The majority of Republicans don’t believe in evolution? I don’t even know where to start.

A very recent Gallup poll, reported on June 11, says that 68% of Republicans do not believe in evolution. Now I know some Republicans would like to nuance that response, as you may have seen in my last post about Senator Sam Brownback.

Senator Brownback’s position—that God created humans uniquely but micro-evolution does occur—may be more widely held than I realized. Gallup says when you break it down, 41% believe creationism is true and evolution is false, 28% believe evolution is true and creationism is false but, startlingly, 24% say they believe both theories are true, which is apparently the sort of thing Senator Brownback believes.

My concern is not in the nuance, however, but in political parsing of the numbers. And here it gets a little stark. I repeat, 68% of Republicans do not believe in evolution. By contrast, 37% of Independents and 40% of Democrats do not believe in evolution. Those are still big numbers but that’s to be expected, I guess. I mean, 2/3 of the whole country believes in creationism, so those people have to be somewhere.

The tightest correlation Gallup could find was between belief in creationism and weekly church attendance. Liberal religionists aren’t going to like this, but 74% of those who attend weekly do not believe in evolution and those folks—the ones who are very religious and attend church regularly—are also much more likely to be Republican. The numbers in the report don’t separate by race or ethnicity, but I guarantee you that African-Americans will be the exception to the link among church attendance, belief in creationism, and leaning Republican.

Let’s be honest, painful though it is for me: there are some free-thought, small-government Republicans out there, but the “base” is now made up of small-thought, moral-government Republicans who attend church weekly and do not believe, or cannot understand, what science has demonstrated conclusively. Heck, I was probably wrong about Mitt Romney, too, a few weeks back. I may want the “third leg” of the Republican stool to be freedom, but the creationists surely will want it to be family values so he’s playing to 2/3 of his party.

My conclusion? Ronald Reagan really did change the party and make its successive victories possible. He did this by recognizing that big-business, big-defense, small-government Republicans could only win by pandering to, or at least paying lip-service to, the broad base of anti-intellectuals who believe the moon is made of green cheese. People like me who want the GOP to turn toward other values may be encouraged when McCain or Giuliani do NOT beat the family values drum, but the eventual candidate will wind up courting the irrational once again. There’s no way around it.

If, like me, you thought it was trite when the Republican hopefuls were asked to “raise your hand if you do not believe in evolution”, then you, like me, failed to realize how deep this problem truly is. I may wish to believe that a few religious fanatics have seized the Republican party and are exercising disproportionate influence. But if 2/3 of Republicans really subscribe to creationism, then maybe it’s me who needs the reality check.

Arthur Farnsley's blog | login or register to post comments