ABSTRACT
Nearly a quarter century after a young British naturalist named Charles Darwin visited the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand, he published a monumental study On the Origin o f Species (1859). In it he attempted not only to explain speciation largely by means of natural selection but also to overthrow the long entrenched notion that God had created living creatures by special creative acts. In a widely used history of New Zealand, Judith Binney asserts that the Origin ‘overturned the religious world’ (Binney et al. 1990: 83; cf. Parsonson 1983). Though there is something to be said for this view, it ignores the non-revolutionary effect of Darwin’s theories on the religious outlook of many converts to evolution, and, as we shall demonstrate in this chapter, it overlooks the substantial number of ordinary New Zealanders who never bowed their knees to the Origin. In the following narrative we trace the fluctuating fortunes of anti-evolutionism in New Zealand, from the largely indigenous protests of the nineteenth century to the American-inspired promotion of scientific creationism in the late twentieth. Secularization, or the disappearance of traditional forms of religious belief, was neither as inevitable nor as complete as many have assumed.
