The late Stephen Jay Gould, renowned evolutionary biologist and popular science writer, assured the world in 2000 that creationism, though insidious, was a “local, indigenous, American bizarrity” unlikely to spread. He was wrong. In Europe, more secular in its public culture than the United States, creationist movements took root in many places during the late-twentieth century. Far from disappearing, most have flourished during the twenty-first century, finding receptive audiences among conservative protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, pentecostal and Muslim communities of many ethnicities. Creationists have won sympathetic hearings from ministers of education in several European countries, sparking strong reactions from secular and religious critics, including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The rise and spread of creationism in relatively secular Europe is the central focus of this important collection of essays.

It focuses primarily on developments from the 1970s to the present, devoting separate chapters to France, Spain and Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Greece, Russia (including Belarus and Ukraine) and Turkey. Thematic essays on Catholicism, intelligent design, and anti-creationism complement the geographical focus. Ronald L. Numbers, the editor of the series in which this volume appears, pioneered the study of modern American creationism in his magisterial 1992 volume, The Creationists. The 2006 edition, revised and expanded, included a chapter, “Creationism Goes Global,” outlining the spread of creationist ideas, institutions and personnel from the United States to other parts of the world, beginning with Australia and New Zealand, from the 1970s. Although other scholars have explored the spread of creationism beyond North America, this is the first substantial comparative study of creationism in Europe.

One of its many strengths is that, while contributors acknowledge the importance of American ideas, institutions and individuals to European creationism, this is, as the editors' introduction makes clear, much more than an American story. Where creationism won support in Europe, it did so for reasons rooted in the history, religion and politics of particular European places. Sometimes, as in France, with its long history of anti-Americanism, creationist activists had to work hard to disassociate creationism from America, with little result. In Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, by contrast, creationist and intelligent design movements have flourished amongst some Catholic, protestant and Orthodox Christians since 1989, partly propelled by popular disillusion with atheistic communist regimes that imposed evolutionary materialism through the state education system. In Greece, similarly, evolution got caught up in fierce twentieth century battles between modernizing socialists and conservative anticommunists, with the Greek Orthodox Church, internally divided over evolution, remaining sympathetic to creationist ideas. In Turkey, conservative Muslims in the Nurcu movement attacked evolution during the 1970s in order to undermine the materialism of the secular left. Adapting and Islamicizing American creationist and intelligent design arguments since the 1990s, Turkish creationist movements, popularized by businessman Adnan Oktar, have spread rapidly round the Muslim world.

One of the strengths of the volume is its recognition of the importance of geography. In Dealing with Darwin (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University, 2014), another volume in this series, historian David Livingstone has emphasized the importance of local context in shaping the reception of science by highlighting the strikingly different ways in which Presbyterian communities in three major cities responded to evolutionary theory. Belfast Presbyterians responded much more sourly than their co-religionists in Edinburgh and Princeton mainly because in 1874, in their own city, the Irish physicist John Tyndall used Darwin, evolution and history to attack Christian theology in a presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Place mattered.

This volume shows that support for creationism varied from country to country and within particular regions and nation-states. Broadly speaking, evolution won considerably broader, though never unanimous, public acceptance in northern and western European countries, where creationism remains confined largely to small, though vocal, evangelical, pentecostal and Muslim subcultures. In Eastern Europe and Greece, by contrast, where aggressively secular communist regimes or movements deployed evolution against popular religion, alienating many, creationism found fertile soil once communism collapsed. In Turkey, the subject of Martin Riexinger's fine essay, popular Islamic opposition to evolutionary materialism from the late-nineteenth century meant that evolution never made much headway, despite the efforts of Ataturk's modernizing secular regime to include it in school science curricula. Although Oktar Islamicized American creationisms from the 1990s, he was building on popular religiosity that modernizing secularists had never uprooted.

The authors of the national and regional surveys in this volume were often attentive to local variations in the stories they told. Writing on the U.K., Joachim Allgaier noted the popularity of creationism and intelligent design in northern Ireland—the creationist capital of Europe, according to critics—and in London, where African and Afro-Carribean churches flourish. Here, as elsewhere, distinctive local contexts, not least Muslim ones, might have benefited from fuller treatment than they received.

Contributors paid little attention to gender, although we know that women have historically outnumbered men in religious institutions and movements in Europe, as in most other parts of the world. French men long resisted votes for women partly because many feared that female voters would enhance priestly power. Several of the European ministers of education especially sympathetic to equal treatment for creationist or intelligent design were female, although neither contributors nor editors commented on this. Few of the polls and opinion surveys cited by many contributors linked support for creationism with ethnicity and gender, which might yield interesting results. And what about fertility? Are creationism-friendly conservative religious groups having larger families than most secular Europeans, as some studies suggest? These suggestions about future research directions are a tribute to how stimulating this volume is. All those committed to building inclusive modern democracies should read it.