While Bush’s conservative Christian fundamentalist base is delighted by his pronouncement, it has opened a split with neoconservatives and other secular allies on the right.

In Texas, where the president likes to spend August reconnecting with his heartland, Bush said last week: “Both sides ought to be taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.”

The teaching of Darwinism is a controversial issue in Kansas and other patches of middle America, where legal and political challenges are being mounted to introduce intelligent design into the science curriculum. Many fundamentalists believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and that atheistic theories are being foisted on children.

The teaching of intelligent design advocates a divine — or “intelligent” — creator and is regarded by many scientists as mumbo-jumbo.

“With the president endorsing it, at the very least it makes Americans who have that position more respectable, for lack of a better word,” said Gary Bauer, a leading Christian activist. “It’s not some backwater view. It is a view held by the majority of Americans.”

Some of the president’s greatest supporters in the war on terror are shaking their heads in disbelief at his remarks. Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative commentator, said the idea of teaching intelligent design — creationism’s “modern step-child” — was “insane”.

“To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of a religious authority,” he wrote. “To impose it on the teaching of evolution is ridiculous.”

Krauthammer’s scathing article appeared in the current issue of Time magazine before Bush expressed his opinion. He believes it prompted a reporter to ask the president where he stood.

Caught off-guard, Bush gave an unrehearsed answer. “It is very clear to me that he is sincere about this,” Krauthammer said. “He is not positioning.”

However, he added: “If you look at this purely as a cynical political move, it will help in the heartlands and people of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas.”

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