Not the smallest of the crimes of the Bush administration is to allow an affectation of cultural superiority to sweep Europe. By now, you must know the list of our alleged virtues by heart and the odds are you accept our moral pre-eminence as incontestable.

The Christian right wants an end to abortion, a rolling back of homosexual rights and the teaching of creationism to gullible children in state schools. These primitive beliefs put Republicans outside the bounds of civilised discourse to everyone who matters except Tony Blair and he'll be gone soon. The rest of us can savour the antics of Baptist churches and Deep South demagogues as one of our greatest voyeuristic pleasures - the pornography of the politically literate. Every time a film crew comes back with footage of tele-evangelists milking their flocks, the seductive thought that there is no moral difference between Christian fundamentalism and Islamism becomes a little more appealing.

To be told that it is easier for creationists to get at children in Britain than the US is as shockingly incongruous as opening a paper and reading that more prisoners are executed in Devon than Texas. Yet British scientists trying to uphold basic intellectual standards are starting to believe just that.

It isn't that Britain has anything comparable with the US creationist lobby. The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches accept evolution, although there are signs from polls that the people likely to found Muslim schools do not. The organisations that are pushing biblical literalism in Britain are obscure. I doubt if one person in 1,000 will have heard of Truth in Science, Answers in Genesis, the Emmanuel Schools Foundation or the Creation Science Movement.

Typical activists describe themselves as 'street proselytisers', and tour the country giving lectures in nonconformists chapels and preaching from soap boxes in shopping centres. They look like living fossils, but researchers for the British Centre for Science Education show that they can be surprisingly effective.

Truth in Science has established a website and sent information packs to every school. Its suggested coursework for teachers to base lessons around is very slick and includes powerpoint presentations, video clips and arguments questioning that life could have emerged without a creator. If the group is to be believed, more teachers have thanked it for their help than phoned to say they had thrown their packs in the bin.

As in the United States, old-time creationism is dressed up in the pseudo-scientific garb of intelligent design. Instead of appealing to the literal truth of Genesis, smart creationists point to the complexity of molecular structures as evidence that only an omnipotent creator could have conjured life into being.

Stephen Layfield, head of science at the fundamentalist Emmanuel College near Middlesbrough, explained that teachers who say the 'Genesis account may be actually historical and true stand to meet with a barrage of criticism and scorn'.

Talking about molecular structures or gaps in the fossil record, however, deflects the derision. More important, it appeals to teachers who have no religion but suffer from what you could call the BBC fallacy. 'We teach the theory of evolution,' they say to themselves, 'so we should balance that by also teaching the theory of intelligent design.' They don't understand that you can't have balance between truth and falsehood. Those who claim you can are putting themselves in the same camp as Holocaust-deniers from the far right or deniers of the Bosnian concentration camps from the far left who, when confronted by incontrovertible evidence, always try to wriggle away by saying :'I'm just trying to put the other point of view.'

Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association is emphatic that the infiltration of British schools would be impossible in the United States. Because we don't separate church and state, he says, we can't simply say that it is illegal to bring God into the classroom. We therefore condemn ourselves to fighting endless minor science wars in the school labs. Last year in the US, by contrast, a federal judge ruled that a Pennsylvania school board's policy of teaching intelligent design in high-school biology class was unconstitutional because it was clearly a religious idea that advances 'a particular version of Christianity'.

His judgment showed that the great push by American Christians to challenge Darwin was doomed to fail and most of the other Christian initiatives look like going the same way. We are well into Bush's second term, but abortion is still legal and homosexual rights remain. Europeans enjoy their fantasy of the American dystopia too much to notice what is in front of their noses.

The Republicans used religious passions to push largely working-class American Christians to vote for Bush, then gave them next to nothing when he was in the White House. Perhaps one day their brains, honed by millions years of evolution, will work out that they have been taken for fools.