On Climate, On COVID, On Science, On Evolution, The Religious Right Is Still Stuck In 1925
Why is the United States the only wealthy country where novel coronavirus cases are hitting new highs while elsewhere the virus is being contained? A lot of it has to do with the rejection of science by many on the right. A Gallup survey reports that while 98 percent of Democrats reported wearing a mask outside the home, only 66 percent of Republicans did. The same denialism extends to other important issues: A Pew survey reports that 75 percent of Democrats regard climate change as a top policy priority, compared with only 25 percent of Republicans. President Trump — who rejects his own government’s warnings about global warming and keeps insisting that the coronavirus will “miraculously” disappear on its own — is more a symptom than the cause of the problem. The right’s reign of unreason long predates his presidency.
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It’s true that fundamentalism became less assertive after the Scopes trial, but it hardly went away. By the 1980s, it had migrated to the Republican Party (Bryan was a Democrat) and had become a political force to be reckoned with. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, actually thought that Bryan was a sellout for admitting, under Darrow’s cross-examination, that the world was not created in six 24-hour days. Falwell said that Bryan “lost the respect of Fundamentalists” for conceding that the Book of Genesis was referring to longer periods of time.
Today, the theory of evolution is accepted by most Americans — including most religious believers — but still resisted by a significant minority. According to a Pew poll in 2018, 18 percent of American adults deny the theory of evolution. Among white evangelical Protestants (a core part of the Trump base), 38 percent say that humans have always existed in their present form. Having 18 percent of the adult population in the anti-evolution camp might not seem like a lot, but it translates to roughly 37.6 million people — the population of Canada — who reject a core tenet of modern science.
I suspect there is a lot of overlap between anti-evolutionists, anti-maskers and climate deniers. That hostility to science, found far more on the right than the left, makes it much harder to deal with major crises such as global warming or the coronavirus.
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/08/foes-science-faced-ridicule-scopes-trial-were-paying-price-95-years-later/
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