Darwin, Agassiz, and the Snohomish Pulpit Wars
A fiery editorial from 1877 Snohomish takes on the local clergy for their public ridicule of scientific discovery and the theory of evolution.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It is altogether too common for members of the clergy to ridicule and stigmatize the new discoveries of science, especially when of a tendency to unsettle any points of doctrinal theology, as mere theories. Recently, in this community a leading clergyman was accredited with the remark that, 'all the tangible discoveries of science when they are real discoveries, and not mere theories as nine-tenths of the so-called scientific discoveries are, should be accepted as handmaids of the religion of Jesus.' In view of the wonderful achievements of science, of its rapid advance, of the great amount of demonstrated facts it every year adds to the fields of knowledge, it becomes highly proper to inquire if it is true that nine-tenths of the so-called scientific discoveries are mere theories, unsupported by facts. Each of the great historical religions of the world generalizes some special fact or set of principles that have been found once to be of particular value. When once formulated into a creed, they too frequently have become, by the impacts of time or changes in society, like the sacred languages, dead, so far as any vitalizing influence they possess for the good of mankind. Science not only challenges all demonstrated truth, but it is seeking fresh discoveries in the broad and varied field of nature. It learns not from the future; its motto is, 'Let the dead past bury its dead; act, act in the living present, heart within, and God o'er head.'
“It is altogether too common for members of the clergy to ridicule and stigmatize the new discoveries of science... as mere theories.”
This 1877 editorial captures a classic Washington frontier friction point: the struggle between rigid, established power structures and the rapid, often uncomfortable march of new knowledge. Just as 19th-century Snohomish residents sparred over the implications of Darwinism, contemporary Pacific Northwest communities often find themselves in similar 'pulpit versus lab' tensions regarding technology, environment, and social change.
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