This is a never-ending story because pollsters and the media keep regenerating it. A new poll from Pew indicates that one-third of American adults reject the idea of evolution, and stories like this one from
USA Today are quick to imply this represents some sort of rejection of science by people of faith
Seventy-six percent of the religiously unaffiliated, 68% of white non-Hispanic Catholics and 53% of Hispanic Catholics
agreed with evolution.
Republicans are less likely to say humans evolved compared to Democrats or independents, Less than half of conservatives or 43%
agreed with evolution compared to 67% of liberals and 65% of independents.
When you read what the media writes, it's important to pay attention to subtleties like the use of "think" vs. "agree with." They're passing judgment here without really admitting they are. It's like when they use "claimed" or "insisted" to tell you they don't believe what a source said.
If you "agree with" evolution, you're accepting the understood truth, according to them. If you "think" something other than evolution happened, you are embracing some unsubstantiated notion. Every journalist betrays his or her bias in this way. It's human nature. This entire poll and story are designed to portray Republicans in general and evangelicals in particular as knuckle-draggers, which is kind of ironic when you think about it.
The truth is that the pollsters and the media don't understand what their own results mean, because they don't understand how people of faith think - and more importantly, how people of faith recognize and respond to the cues of the secular world.
To most Bible-believing Christians, being asked by a pollster or a journalist if you believe in evolution really means one thing: You don't believe that creation story, do you? It's not so much a query on your scientific sensibilities as it is a challenge to prove you're not one of these simpletons who believes Sunday School fairy tales.
I am pretty familiar with the way evangelical Christians of various stripes think. There is a small group that thinks the Bible requires you to believe the world is only 6,000 or 10,000 years old. This groups is not nearly as influential as a lot of raving secularists think. For most, it's a simple as this: We believe every word of the Book of Genesis without feeling the need to reject how science fills in the gaps. God created the world. God breathed life into man. God took woman from man. I believe the Word of God.
Now, how exactly He did it is not as important as what Genesis tells us about His relationship to man. Whether He formed man from the dust in an instant, or took billions of years to do it, is not a huge concern to me. I just know He did it.
When Christians tell pollsters they reject evolution, what they're really saying is that they reject the secular campaign to cast the creation story of Genesis as ridiculous. The secular world is a lot more obsessed with this question than the faith community is. When Christians say they believe man has existed in his present form from the beginning of time, they're giving one take on how the details of creation might have worked.
The intelligensia of our time has decided evolution is not only unassailable as a scientific fact, but that it needs to be constantly put up as a refutation of Genesis. The truth is that God knows more than we do about how He did what He did, and I'm more concerned about being right with Him than I am with giving Pew and USA Today the answers they want.
I probably would have answered with the "reject evolution" people too, not because I'm a young-earther or anything like that, but just because I know what they're trying to imply with the question. If they really want to understand how people of faith think, they should ask better questions and not take this same dumb survey all the time.
