Conclusion
The success of the Creationist doctrine in the United States continues to bemuse most Europeans. Maybe it should be understood as a will to reconnect with religious roots modernity appears to challenge. William J. Bryan may here serve as a paradigm of this position. He thought America was threatened – by urbanisation, industrialisation, new lifestyles which, to his way of thinking, undermined the United States' traditional identity and religious bend (the famed American way of life). So the key to his objections to Darwin may be sought in his sense of threatened identity. For Bryan, a traditional Protestant faith, which he felt undermined by Darwin, belonged with a US identity with which it is of a piece: to him the value of the Bible is not only religious but also patriotic. “If all the biologists of the world teach this doctrine - as Mr. Darrow says they do - then may heaven defend the youth of our land from their impious babblings.” he protested during the Scopes trial.
The controversy caused by Darwin's theory undoubtedly concerned epistemology but, in so far as it affects the identity defended by the protagonists it also bears on sociology, and indeed psychology.
