Ken, I've had occasion to be around such people in my life, and I agree they can be perfectly nice and agreeable folks in general. And if they have these weird ideas about the age of the earth and how everything began and we all got to this point, what's the harm, right? I had always hoped that these kinds of ideas could simply occupy a …
Ken, I've had occasion to be around such people in my life, and I agree they can be perfectly nice and agreeable folks in general. And if they have these weird ideas about the age of the earth and how everything began and we all got to this point, what's the harm, right? I had always hoped that these kinds of ideas could simply occupy a compartment in their minds that would ultimately be isolated from the rest of us.
The problem with that became apparent in the '00s when it became clear that the Republican Party had two major factions in support of climate change denial for distinct reasons, rendering a powerful coalition standing in the way of environmental reform. For big-business Republicans, the motivation was financial, and pushed by the fossil fuel industry. For fundamentalist Christians, accepting the reality of climate change meant validating the broad swath of what we might call the "Earth Sciences" (geology, climatology, paleontology, etc.), which would lead to conflicts with creationism. There were also abstract concerns over heretical ideas like "Earth worship", or contradiction of the Bible's alleged mandate to use the Earth as we see fit, but the attention paid to these paled in comparison to battling the theory of evolution, and all of the things like carbon dating that allowed climate scientists to develop epochal climate models spanning Earth's lifetime.
And then came Trump. At which point, yet another danger of having such an insular, epistemologically cloistered culture became apparent. Although general right wing media had a lot to do with this, fundamentalist Evangelicals, long shepherded by corrupt, wealth worshipping televangelists, proved to be a receptive constituency easily led by the endorsements of relatively few individuals – and many continue to be credulously receptive to conspiracy theories pushed by trusted faith leaders. Furthermore, the life-or-death consequences of such abuse of trust proved deadly during the COVID pandemic, with pastors and other religious leaders outright promoting medical quackery and false, faith-based reassurances to their congregations.
The really amazing thing about the climate-denier alliance was that, since the fossil fuel industry openly depends upon old-earth evolution science for its business, the two alliance parties were at complete ideological odds to begin with. (I wonder how Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers reconcile this?)
Ken, I've had occasion to be around such people in my life, and I agree they can be perfectly nice and agreeable folks in general. And if they have these weird ideas about the age of the earth and how everything began and we all got to this point, what's the harm, right? I had always hoped that these kinds of ideas could simply occupy a compartment in their minds that would ultimately be isolated from the rest of us.
The problem with that became apparent in the '00s when it became clear that the Republican Party had two major factions in support of climate change denial for distinct reasons, rendering a powerful coalition standing in the way of environmental reform. For big-business Republicans, the motivation was financial, and pushed by the fossil fuel industry. For fundamentalist Christians, accepting the reality of climate change meant validating the broad swath of what we might call the "Earth Sciences" (geology, climatology, paleontology, etc.), which would lead to conflicts with creationism. There were also abstract concerns over heretical ideas like "Earth worship", or contradiction of the Bible's alleged mandate to use the Earth as we see fit, but the attention paid to these paled in comparison to battling the theory of evolution, and all of the things like carbon dating that allowed climate scientists to develop epochal climate models spanning Earth's lifetime.
And then came Trump. At which point, yet another danger of having such an insular, epistemologically cloistered culture became apparent. Although general right wing media had a lot to do with this, fundamentalist Evangelicals, long shepherded by corrupt, wealth worshipping televangelists, proved to be a receptive constituency easily led by the endorsements of relatively few individuals – and many continue to be credulously receptive to conspiracy theories pushed by trusted faith leaders. Furthermore, the life-or-death consequences of such abuse of trust proved deadly during the COVID pandemic, with pastors and other religious leaders outright promoting medical quackery and false, faith-based reassurances to their congregations.
The really amazing thing about the climate-denier alliance was that, since the fossil fuel industry openly depends upon old-earth evolution science for its business, the two alliance parties were at complete ideological odds to begin with. (I wonder how Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers reconcile this?)
Very well said.