Chapel service for these kids is an array of enthusiastic songs about their love for God, complete with Macarena-esque turning and wiggling, hand gestures, and air guitars. In the background, enigmatically, an audience of puppets bob their heads along with the music. Several things are clear: These are happy, disciplined children who love going to school, and love Jesus.
Jerald McClenahan might get some of New Song’s students when they’re ready to move on to high school. Berean Academy—a nondenominational Christian school—is 35 miles northeast of Wichita off a country road in Elbing. A science instructor for grades 9 through 12, Jerald doesn’t actually use a text, finding A Beka Books “contrived.” “They seem to just throw in some Scripture verses. They don’t integrate [creationism and evolution] well. I don’t want [my students] to be self-righteous.” He chooses to start his life science classes off simply, and with the book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. . . . And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
Illustration by Ashley Deming
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“God created order and duty,” Jerald says. “He’s created this world. And this gives us insight into His character. The world is really a revelation of God in His greatness, evidence of His love for us.” How then would you explain tragedy in the world? I ask. “God gave us this great Earth. It was a beautiful place, but because of our sins the Earth will be cursed. It’s because of our abysmal mess-ups that we have bugs, crop failures, disease. Death came after sin. The Earth is cursed. God is kind to let us live. God is love, but He is righteous.” Were there dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden? “Oh, yes!” he says. “Everyone loves the dinosaurs, don’t they? How do I know? Because the Scriptures talked about the deluge of Noah, and before that the dinosaurs were around. They must have died off or drowned. That makes them antediluvian—before the flood.” How do you explain medical science? “Well, it’s not a threat to my scientific principles to believe in miracles. There were miracles in the Gospels.”
Jerald’s science students are asked to do exercises to learn how to look inside themselves on a spiritual level. “Some kids say they would like to be a better daughter or son. Some say they’d like to learn how to understand God better, serve Him, be more loving towards Him. God gives us the raw material and we do the best we can. But when we see God as our Creator, it helps us.” And then he adds, “The term ‘evolution’ is misused. Earth scientists have an issue as to where the universe came from. The process of evolution is a biological thing, and species change. I don’t believe He created variations in species—the Pekingese and the poodles. But God created all species so that they can change. But the word ‘evolution’? Conservative scientists don’t use that word.”
I ask him what became of the Garden of Eden. “I don’t honestly know,” he says. “The Scriptures don’t say what happened to it. I’m guessing it looks like my garden, filled with weeds and deterioration.” And then Jerald McClenahan, science instructor, perks up a bit and declares, “But I do believe along with the Garden of Eden, He gave us the solar system, and the heaven, moon, and the stars.”
On the outskirts of Americus, Kansas, population 950, science teacher Karen Heins can make the earth move. Sort of. It’s a reputation that precedes her, says one of her fellow staff, demonstrating the link between small-town gossip and legend. “I don’t know how she does it,” the perpetrator of this legend told me, with assurance and enthusiasm, “but she has a way to create an earthquake right in the classroom. You can feel it under your feet.” When Karen Heins hears this, she lets out a girlish giggle, belying her pragmatic appearance. “It’s a seismograph,” she says, laughing, of the mechanism she purchased for her fifth- through eighth-grade students. “It measures earthquakes, it doesn’t create them.” Americus boasts a post office, café, library, and one elevator for farmer’s feed. Technically speaking, Karen and her family don’t live in Americus but in a “small town right outside.” Karen is a native Kansan with two sons in the public school system. Karen has taught public school science for 22 years. For 20 of those summers, she’s gone back to school herself to keep abreast of new methods of teaching. On weekends she works at a greenhouse, admits her flowers are her passion, and offers that it’s hard to explain the beauty of flowers with science. “It had to come from somewhere,” she says, referring to the mystic ways of the world. “It had to come from somewhere.”
As a devout Christian, Karen is faced with an internal battle that has resonated in the public school system nationwide for the past two years: the belief in intelligent design versus evolution, and the consequent undermining of the latter. With a subject that has created such political fury, for teachers like Karen, the debate starts at home, and sometimes at church. For all the laws and regulations, monitoring the insertion of intelligent design materials in every school is nearly impossible. Even for a small-town teacher like Karen Heins, sometimes the battle just isn’t worth the fight. At her last teaching job, “at a real small town,” a particularly influential minister was encouraging teachers to “spread the Word” among their young ones in any way they could. Karen was teaching science then and found the atmosphere to be too insufferable to describe. “I would never go against what was given to me by my administration,” she says, referring to the prescribed science curriculum. “Your administration is very clear about what you should teach.” Other teachers apparently did go against it, at the urging of their community’s religious leader. Karen shakes her head in dismay. “When people think of school they think only of the teachers, but everyone in school influences a child. Everyone on staff. Everyone makes up a child’s education. I had a friend who pulled her child out of that school to homeschool him, that’s how bad it was.”
