[ppi] [ppiindia] Dinosaurs, evangelicals and the state

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4469590.stm

Last Updated: Saturday, 26 November 2005, 12:07 GMT  


      Dinosaurs, evangelicals and the state  

             By Justin Webb 
            BBC Washington correspondent  


      Should the views of the religious right, many of whom are Republican 
party supporters, be adopted by the US government? In Washington, Justin Webb 
considers the implications and asks whether politics and religion make a good 
mix. 

             
            Should dinosaurs and religion mix? 
      We are having dinner at the house of some friends who are supporters of 
President Bush. 

      Their five-year-old son, a classmate of our children, takes me upstairs 
to see his collection of dinosaurs. 

      Little Meade is a passionate palaeontologist and this is a land of plenty 
so the room heaves with prehistoric life. 

      I am suitably impressed, but unknown to Meade I am not here to admire the 
bone structure of the dinosaurs. 

      I am in this room on assignment, because in modern America Meade's 
dinosaurs are at the heart of the travails of a political party and I need to 
find out something about Meade's parents which will affect our relationship. 

      I need to know what they told him about when the dinosaurs existed. 

      Millions of Americans, most of them supporters of the Republican party, 
believe that the world was created only a few thousand years ago as per the 
account in Genesis and the dinosaurs can only date from then, so the 
Tyrannosaurus Rex romped around with Adam and Eve. 

      In other words these Americans, heirs to every scientific advance in 
history, deny rational accounts of how the world came to exist. 

      And Meade's parents - I know his mum teaches Sunday school - might be 
among them. 

      I put the question to Meade: "When did the dinosaurs live?" 

             
            According to some, the age of the Grand Canyon is open to debate 
      There is an agonising pause as he considers it. American children are 
wonderfully earnest and Meade is not going to be rushed. 

      Eventually he says it is in a book his Dad bought him. 

      We hunt the tome, find it, open the page and behold a diagram which has 
been explained to Meade. 

      It all floods back. 

      The dinosaurs, he informs me with great authority and aplomb, are 
millions and millions and millions of years old. I could have hugged him and 
his parents; we are, after all, inhabiting the same mental planet. 

      But many modern members of the Republican party, including some in 
positions of great power, do not seem to be living on that planet. 

      Central question 

      As the nation recovers this weekend from the worldly pleasures of the 
wonderfully inclusive festival of Thanksgiving, a festival which can appeal 
equally to atheist and Bible-basher, it seems to me that the central political 
question facing everyone here, far more important than any to do with Iraq or 
the deficit or Guantanamo Bay, is whether or not the Republican party, after 
decades of flirting, has finally got into bed with an irrational sect. 

      Describe an American as a Roman Catholic and you say nothing about his or 
her political and social beliefs. 

            In the state of Kansas they have succeeded in getting the science 
syllabus altered so that teachers can tell their pupils that God made 
everything in its current form 
           
      Left-wing flower-power Democrats can be Catholics, so can right-wing 
socially conservative Republicans. 

      American Jews, Hindus, even Muslims are not politically defined by their 
faith. 

      But evangelical Christians, operating inside the Republican party, have 
coalesced their energies and their resources around a set of beliefs on 
homosexuality, abortion and Darwinism which place them on the authoritarian 
right of every political question and at odds with science campaigning. For 
instance, to tell visitors to the Grand Canyon that this wondrous sight is not 
millions of years old, which it is. 

      Backlash 

      In the state of Kansas they have succeeded in getting the science 
syllabus altered so that teachers can tell their pupils that God made 
everything in its current form - a change the National Academy of Sciences said 
"would put the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as they took 
their place in the world." 

      This is serious stuff and Republicans who are not evangelical Christians 
have in recent weeks been organising a fight-back. 

      They have noticed two things. Number one, that the zealots are spending 
more energy fighting Charles Darwin than cutting taxes, and number two - and 
this is much more important - that the zealots outside Kansas are not receiving 
the support of the nation at large. 

             
            Did the board lose the election because they opposed evolution? 
      In the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, the local school board managed this 
year to get warmed up, creationism infiltrated into biology classes, and here 
is what happened. 

      A couple of weeks ago all eight members of the board who were up for 
re-election lost their seats. 

      "If there is a disaster in your area," the tele-evangelist Pat Robertson 
told the people of Dover, "don't turn to God - you just rejected Him from your 
city." 

      Mr Robertson is an important man: the former Attorney General John 
Ashcroft teaches at his university, and his views are sought on Supreme Court 
candidates and foreign affairs. 

      Republican doubts 

      But should those views govern the Republican party? 

      Many members think not, particularly since President Bush is himself in 
such dire trouble now. 

      He famously told an interviewer that when deciding to go to war in Iraq 
he listened to the authority not of his dad but of a Higher Father. 

      And, Republicans are daring to think, if not quite say, out loud: "Look 
where that got him." 


      From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 26 November, 2005 
at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World 
Service transmission times. 









     


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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