Creationists
I agree with Ron Bailey: it is a shame that decent people, who want to bring their children up with salutary moral teachings, consider it necessary to deny much of modern science in order to do so.
This is also part of a larger split among our elites. Harvey Mansfield wrote some years ago of the split between the intellectuals, especially centered around the humanities, and the money-makers or business people. More and more they have become distinct groups, instead of friends and relations with a common education, who end up with a greater or less interest in one activity or another. They see each other as threats, and since we live in a democracy, they appeal to the demos or the common people: "Those other people are an elite who are hostile to your interests." To some extent the business people say: "the intellectuals want to raise your taxes for wasteful and/or immoral programs," and the intellectuals say "the business people want to leave you at the mercy of the worst employer, landlord and retailer you can find." The business people in the U.S. have made an alliance with social conservatives, and they talk about values, going beyond tax cuts. Right now it doesn't seem to be so much abortion or gay marriage, big as they are, but "leadership." Intellectuals have fallen into an unfortunate habit of sounding like the village atheist: all that stuff is bunk!
Then you have the military (officers now skewing Republican), the clergy (evangelicals to the right, blacks including evangelicals, and others, to the left). Part of the complaint of the creationists is that mainstream churches accepted modern science as part of the same process by which they gave up proselytizing for any of the statements in Scripture. Creationists think that in order to restore the latter practice, it is necessary to deny science. So the clergy who are most successful at gaining adherents will be totally divorced from the secular university, the sciences as well as the humanities?
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