Communicating Conflict: Language of “War” in Tennessee’s Struggle with Evolution

The debate over teaching evolution in the US is often construed in terms of a metaphorical war. As the conflict first drew national attention with the 1925 trial of John T. Scopes in Tennessee, and again returned to Tennessee in 2012 with the passage of a science education bill, we believe that analyzing the language used to describe these events will improve understanding of how this conflict is communicated. Our analysis draws on the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a) and suggests that participants on either side of the debate view the conflict according to a “just war scenario” (1991). This construal intensifies the moral weight of the conflict, making compromise and dialogue more difficult. The introduction outlines the history of the conflict, which is followed by a description of research conducted to date. section 3 explains the questions addressed in the paper, section 4 presents the conceptual metaphor theory, and section 5 describes the materials analyzed. The results are divided into two parts: section 6.1 looks at articles from the 1920s; section 6.2 looks at articles from 2012. Discussion of the results can be found in section 7 and is followed by ideas for future research.