Recent concerns have been expressed about the teaching of creationism and Intelligent Design in UK 'faith schools'. In the US this is an old story - legal battles to get creationism into US education have been going on for decades. But in the UK this is something new.

There is a certain irony in this. Next year is an important double-anniversary for Charles Darwin, who was born in 1809 and published The Origin of Species in 1859. There will be a vast outpouring of books, conferences and programmes ensuring the man and his book are celebrated. Yet, in the country of his birth, creationism, unknown and unheard of just a few decades ago, is now visible, whilst in the world’s leading scientific and technological country, 42% of the population rejects evolution altogether.

Due to the publicity about creationism in faith schools, some people think that creationism is the traditional stance of faith communities. Not so. Many Christians are as critical about the teaching of creationism in schools as are humanists.

It is also easy to forget that young earth creationism is a late twentieth century phenomenon, and Intelligent Design even more recent, only emerging as a distinct movement in the US during the 1990s. As someone raised in a Christian home and active as a Christian student in the Oxford of the mid 1960s, I can report that creationism was unheard of at the time. Christians didn't have any problem with evolution and it was not a topic for discussion or debate. I was nurtured as a Darwinian and remain so today.

This Christian stance towards Darwin goes back a long way. Darwin exchanged letters with nearly 2,000 correspondents in the course of his life, of whom around 200 were clergyman, some personal friends, many of whom provided Darwin with biological data for his publications.

I have held in my hands the original copy of a letter written by the Revd Charles Kingsley to Darwin, dated 18 Nov 1859, in which Kingsley thanked Darwin for his kind gift of an advance copy of the Origin of Species. This was the Kingsley who was soon to become the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.

In thanking Darwin for his kind gift, Kingsley wrote that 'All I have seen of it awes me', going on to remark that he didn't believe in the fixity of species anyway, and then making a comment that Darwin liked so much that he quoted it in the Second Edition of the Origin:

'I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development …. as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas (or ‘gaps’) which he himself had made'.

Other Christian clerics and academics at the time were no less generous in their praise of Darwin's new theory, not least Frederick Temple, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Similarly, in the US, Asa Gray, Professor of Natural History at Harvard and a committed Christian, was Darwin’s long-term correspondent and confidante who helped organise the publication of the Origin of Species in America. As the historian James Moore has commented when writing about the early reception of Darwinism: 'With but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution'.

Why the change in the late twentieth century? As far as the UK is concerned, much has to do with the efficiency of US exports - a steady stream of creationist financing, publications, speakers and movies has been flowing over into UK churches. But the new breed of tub-thumping atheists also have a lot to answer for: if you keep telling the average Christian in the pew that 'evolution equals atheism', then it's not surprising if they find the glossy creationist magazines more attractive.

There is a great need for education on science and faith in general, and on evolution in particular, within the Christian community. The answer to the question 'Creation or Evolution - Do We Have to Choose?' is simply 'no'. Many Christians see evolution as God's chosen way of bringing all biological diversity into being by a long creative process, and have done so ever since the time of Darwin. In this view, 'creation' is the complementary theological narrative to that of the scientific narrative of biological evolution, the former addressing questions of meaning and purpose, the latter the 'how' questions which science is so good at addressing.

That is not to say that evolution does not raise some important theological questions, of course. If God is a God of love, then why would he choose to bring all living things, including us, into being by such a long process that involves biological death and extinction on such a mind-boggling scale? The evidence for our common ancestry with the apes is overwhelming, made even stronger by recent genetic data. So, who were Adam and Eve? Does the evolutionary account leave any room for the idea of the Fall? How do we explain the origin of life and of the genetic code itself?

Perhaps the Darwin 2009 double-anniversary will act as a wake-up call to those in the UK Christian community who have been hood-winked by the US exports. In returning to a full-blooded Christian Darwinism they will only be rediscovering a tradition that itself goes back to 1859.

Denis Alexander is Director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where he is a Fellow. His book Creation or Evolution – Do We Have to Choose? is published this month by Monarch (retail price £10.99). Discounted copies can be purchased for £6 plus p & p from the Faraday Institute.