If kids grow up with a scientific turn of mind, they are bound to turn that habit toward the rest of religion and society. Authoritarian religion has no stomach for that. In short, the evolution controversy is a conflict between dynamists and stasists. There must be, but in twenty years I have yet to encounter a single such person. Such a politics is impossible if the citizens, like scientists, always demand to know why.
Evolution teaches that man has no naturally fixed position in any organized hierarchy of species.
To the creationist, this is bad enough. Creationism seems like an isolated controversy, but evolution is fundamental to so many discoveries, that if it won, everything this side of physics would have to be torn out by the roots. Even if this weren't the case, we have no reason to believe that they would stop at evolution. The same Fundamentalists were horrified by anesthesia when it was new, because the Bible says women must give birth in pain. They see diseases as punishments visited upon the wicked.