When a body of thought crosses into another language, readers do not simply receive it. They interpret, explain, borrow and leave things out, so the ideas get rebuilt from local words and concerns. Measuring these readings against the original misses the point, because the new meanings they create in society, politics, schooling, religion and law are the real history.
A theory of where living things come from was taken up as a ready set of metaphors for why some nations lag and others rise, and as a model for analysing society. Read during imperial pressure and fears of civilizational decline, evolution became a way to talk about progress and backwardness. Some readers concluded that science, not the state, was what moves a society forward.
Reformers who used new science often did not frame their work as a modern break with tradition. They took from science eclectically and set their project in an older vocabulary of community reform and renewal. Labels like 'religious modernism' can therefore misdescribe what the reformers themselves thought they were doing.
Missionaries who could not win converts directly turned to science, hoping it would expose the faith they opposed as childish and inconsistent to educated minds. Teaching science as a weapon against a religion made it suspect. When teachers defended a controversial theory, students were suspended for protesting and the school retreated to a more orthodox curriculum.
Arguing over a new theory did more than test belief. It became a way to discuss how scripture should be read, what makes belief possible and how the universe is ordered. Through these arguments the very ideas of 'science' and 'religion', and of 'science' and 'civilization', changed shape together.