This blog has looked before at the correlation between the belief in Bible inerrancy and low levels of education with evangelicals routinely being revealed as the least educated overall and the most believing in the Bible as inerrant fact. As the evangelical Christians - those I call the Christofascists - have taken over the Republican Party we now see only 43% of self-identifying Republicans believing in evolution. The sane and educated people have simply left the GOP, a party that once valued science and knowledge. But even among Evangelicals there is an exodus of the younger educated factions who go to college, receive an education and come to see the religious faith in which the have been raised/brainwashed as unacceptable. A Piece in The Daily Beast authored by a professor at an evangelical college looks at the downward spiral among evangelicals. Here are excerpts:
According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.
The connection between acceptance of evolution and political affiliation has grown stronger over the past three years, exacerbating the polarization now plaguing Congress. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent.
The trajectory is not encouraging, especially as it runs in parallel with a steady increase in the evidence for evolution—evidence now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory. Evolution is as widely accepted in biology departments as gravity is in physics departments.
So how is it that 64 percent of America’s “white evangelical evangelical Protestants,” an unusually powerful and wealthy demographic, remains so strongly opposed to evolution?
I am a white evangelical Protestant, or at least I was until persuaded to leave a couple of years ago. Raised in a parsonage, I grew up in that tradition and, after earning a Ph.D. in physics, I taught science, including evolution, at an evangelical college, one of approximately 160 similar—and accredited—institutions in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Most evangelical colleges teach evolution, albeit quietly, carefully, and often tentatively, although there are exceptions.
In an ideal world these efforts should slowly trickle onto Main Street, where they would inform ordinary evangelicals, including those who run for Congress. In time, Darwin’s dangerous idea should become widely accepted, just as Christians gradually gave credence to Galileo’s dangerous idea about the motion of the earth. But that is not what is happening.
For a quarter century I taught scientific theories of origins—evolution and the Big Bang Theory—under a cloud of suspicion that waxed and waned but never totally disappeared. With few exceptions, my mostly evangelical students accepted these ideas. I took informal polls indicating that most of the 50 percent of my students who rejected evolution at the beginning of my course accepted it by the end. My colleagues at other evangelical colleges report similar experiences. We were hopeful that these evangelical students would become leaders of their faith communities and gradually persuade their fellow evangelicals that evolution was not a lie from hell—which was what many of them had been taught in Sunday school. But instead scientifically informed young evangelicals became so alienated from their home churches that they walked away, taking their enlightenment with them.
An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.
[S]ome professors, alarmed by the persistent gap between the evangelical community and the findings of science—the gap that drives their students out of their churches—have naively presumed to educate their larger faith communities by writing books and articles in support of scientific theories of origins such as evolution and the Big Bang. Their quiet whispers thus become loud proclamations. Influential leaders read their books and are horrified to discover that a faculty member at “their” college is spreading “lies from the pit of hell” and destroying the faith of the students. Campaigns of various sorts are mounted and pressure exerted on the college leadership to remove that dangerous professor.
Productive scholarship that would be highly valued at other institutions became instead a major liability. Administrators complained that I was too controversial and creating public relations problems . . .
I spent countless hours in the office of a succession of college presidents, explaining why Christians needed to make peace with evolution, no matter how painful. I was forced to communicate and even meet with hostile external constituents to defend well-established science against people who knew nothing about it beyond the challenges it posed to their interpretation of the Bible. One such watchdog group, the Reformed Nazarenes, rejoiced when I finally left the college.
My story is far from unique. Indeed, it’s almost typical. Understandably, only a handful of evangelical scholars have published books and articles in defense of evolution, but many of them have been forced to resign as a result.
It is no surprise that American Christofascists are focusing so much effort on Africa. To thrive, their poisonous religious beliefs require (i) an ignorant, uneducated audience, or (ii) simple minded individuals who due to their own psychological issues are terrified to think or question hogwash that has been spoon fed to them. It is frightening that such mental midgets now hold so much sway over the GOP which seems engaged in a race towards utter ignorance.
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