A federal judge in Indiana dismissed a case filed by the parents of five public school children, who claimed that teaching evolution was coercing them into accepting atheism. Jason and Jennifer Reinoehl filed a lawsuit against the Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation, the Indiana State Board of Education, and the Indiana Secretary of Education in May 2023. They claimed that the defendants were equally responsible for inflicting their family sorrow and suffering by “forcing” the children to learn and cite true religious origin myths that differed from those in which they believed.
In the 35-page complaint in which the plaintiffs represented themselves as pro se litigants, the Reinoehls referred to evolution as “religious teaching” and a “religious myth of evolution.” They reason that evolution has not been demonstrated scientifically and is, therefore, religion. The plaintiffs claim that evolution is a “highly flawed scientific theory” that fails to meet the criteria for scientific hypothesis and has been “scientifically disproven.” Scientists, they argued, agree with evolutionary theory because they “have been indoctrinated with it while attending public schools and universities,” and they are “reluctant to abandon this religious teaching.”
The plaintiffs compared evolution to artificial sweeteners, claiming that “scientists believed, without experimentation, that replacing sugar with these substitutes in foods and beverages would help people lose weight,” but were proven wrong when obesity grew. The Reinoehls also claimed that evolution was previously “taught alongside eugenics” and that evolution, like eugenics, should be eliminated from the curriculum as “pseudoscience.”
The plaintiffs claimed that by including evolution in its science curriculum, Indiana is forcing its instructors to provide information “that is inherently religious, not scientific, in nature.”
“Just as altering the name of Spontaneous Generation to Chemical Evolution does not make it an acceptable scientific hypothesis, changing the name of Atheism to Evolution does not render it less of a religion,” according to the lawsuit. “Evolution is a nonscientific idea that contradicts science’s known, proven, and observable rules. It gives ‘nature’ intelligence and supernatural power to choose and distinguish one animal from another. Evolution is fundamentally a religious origin myth, argument, or assumption outside science’s scope. It is not a scientific or testable theory.”
The defendants moved to dismiss on procedural and substantive grounds, arguing that the Reinoehls did not identify facts that constituted religious coercion. They specifically cited the 1968 landmark Supreme Court case Epperson v. Arkansas, in which the Court overturned an Arkansas statute prohibiting teaching evolution in public schools.
Senior U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker, an 81-year-old Reagan appointee, quickly dismissed the Reinoehls’ case and granted the defendant’s request. Barker ruled that the teaching of evolution did not violate the Establishment Clause, notwithstanding the similarities between evolutionary theory and atheism.
In an email to Law&Crime on Tuesday, Jennifer Reinoehl stated that she had not yet received an explanation for the case’s rejection and assumed the verdict was due to “some flaw in the complaint” rather than a deficiency in the case’s merits. “It is ridiculous that we continue to teach evolution as ‘scientific truth’ when it has been long disproven,” Reinohel tweeted.
Reinoehl also filed a failed case in 2021 against the Centers for Disease Control and 16 businesses over mask mandates, as well as a lawsuit in 2024 challenging Indiana’s ballot access. The plaintiffs have not yet indicated whether they want to appeal the dismissal. Attorneys for the defendants did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
