If Almost 1/4 of US States Can Now Fund Creationism...
Bruce Wilson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Wed May 25, 2011 at 12:48:43 PM EST
"Religious schools across the nation are receiving public funds through voucher and corporate tax credit programs. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of these schools use Protestant fundamentalist textbooks that teach not only Creationism, but also a religious supremacist worldview, with a shocking spin on politics, history, and human rights." - from Vouchers/Tax Credits Funding Creationism, Revisionist History, Hostility Toward Other Religions


Does it matter that, as Talk To Action contributor Rachel Tabachnick has documented at length in a new groundbreaking story, state tax money in almost 1/4 of the states in the US can apparently now fund religious schools that teach from textbooks promoting creationism*, which call the Theory of Evolution a lie and link liberal views to an alleged national decline? Or that the UK government, moving in the opposite direction, has just opted to ban government funding for creationist schools? Regardless, isn't the march of atheism and secularism an inevitable trend?
[below: excerpt from Vouchers/Tax Credits Funding Creationism, Revisionist History, Hostility Toward Other Religions]

A quiz in the teacher's guide for the A Beka eighth grade text Matter and Motion asks, "Why did superstition take the place of science during the Middle Ages?"  The answer key tells us, "People did not have the Bible to guide them in their beliefs.  Many looked back to the false ideas of Aristotle."23  The next question is, "Why did modern science begin so suddenly in the 1500s?" The answer given is, "As people returned to the authority of the Scriptures during the Protestant Reformation (1517), they started learning the truth about God and His creation." 

A three page section in this A Beka text leads with a headline "Two Faiths: Creation and Evolution" and states, "Creation, not evolution, is based on a reasonable faith."24  The section on Darwin is headlined "Evolution: Faith Disguised as Science."25 A Bob Jones science text includes a chapter titled "Biblical Creationism," claiming that evolution cannot be a part of science, since it can not be observed and must be accepted by faith.

The same Bob Jones text explains, "From a Christian standpoint, there are only two worldviews from which to choose - a Christian worldview or a non-Christian worldview.  The most important beliefs in a Christian worldview are the beliefs that the Bible is the Word of God and the only completely reliable thing in this world."26

The text suggests that sedimentary fossils were formed in Noah's flood.  One-and-a-half pages are dedicated to the possibility that the Bible refers to dinosaurs and closes with the warning, "Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation.  Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."27  

On young-demographic big social media sites such as Reddit.com I read a great deal of sentiment to the effect that atheism, as movement, is winning and will inevitably prevail. Often, reasons given center around the alleged decline of Christianity in the US and other nations, and a supposed corresponding rise in secularism.

Without getting into the numbers game (fewer Christians? More atheists?) I'd like to point out that energized and organized minorities can very effectively organize for political power.

One trend that radically bucks the claim that atheism is prevailing is a disturbing (for supporters of church-state separation) trend in which more and more federal and state money flows, each year, to religious entities in America. Outrage over this phenomenon breaks out sporadically, with Kentucky's tax-credit supported Noah's Ark theme part as the latest provocation du jour but rarely do people so outraged back up, to survey the wider pattern in which more and more government tax dollars flow to the "faith based" sector.

The trend really took off with George W. Bush's Faith Based Initiative, which diverted several billion dollars to religious groups during the Bush years but the flow hasn't stopped, and as independent journalist Andy Kopsa has chronicled, FBI money has recently gone to virulently bigoted, antigay organizations such as the Iowa Family Policy Center, which has claimed that homosexuality poses a great threat to public health than secondhand smoke.

In the end, it really doesn't matter if the politicized Christian right amounts to only a