a lot religious people complained about Noah deviating from scripture and that came out this year

One of the most fundamental, useful, and dangerous cultural assumptions in Western society is in the inevitability of progress. We often tend to look at social and technological progression as having a linear correlation with time, when the truth is that there are many instances of both progression and regression in Western history that buck this trend.

In the 20th century, the rise of the Nazi party in Germany makes for an excellent example. While various degrees of anti-semitism were present in Europe since the declaration of Jews as guilty of deicide (and perhaps beforehand), the Holy Roman Empire (of the German people, which was "not holy, nor Roman, nor an empire") is considered an example of a medieval Christian state where Jews had better chances of social integration than many other Christian states. That is, while anti-semitism was certainly present, it was perhaps tamer than in other places. As we all know, however, Germany was the most violently anti-Jewish state in the world by the 1940s and neo-Nazism lingers on the fringes of that country to this day. A German Jew in the year 1500 was living a safer, happier life than their descendant 440 years later.

Ergo, we shouldn't make assumptions about how progressive or accepting a society is based solely on time. On top of that, there are many differences between the social context and politics of 1960s USA when compared to its state of being today. Consider how heavily lobby groups have taken off, for instance, and that 1960s USA was in the process of a social revolution.

Someone here can write a beefier version of this, but basically, the whole show was courting scandal an awful lot of the time.

Rod Serling is remembered as one of the most controversial writers in television, coming into conflict with censors and the public (and, later, his former next-door neighbors, Ron and Nancy Reagan).

If the Adam & Eve episode didn't cause a scandal (and unlike many commenters here, I suspect it did, at least on a small scale - there were, I'd imagine, quite a few letters written), that's because it would have been dwarfed by the furor over "I am the Night - Color Me Black", which was a thin allegory of current events in the Civil Rights struggle, or "The Encounter", with a young George Takei taking on anti-Asian racism, post-war trauma and the Vietnam War all at once.

"The Encounter" attracted so many complaints, it got yanked from syndication.

A lot of the current politicization of religiousness in the United States comes from the efforts of the Republicans to win the South from the Democrats. In the 1960s, when this happened, the Evangelical wing of American Christianity was mostly apolitical and did not believe in intervening politically on the same scale as they do today.

This essay at the beginning of an excellent book is an good, short, look at the change in the position of Evangelicals due to increased attention to their issues from Republicans. This series of six of PBS documentaries is a documentary in the spirit of the Lambert book and also points to the same influences for the rise of Evangelical issues in American politics.

I'm not a historian (I'm a PhD in Social Psychology with an emphasis in understanding American culture), and maybe historians have better ways to answer these questions, but it is very difficult to definitively say why something 'didn't' happen. Still, I think Lambert's book gives an important window into the change in thinking and why Evangelical ideas that were once fringe are now relatively common in mainstream American discourse.

Re religious themes in science fiction, such themes were explored sometimes, such as in James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" from 1958, which deals with the question of whether aliens have souls, and as such, should they be under the jurisdiction of the Church as capable of salvation?

Harlan Ellison's 1967 collection Dangerous Visions contains quite a daring story by the British writer John Brunner, called "Judas", which can be summed up simply by the words "Robot Jesus".

It also contains a story by Damon Knight called Shall The Dust Praise Thee? which deals with God returning to earth only to find that it's been decimated by nuclear war. In his afterword to the story, he writes: "This story was written some years ago, and all I remember about it is that my then agent returned it with loathing, and told me I might possibly sell it to the Atheist Journal in Moscow, but nowhere else".

So religious themes were used sometimes in the edgier types of science fiction in the 50's and 60's. As for why this could be broadcast on television without a popular uproar, is it too much like speculation on my part to say that America is in some ways more religious now, and less secular-minded, than it was in the 60's?

I'm going to try to more directly address your question. Why did religious issues not bring up such vitriol in the 1960s as they do today?

One of the narratives in explaining the growth of the religious right in the United States is the close linking of the Republican Party and evangelical movements, and the subsequent growth of both. Evangelicalism saw it's real start in the early 20th century in the United States, but really started to grow after the Second World War, and particularly after the growth of large mega-churches in the 1970s onward. Television aided this tremendously. There are plenty of papers on attempts to link the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s with the growth of this movement, but I am not going to comment on any certainty there. However, what is certain is that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the religious movement in the United States was fundimentally altered.

Let's go back a bit to 19th and early 20th century United States. Prior to the election of JFK, the religious debate in the country was really dominated by the debate between Catholicism and Protestantism. I don't think JFK's election is quite as barrier breaking as Obamas, but he was the first (and only) Catholic president in the nation's history. Protestantism was long the dominant religion in the country, and for the most part religious sentiments were not particularly strong in public media. JFK being Catholic was not seen as a good thing, but people were able to get over it without too much trouble. Indeed, the idea that the US has always been a state with these religious dominated discussions is really incorrect. Let's go back to the Scopes Monkey trial. This is often brought up in discussions where people try to point out how 'backwards' the US has been in the past as well. In reality, reporting on the trial was almost universally derisive of Tennessee. In short, the state was a laughing stock for most.

So let's come back to the present. I mentioned the evangelical movement. In the 1970s, as the evangelical movement coalesced around strong personalities running churches that could number from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand, these leaders began flexing their muscle, both monetarily and with their actual followers. In 1979, the Jerry Falwell founded the "Moral Majority" which was an organization essentially dedicated to driving the narrative in right-wing politics towards religion. And Republican leaders snapped at it. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s religion and religiously associated organizations in the United States became both more vocal, and more powerful. Larger than life leaders of huge mega churches became men who could funnel not only huge numbers of supporters, but also the cash they controlled, not only at candidates, but issues. Today, the Scopes Monkey Trial would receive 'fair' coverage from media where both sides would be mentioned. In 1925, the Tennessee individuals prosecuting the case were pilloried as 'buffoons' in the press. That simple comparison should go a long way to helping one see the change in American politics.

One thing to bear in mind, that I think is being forgotten amongst the polemics of 60s society, is the simple technology. Today if there something that sends the Religious Right into a tizzy, they're onto social media in seconds. That gets picked up by various blogs and turns up in places like Reddit and might even get coverage on Fox.

In the 60s there was no email, or Facebook, or in many cases even a TV in the house. If you saw something on TV you'd either have to wait until the next day to make a phone call to the studio, or write a letter that may take several days to be read. Even then, unless there was a large number of letters or calls, the studio probably wouldn't make any announcement or apology to the general public. So other people who might have been offended but didn't write or call, wouldn't know there were others like them.

Does anyone know the name of his episode?