Evolutionary biologists, especially in the United States, seem to be engaged in a perpetual war with religion. On the face of it, this is unsurprising: over two-thirds of the American population belong to religious congregations; nearly half describe themselves as born again into evangelical Christian faiths that depend on revelation and the doctrine of justification by faith; and a sizeable and vocal proportion of these consider the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary biology to be anathema. All U.S. (and to a lesser extent, British) evolutionists must therefore choose sides in an ongoing cultural and political conflict. But the public evangelists for evolution, by and large, do more than defend the validity of their science; they also carry the war into the enemy's camp, aiming not only to safeguard their own work but also to vitiate the very underpinnings of religion.

It is generally seen as unfortunate when scientists let their religious or other metaphysical beliefs inform their science; the philosopher of evolution Michael Ruse, for example, speaks disapprovingly in his Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? of “cultural values built right into [Julian Huxley's] science” and of “cultural-value infiltration” into the work of the architects of the Modern Synthesis and current evolutionary biologists – including the late Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Richard Lewontin, and E. O. Wilson – as though evolutionary biology subscribed at least as much as any other science to the “metavalue … of the internal culture of science itself, namely, that of keeping science distinct from culture and hence nonepistemic-value-free.”