I'm always happy to see MSM articles that challenge assumptions about conservative evangelicals, the religious community in which I grew up. Particularly when they aren't just about electoral politics.
This post by David Wheeler highlights a group a lot of people probably haven't considered: evangelical homeschoolers whose reasons for opting out of the school system have nothing to do with objecting to the teaching of evolution.
WTF, Evolution? is the most enjoyable Tumblr I've come across this side of the unassailable, if a tad nichier, Every Day I'm Pastorin'. Basically it's pictures of ridiculous-looking animals and then commentary, often in the form of a dialogue between evolution and a bewildered observer.
Some two decades before Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote the seminal 1985 book Habits of the Heart, which improved the public conversation about religion and society in the United States, Bellah penned a provocative essay called “Religious Evolution.” He has finally returned to that ambitious theme.
In high school I was taught that the Earth is about 10,000 years old. But I also learned the basics of evolution from my evangelical teachers. School administrators knew that students taking Advanced Placement biology exams and heading off to state universities needed to understand secular scientific reasoning, if only to combat it properly.
Forty percent of Americans favor teaching "creation science" instead of evolution in public schools. Fully 68 percent would like to see creationism taught alongside evolution. Given those figures, the decision by the Kansas Board of Education in August to downgrade the teaching of evolution should not come as a shock.
