One spring evening in 1977, the day after his wife told him she wanted to leave, Johnson accompanied his 11-year-old daughter to a Bible school event to which she had been invited. At the church, seeing the minister and the other parents united by their beliefs, Johnson had a realization. “I thought, there is something here that I like, that I want to have. I want to be like that.”

Johnson didn’t become a Christian overnight. It was a gradual process, he says, in which he debated whether Christian metaphysics were real or just something he wanted to believe. His move toward the church was coupled with his disill­usionment with academia. He had left behind the student ferment on campus, and had also grown tired of the “outrageous behavior” of the Berkeley left. It was more than just the drugs and sexual promiscuity, he says: “When the left position turned from pacifism and liberalism into this racial identity politics, that was a big shock to me. Because then I, as a professor and a dean, became the enemy.”

Johnson spent more time at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, where he met his second wife, Kathie. He started to look for a meaningful topic of study with which to make a broader impact on society.

In 1987, while in London as a visiting professor, Johnson read Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. Ever since his conversion to Christianity, the theory of evolution had been a thorn in his side. If Darwinism was true, he reasoned, then Christian metaphysics was a fantasy. Johnson’s legal mind told him it had to be one way or the other. After a first reading he found Dawkins’ defense of Darwinism unassailable. “I had the impression that this was all a matter of proved fact. That … the experiments had proved that we have no alternative, that this was how things were.” But Johnson was also reading Michael Denton’s book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which took aim at the so-called missing links in evolution theory. With Denton’s help, Johnson says he began to detect holes and suspect the rational premise of Darwinism. “I discovered that there was an arbitrary metaphysical starting point and that once I began to look at its basis I saw that it was much weaker than I had been led to believe.”

Johnson became convinced that the scientific evidence of evolution, “impartially viewed,” pointed in the general direction of an intelligent creator. Furthermore, he believed that the scientific community, in excluding any discussion of the “evidence” of divine or intelligent creation from the precincts of science, had in effect rigged the system and precluded any questioning of evolutionary theory. While in England he wrote down his thoughts, a brief, blueprint essence of his book Darwin on Trial, and gave it to Stephen Meyer, who passed it on to like-minded creationists in the States.

When Johnson returned to America in 1988, elements of the academic and scientific communities were busy debating the 1987 Supreme Court ruling against a Louisiana law that required creation science to be taught in the public schools. It was an important case for Johnson, because it reinforced his notion that the only way to get around the separation of the state and religion issue was, officially at least, to take Christianity out of the debate. Two years later, Johnson attended a seminar near Boston to discuss evolution and creationism in public schools. Among the prominent scholars and theologians present was Stephen Jay Gould, the renowned paleontologist from Harvard University. During the meeting, Gould and Johnson engaged in a bitter, two-hour-long debate, which Johnson judged to be a draw.

Johnson began to detect holes and suspect the rational premise of Darwinism. “I discovered that there was an arbitrary metaphysical starting point and that once I began to look at its basis I saw that it was much weaker than I had been led to believe.”

To Johnson, the draw was as good as a victory. He had shown that by sticking to the premise of his idea—that science was not being rational in excluding the “theory” that there might be a Creator—intelligent design could hold its own against the kingpin of materialism. By the time he published Darwin on Trial two years later, Johnson had teamed up with the Discovery Institute and developed the strategy that he thought would ultimately win the campaign against materialism and science.

After the Bush election in 2000, the intelligent design crusade, riding the Republican conservative resurgence in the country, advanced precipitously. Before some intelligent design proponents thought they were ready, Johnson among them, the issue became a legal maelstrom in Dover and bitterly divided the nation. “The whole issue had become tied up in this red state/blue state political divide,” Johnson says. Intelligent design opponents, he says, see it “as a power play to make George Bush president for life. They have talked themselves into a great fear that America faces a [religious] fascist takeover.”

These days it is almost impossible to discuss intelligent design with anyone, on either side of the debate, without having the discussion come back to political parties and their stances on certain moral issues. Philosophically speaking, the believers in intelligent design point out, if Darwin is right and there is no God nor purpose to our existence, then morality is man made and, among other things, abortion and homosexual marriage are okay. “I think sex is very important in all this stuff,” Gilder says, when asked why intelligent design is so divisive. “Leftists regard sexual liberation as the most important accomplishment of modernity and they want to claim that it has been a great success. Religion is regarded as the chief opponent of sexual liberation and that’s why there is such hostility to religion. Because God is alleged to oppose promiscuity, polymorphous perversity, whatever you want it to be. Religion is regarded to be the great obstacle to hedonistic fulfillment.”

At times, talking to these once liberal Harvard men, it seemed as if America had been under a political and moral siege since the 1960s and it was their battle to maintain its Puritan roots. Chapman and Gilder—who, like Johnson, gradually slid to the right and embraced religion later in life—contend that it wasn’t so much that they had changed but that society changed around them. It was the Great Society’s legacy of “grotesque” economic and social dislocations, the “appalling” erosion of America’s military power after Vietnam, and the permissive, relativistic, anything-goes attitude of the leftist counterculture that had moved them to the right. And it was Darwinian ideas such as natural selection and survival of the fittest (aided and abetted by Marx and Freud) that had stripped our existence of purpose and, as an anonymous writer for the Discovery Institute wrote, “infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.”

The defeat at Dover has left Johnson feeling somewhat deflated. “I sometimes feel like a failure,” he says. “I expected we were going to have made a great breakthrough … and turned around the intellectual zeitgeist by this time.”

Johnson has distanced himself somewhat from the Discovery Institute—and so has Gilder. They say they want to keep intelligent design out of the public school controversy, and out of politics all together. “It’s not that I want some program and a party to take over and rule,” Johnson told me. They stress the need for intellectual discussion and more scientific investigation focusing on the origin of life while continuing the battle for religious liberty because, they say, it is under attack. They do not, however, hold out much hope that their views will get a fair hearing at institutions like Harvard, which they believe have been co-opted by political correctness. Johnson fears that students who lack a proper spiritual foundation will be as misled as he once was.

In the meantime, the push to convert goes on. In the media, on campus, in churches, and sometimes one on one. Neighbor to neighbor, husband to wife, parent to child, and subject to author. Johnson, who has suffered several strokes recently, is still tenacious and did not want to give up on me. But in the end our conversation concluded with uncomfortable silences, gaps that could not be bridged. I was an unlikely convert being wooed by an equally unlikely missionary, and that was where matters would have to remain.

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