Schools in Kansas are now free to teach biology without referring to evolution. The state board of education ruling has been hailed as a victory by the religious right, but a closer look at the people -- and traditions -- of the state suggest the victory is illusory at best. Kerry Tremain, who graduated from William Jewell, a Baptist college near Kansas City, is a contributing editor to Pacific News Service, and an editor for Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century.

"You have two purposes in life," Mr. Stringer told us, "to procreate and to magnify your creator."

Mr. Stringer was my high school biology teacher in Coffeyville, Kansas in 1968, but he would have made a terrific pastor. His red hair curled forward, encircling a bald spot in the middle. His voice thundered with the good cheer of the self-assured.

Still, I imagine he might take exception to the Kansas State Board of Education's decision allowing the state's schools to let evolution go untaught. Mr. Stringer was a passionate Christian, but he taught us evolution. We learned genetics by mating fruit flies in baby food jars. Unfortunately, many students punched air holes so large the insects crawled out, creating a fruit fly Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as an infestation in the cafeteria that made Stringer very unpopular.

Mr. Stringer was one of my favorite adults in Coffeyville. He and two ministers -- one Baptist, one Presbyterian -- were always good for a spirited argument on the basics: lust, the Bible, the Meaning of Life. I rarely agreed with them, but there were no hard feelings. Even, I liked to imagine, a kind of regard for a worthy young opponent.

Coffeyville's main claim to fame is its rebuff of the Dalton Gang, "a mean and fearful bunch," as the town song went, on a "sad and fateful day" in 1892. When the gang tried to rob both banks, townspeople grabbed guns and ammo at Isham's Hardware Store and shot it out. A widely circulated photograph showed the gang members' bodies laid out on wooden planks in the city jail. Trespassers beware.

Kansas has a powerful ethos of "live and let live," but also a tradition of righteous crusaders. Carry Nation began her hatchet-wielding campaign against the saloons there, for instance. Perhaps as a result, Kansans possess a finely honed sense of when righteousness slips into what they call meddlin'.

Around the time of my high school graduation, the state elected a religiously correct Attorney General named Vern Miller. As sheriff of Sedgewick County, he earned a statewide reputation in violent confrontations with civil rights protesters at a Wichita high school. Once Attorney General, he conducted high profile, middle-of-the-night drug raids at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. A few people were irritated by his grandstanding with the press, but most people loved it and his ratings soared.

Then Miller tried to bust the airlines and Amtrak for serving liquor while crossing Kansas -- which forbids selling liquor by the drink -- claiming, "Kansas goes all the way up, and Kansas goes all the way down." This made the state the butt of national jokes. Miller's next moves were a disaster. He raided gamblers in VFW, American Legion and private halls, and even threatened church bingo games. His state political career fizzled, and the laws he rigorously enforced were repealed.

The Christian Right has won a victory in Kansas, but it will prove illusory. Like similar victories elsewhere, this one will wake up the moderate middle. The popular Republican governor has called the decision an embarrassment, and suits are threatened.

Despite popular stereotypes, Kansans aren't hicks. Although the state is relatively small in population, it has up-to-date cities, sophisticated scholars, and yellow pages full of Internet service providers. Its farmers are as likely to know the ins and outs of international finance as the latest biotechnology for improving soybean yields.

Ironically, the state's anti-evolutionists won this latest battle by appealing to the "live and let live" side of the prairie psyche. They're not saying you can't teach evolution, only that you don't have to. Almost a position of moral relativism, one might say.

But it's a ruse. Their obvious goal is to get a creationism curriculum in classes like Mr. Stringer's. What if Stringer had been encouraged to cross the line from teacher to preacher and his class had strayed from biology to belief? Under that more coercive regime, my education would have been impoverished and my friendly disagreements translated into bad test scores.

"Live and let live" is the creed of the first amendment. The European experience of non-stop religious warfare taught our founders that good fences make good neighbors. The fence between the state and religion, between science and faith, between schools and churches has needed repair over the years -- and no one said you couldn't talk over it -- but it has held.

In his classroom, Mr. Stringer straddled the fence, but the state board has now jumped clean over. They may discover, as a farmer would say, that they've stepped in it. Most Kansans want their kids to learn science and evolution. Expect them to be just as prairie stubborn in defense of their schools as those Coffeyville forbears who laid out the Daltons.