian students have faulty understandings of evolution.  As they put it,

If they were taught anything about evolution, students were often told that evolution is a component of an atheistic philosophy that aims to disprove God and undermine the authority of Scripture. For many, evolution was not a substantial component of their education; instead, more time and effort was spent on anti-evolution arguments. When these students are confronted with the evidence for evolution from multiple scientific disciplines, they are often shocked by the scope of evidence and react by wondering if their faith is still legitimate. They have often been taught that a Christian who holds a high view of Scripture rejects evolution, and Christians are obligated to interpret Genesis in a particular way. When they learn about evolution in a college biology classroom, they may feel their faith threatened or called in to question.

As a result, Eisenback and Turner explain, students often reject their home faith in toto or they hold their faith tighter and learn to feel suspicious toward mainstream science.  Whether they go to school in Christian schools that use curricula such as the Apologia series, or they go to pusillanimous public schools that tend to downplay evolutionary science, too many Christian students get only a distorted echo of real science, Eisenback and Turner point out.

Their solution?  A BioLogos-funded curriculum that will teach evolutionary science thoroughly and respectfully, yet do so in a profoundly Christian context.  Their curriculum will begin not with a primordial soup, but with the Old Testament.  It will include a broad range of ideas about life’s origins.  As Eisenback and Turner put it, they hope students will recognize the false dichotomy too often given between “atheistic evolution and young earth creationism.”

Will it work?  Will this curriculum help overcome the decades-long tension between evolution education and conservative evangelical belief?  Will students at Christian schools learn evolution better?  Will their faith be more durable when they encounter the compelling claims of mainstream science?

I wish Eisenback and Turner all the best.  As someone who hopes to see more and better evolution education in all kinds of schools, I strongly support efforts to bring good science into households that have, IMHO, been misled into believing that their faith won’t allow them to trust mainstream science.  But I can’t help but raise a couple of issues.

First, as many ILYBYGTH readers have taught me, there are intellectual and logical stumbling blocks to this approach.  In this as in many contentious issues, it ends up being simply dishonest at some point to mumble through some central concepts in the hope that “we can all just get along.”  For many evangelical Protestants, one such stumbling block is apparently the historicity of Adam & Eve.  Science demands a large genetic pool of original ancestors.  Many readings of the Bible demand an historical first pair.  Without that first pair and a real historical original sin, there is no need for salvation from Jesus, I’m told.  More than the age of the earth or the historicity of a global flood, this issue of sin and salvation are non-negotiable for many religious people.  How will this curriculum handle this stubborn intellectual conflict?

Second, though I do not know much about evangelical theology or genetics, I do know a thing or two about classroom teaching.  As an historian, I have seen, time after time, laments that America’s young people are not learning X or Y.  In most cases, the jeremiads about the state of student knowledge are followed up with grandiose plans to fix standards or textbooks.  Today’s huffapaloo about the Common Core Learning Standards, for instance, is based on deeply held assumptions that those standards are the most important way to fix or wound schooling, depending on one’s perspective.  But standards, textbooks, and curricula are not the most important determinant of learning.

As a teacher, I’ve learned to be skeptical about curricular panaceas.  I taught middle school and high school for ten years.  I’ve taught in a state university now for almost seven.  In all these teaching contexts, I’ve seen students go through identical curricula with wildly different results.  In other words, curricula/textbooks/syllabi/standards can be great, or they can be terrible, but either way, they will not determine student learning.  Don’t get me wrong: all other things being equal, good textbooks/standards/curricula are better than bad ones.  But good teachers, devoted parents, interested and engaged students…these are the things that make learning go on.  Without them, the best curricula are not going to produce great learning.  With them, bad curricula won’t get in the way.

Finally, we must also ask the $64,000 question: What about students in public schools?  They make up a vast majority of students.  Eisenback’s and Turner’s frankly theological curriculum could never be used in public schools without making a joke of the US Constitution.  But can there be a way to reach public-school students with evolutionary science when they live in communities that look askance at such things?

I’ll say it again: I hope Eisenback’s and Turner’s curriculum project takes off.  I hope students in Christian schools and Christian homeschools use their materials to see that questions of evolution are more complex than a stark choice between Darwin & hell on one side, and Jesus & bad science on the other.  But as Eisenback and Turner themselves would likely be the first to agree, these ambitions come with important roadblocks that must be overcome.