THE FISH IS, along with the superimposed chi and rho, one of the very oldest symbols of Christianity. As handed down in Christian iconography, it looks like a football drawn with two arcs — but sloppily, so that the two lines meet at one end and cross at the other. Most early Christians having been Greek-speakers, between the two arcs is written IXOYE — Greek for “fish,” and an acronym for “Jesus Christ the Son of God [Is] Savior.” It invokes the miracle of loaves and fishes and Jesus’ exhortation to his disciples to become “fishers of men.” It was scratched in the Roman catacombs and daubed on walls in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it is mentioned in the writings of the Carthaginian church father Tertullian. It still appears on gonfalons and stoups and salvers and various other accounterments of Christian worship.
And — fatefully — on the backs of cars. For the past decade, five-inch-long chrome trunk plaques of the fish symbol have sold like hotcakes, at four bucks apiece. Harbor House Gifts of Fullerton, Calif., the maker of the fish, has made hundreds of thousands of them. Such success has led, predictably, to a backlash. In 1990, a Hollywood special-effects designer named Chris Gilman began producing a bumper plaque of his own design that replaces IXOYE with “Darwin” and gives the fish legs, as if to show it walking out of the shallows of amphibiana onto the solid ground of the mammal kingdom. Gilman sold his gag to Evolution Design of Karnes City, Texas, which is making a fortune off them. The company has sold tens of thousands of the Darwin gadgets, primarily in the South and West.
The bumper plaques have occasioned a battle over religious tolerance, free speech, and political correctness that has been playing out for years now — through pulpits, talk shows, op-ed columns, and especially letters to the editor. A writer in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette worries that the Christian fish is seen as “rubbing noses in the fact that ‘I’m this and you’re not.” A Dallas Morning News writer says people sport the Darwin fish “just to infuriate Christians.”
Both have a point. Displaying the IXOYE fish is a gesture that many conservative Christians would recognize as “identity politics” if someone else were doing it — at worst a kind of puffed-up pride, and at best a lighthearted bit of crowing, along the lines of “Thank God I’m Irish” or “You Bet Your Dupa I’m Polish.” But the Darwin fish is something altogether nastier. It’s a statement that, were it directed towards anyone besides Christians, would be condemned as bigotry by most of those who display it.
Because once it is acknowledged that we are talking about identity politics, we are talking about something on which — in this country at least — a clear-cut decorum has developed. Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with “Shalom” written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with “Usury” written inside the same symbol would be an outrage. A bumper sticker with “Pride” written in the gay-rights rainbow colors would be anodyne; a bumper sticker with “AIDS” written in the same color scheme would be a hate crime. Where “Black Is Beautiful” might start a conversation, “Black Is Horrible” could lose you some teeth. This isn’t a baffling custom, and the Darwin-fish people ought to understand it — safe to say they’ve had more to do with promulgating it over the years than their IXOYE-proclaiming brethren.
Discontent with the Darwin plaque is not just humorless bluenosery — though presumably the Darwin people would say they’re purveying a species of humor, not hatred. In ethnic humor, it’s hard to tell pomposity-deflating kidding from boiling malice — which is why, in the last decade, this once-thriving vein of wit has been all but banished from the public square. Except as regards Christians.
The Darwin people and their sympathizers would insist that they’re lampooning not a holy symbol but a piece of propaganda. “The Darwin fish folk are rebutting creationist teachings,” writes the AP’s Gary D. Robertson. Robertson takes aim at those who believe in the literal meaning of the Bible — that God created the universe in seven days, and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is therefore impossible — and who want to revamp school systems across the country to reflect their teachings. Shantana Croom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also bills the bumper-sticker wars as a controversy between rationalists and Bible-thumpers. The Economist, writing on the issue in 1996, got Robert Simonds of the National Association of Christian Educators and Citizens for Excellence in Education — a creationist group — to defend the fish, as if Christians and creationists and deniers of evolution were all synonymous.
There are two ways to look at this conflation of Christianity and creationism. First, assume it’s inaccurate — which it is. The creationist Simonds, who can be expected to make a generous estimate, claims to represent only 350,000 parents. That’s 0.1 percent of the country — a group that’s barely enough to account for all the fish plaques in circulation and that looks more like a minority in need of protection than a threat to pluralism. North Carolina State rhetorician Paul Celmer is right to note, “Darwinists are mocking what they think is the ‘Christian’ view of the origin of man and the Universe (even though there are probably as many Christian interpretations of Genesis as there are denominations of Christianity).”
But even if the one-to-one identification of Christians and creationists were accurate — and the Darwin fish were a sincere attack on those who reject Darwin and all his works — it is hard to think of another religious belief that could be held up to the same scorn in today’s cultural climate. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a bumper sticker saying “Eat a Cow” in Hindi.
You’ll never see one. And the reason is that, for all our complaints about its death, civility is something we have a lot more of than we think, particularly on matters of ethnic and religious identity. Whether one praises it as courtesy or derides it as political correctness, there can be no doubt that it has been elevated to the status of a social compact, one that is observed punctiliously and enforced ruthlessly — with one exception. The source of Christians’ rising frustration is not hard to see. They are bound by a regnant civility that has no hold on those who wish them ill.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
