It’s a Sunday morning in January and inside Stanford University’s Memorial Church, the Rev. Scotty McLennan - immortalized by former Yale roommate Gary Trudeau as the radical minister in ‘Doonesbury’ - is bashing intelligent design. Rather than weaving divinity into the fabric of the universe, intelligent design diminishes God by wedging religion into the gaps of scientific theory, he tells congregants. Not by coincidence, McLennan’s message was repeated five weeks later from more than 300 other pulpits nationwide that day by clergy participating in ‘Evolution Sunday.’ The newly organized event, held to coincide with the 197th anniversary of naturalist Charles Darwin’s birth, served as an exclamation point to a yearlong - and oft-times political - campaign to show that science and religion are not at odds. It included The Clergy Letter Project, a public declaration signed by McLennan and 10,300 other priests and pastors that their faith squares neatly with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was no Sunday drive. The campaign was launched at a time when the fight between biology and biblical creationism is at the center of public school court cases in a half-dozen states. It highlights broader tensions between religious conservatives and both progressive Christians […]