“Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits”: Evolution, Eschatology, and the Anticommunist Politics of George McCready Price

Abstract

George McCready Price (1870–1963) is best known as the Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist amateur geologist who pioneered the idea of a young earth in the early twentieth century. Price laid the foundation for modern “creation science,” which took off decades later, with the publication of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb Jr.'sThe Genesis Floodin 1961. Despite his extensive writings on the details of geology, however, Price admitted that his main objections to evolution were not scientific but “moral” and “philosophical”—the “fruits” of the “corrupt tree” of evolution. Historians have almost entirely neglected this aspect of Price's opus; yet, Price authored a series of works from 1902 to 1925 that, in increasingly alarming tones, blamed evolution for socialism and communism. This article analyzes these works by examining Price's Adventist background, his early experiences working and living in the United States, and the broader political context in which he wrote. It also assesses the impact of Price's political writings on subsequent generations of creationists and conservative evangelicals. Price should be seen as part of the long process by which a New Christian Right was forged from materials including creationism and anticommunism. He was not only a geologist but also a creationist politician.