February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday. It is also Abraham Lincoln's birthday. This past Monday was Presidents' Day (and George Washington's birthday). So I thought it would be a good occasion to look at creationism and how it has affected the media, Trumpism, and politics.
On the face of it, one wouldn't think that something like creationism has much in common with Trumpism. But at their core-values, most creationists and Trumpists are fundamentally aligned, and the tactics used to deceive the masses in both camps are identical. There's a lot of overlap on that Venn diagram! The rise of creationism really does parallel the rise of the Right-Wing Media Machine. They are both part of the same ecosystem, and while Creationism doesn’t always get overtly political, it certainly does when it comes to removing evolution from school classrooms and putting organized prayer back in. A large part of why creationism persists is because it gives Christians an imaginary excuse to invade the secular sphere, and they get very passionate about it because kids are involved. The fact that those kids don’t necessarily belong to them doesn’t phase them. In fact, it’s kind of the point. They want to indoctrinate YOUR kids without having to expose THEIR kids to anything like a contrary viewpoint.
To give an idea about how closely creationism and the Right-Wing Media Machine are interconnected, let’s look briefly at the history of creationist organizations. For the most part, organizations like this have failed, collapsing under the weight of theistic evolution, which is the notion that evolution happened, but God somehow guided or shepherded the process.
Let’s start with the Religion and Science Association, or “RSA.” It was started around 1935 or so, although nobody is certain of an exact date. Dudley Whitney was the main founder, and he teamed up with two other big champions of creationism at the time, George McCready Price and Byron C. Nelson. The organization only held one conference, and that was on March 27th & 28th in 1936 at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. The attendees were mostly Christian professors at secular universities, and there was a lot of infighting between biblical literalists, who were the “ring leaders,” and the academics in the majority who argued for “gap theory.” (“Gap theory” is a form of theistic evolution which says that there was a huge gap of time between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, where god created everything, allowed evolution to happen, and then came Adam and Eve roughly 6,000 years ago as the first true modern humans.) A planned series of papers from the conference was never published, and the group disbanded in 1938.
But that didn’t keep Whitney, McCready Price, and Nelson from trying again. They formed a new group in 1939 called the Creation-Deluge Society. They published a regular journal between 1941 and 1944, and held regular meetings in the Los Angeles area. Most of its members were Seventh-Day Adventists. (And you’ll find in the history of creationism, it was Seventh-Day Adventism that mostly kept the torch of creationism alive. There were a few die-hard extremists from the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church as well, but for the most part it was Seventh-Day Adventism that kept it alive.) But again, infighting developed between young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists. Even though one ostensibly had to be a young-earth creationist to be a member, the old-earth creationist crowd gained leadership within the organization, and it disbanded in late 1945.
But there was another group at work. It was called the American Scientific Affiliation, and it began at the Moody Bible Institute in 1941. The organization was composed of scientists who happened to be Christian, and was committed to both orthodox Christianity and modern scientific standards. It began asserting young-earth creationism, but ended up succumbing to old-earth creationism instead. By the late 1950’s, it was regarded by most young-earth creationists as an organization which was “too liberal” for their standards. But unlike the previous organizations which had a commitment to young-earth creationism written into their charter and disbanded, this one didn’t have such a requirement, and so it became entirely old-earth creationist and STAYED there. The organization still exists today, in fact!
Then, in 1961, a real breakthrough finally happened. Creationists Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb teamed up to write the first book of Institutionalized Disinformation regarding creationism, and that was The Genesis Flood, published in 1961. This was a watershed event, not only for creationism, but for conservatism as a whole. Why? Because it was here that the disinformation was codified, published in permanent form, and given the appearance of endorsement by both a high-ranking theologian (Whitcomb) and a man with a Ph.D. in the natural sciences (Morris). Now, Morris was only a doctor of engineering, not biology, but up to that point, that was the closest thing the creationist movement was ever able to achieve in terms of a scientific endorsement. All the biology-related Christians had been lost to theistic evolution. This was the first time a scientist achieved a science-related Ph.D. of any kind, and he used it to endorse absolute bullshit.
With The Genesis Flood as their second Bible in all but name, a new creationist organization committed to young-earth creationism formed, and this time it stuck. This one was the Creation Research Society, or CRS. It formed specifically because it hated the American Scientific Affiliation's commitment to old-earth creationism. It first met formally in Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, and still exists to this day. Because it championed Morris and Whitcomb's book as some sort of "proof" that their young-earth creationist views were genuinely proven.
And that’s the formula: Institutionalize the Disinformation. Make it look as though the bad info has been vetted by real experts, and the masses will assume there’s something to it. The Institutionalized Disinformation is why CRS lasted, and all the earlier versions of it died.
This led to copycat creationist organizations popping up all over the nation. But other developments took place later on to galvanize both the creationist movement and the conservative movement. In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Murray v. Curlett and Arbington v. Schempp that public schools could not engage in faculty-led prayer. This gave the Christians something to really bitch about. The Civil Rights movement raged throughout the 1960’s, and by 1964 came the Civil Rights Act, and also the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It became very trendy for conservative publications to demonize liberals. In a backlash, it started to gain steam by the 1970’s.
And here’s another element: Demonize the Other. Conservatives began demonizing liberals. To a certain extent this had been going on ever since Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s, when he cast all liberals as "communists." But McCarthy’s fall gave demonizing liberalism a bit of a break. By the 1960’s, however, conservatives were pushing back against liberals, gradually demonizing them more and more. It was easy during the Cold War to cast liberals as “Communists” or “Marxists,” and that slur continues to this day, long after the Soviet Union has fallen.
For creationists, demonizing the other meant casting evolution at the heart of all that is evil. Evolution got blamed for everything from Joseph Stalin’s mass murders to Adolf Hitler’s. And it all stems from the demonization of the other.
Here’s an illustration which often gets shown at creationist gatherings and within their publications.
As you can see, evolution is blamed for all kinds of stuff. And illustrations like this have been around ever since the 1960’s when it was first cooked up.
By the 1970’s, the conservative movement was beginning to rally behind people like California governor Ronald Reagan. Demonization of liberalism again got a reprieve with the fall of Richard Nixon, but that reprieve was also short-lived. The Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, and when the newly elected Jimmy Carter, who was largely elected on the strength of the Christian vote in 1976, spoke in favor of abortion, the Christian community suddenly didn’t care how devoted to Jesus Christ he was. They all turned on him, and Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
For creationists, the 70’s meant a deeper commitment to Institutionalized Disinformation, and so they began to focus more on so-called “research.” This was, as always, designed to feign legitimacy from a scientific standpoint, and for the masses, it worked. Two new organizations cropped up which were utterly devoted to promulgating Disinformation from on-high: The Creation-Science Research Institute (CSRI), and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Both of these organizations still exist today. Both of them are firmly committed to doing “research” and then publishing that “research” as some sort of proof that God created the Earth in six days, 6,000 years ago.
And again, we see the power of Institutionalized Disinformation at work. With these two new “research centers,” creationists began flooding the zone with disinformation.
Classic examples include this 1977 book by Robert E. Kofahl, “The Handy-Dandy Evolution Refuter.” Or the 1985 book by Duane Gish called “Evolution: The Fossils Say No!” (When I wrote my counter to this I deliberately riffed off of that title, calling it “Creationism: The Bible Says No!”)
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of debating a creationist, they all know dozens of phony claims as to why they believe evolution to be false. All of which have been debunked.
- The Grand Canyon was formed and carved by a single flooding event that took 40 days and 40 nights instead of millions of years.
- Piltdown Man was a hoax and not a transitional fossil.
- Wildly discordant dates of Mammoths and Mastodons prove that radiometric dating is unreliable.
- Probability statistics proves that evolution is impossible.
- The moon is slowly spiraling outward. Run the clock backward and the moon would have crashed into the Earth only 50 million years ago or so.
- Shells from recently deceased clams and snails have been carbon-14 dated to be 50,000 years old.
- Fossilized dinosaur footprints in Glen Rose, Texas show human and dinosaur tracks side-by-side proving that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
On and on and on…
I used to memorize a lot of these and have rejoinders for them but honestly, nobody can know them all. It’s an absolute tidal wave of bullshit. And it WORKS! Flooding the zone with false information really does lead people to believe whatever they prefer rather than what is actually true.
By the mid eighties, this misinformation flood really began taking off. Duane Gish and others like him challenged college professors to debates, and during those debates they would flood the stage with so many points of disinformation that the professors often couldn’t keep up, making it seem like the creationist debater had won. Duane Gish was particularly good at this, and that’s why the dissemination of multiple points of fake evidence all at once is today referred to as a “Gish gallop.”
It’s right around this same time period that traveling showmen like Kent Hovind began traveling all over the U.S. giving “seminars” on counter-evidence to evolution. And, of course, creation-themed “museums” began popping up all over the nation. Most of them were small, stupid affairs, but they finally built a really big one in Kentucky around 2007 or so. It’s still there. (I call it the “Kentucky Fried Museum.”)
I think it was also about this time that somebody in the Republican Party really began to take notice regarding what creationists were able to accomplish. Some political analyst looked at this and said, “Man, if we could only do something like this to the liberals, we’d really have something!”
And sure enough, Ronald Reagan helped make that happen. In 1987, he put two cronies of his on the three-man panel of the FCC, and immediately they repealed the Fairness Doctrine. This was a requirement that radio and television stations present both sides of any controversial issue. Well, with that gone, right-wing radio personalities could go on the air and be as partisan as they please.
Rush Limbaugh was one of the first out of the gate. If you really want an education as to the craziness of the Right-Wing Media Machine, take a look at what Limbaugh was prior to this stroke of luck. He was a penniless ne’er-do-well who floated from one gig to another. He did poorly in high school, dropped out of his local community college, and floated from one DJ job to another, usually lasting no more than a year or so before getting fired. Eventually he landed a semi-regular job as an event publicist for the Kansas City Royals, but eventually he left that job to become a DJ again and got fired from that too. Finally, in 1985, he ended up as a late-night DJ where his political wise cracks didn’t get the radio station in too much trouble. Then, 1987, the Fairness Doctrine fell, and Rush could suddenly say whatever he liked with little or no reprisal. By 1988, CBS radio offered him nationwide syndication and it was off to the races for that motherfucker.
Pretty soon, there were lots of copy-cats of Limbaugh’s style. Radio station owners quickly realized that angry right-wing rhetoric could drive up ratings in a way that left-wing rationality simply could not. So the rhetoric became more radical, which drove up more ratings, which caused more radical rhetoric, which drove up more ratings, which led to more radical rhetoric, and so on and so forth.
But the politicos behind the increasingly radical talk show rhetoric were taking a different tactic: They were disguising the true intentions of the politicians so that moderates wouldn’t be able to pick up on the real agenda. So, tax breaks for the rich became “supply-side economics.” Funneling taxpayer money to religious schools was proposed by an economist named Milton Friedman in the form of vouchers. It’s "free-market competition," not shelling out tax money to religious schools.
By the 90’s, creationists had kicked it up a notch, too. Unsatisfied that the existing creationist groups weren’t radical enough, an Australian named Ken Ham set up shop in 1993 with a new creationist ministry called Answers in Genesis, perhaps because Americans are simply more gullible than Australians. The unapologetic attacking style of Answers in Genesis fit right in with the newly radicalized Right-Wing Media Machine, and it grew to be even bigger than its rival, CRS.
Here, creationism took a nastier turn. Only this time, instead of Republicans borrowing from the creationist playbook, the creationists borrowed from the Republican playbook. They disguised their true agenda. A 1987 Supreme Court ruling called Edwards v. Aguillard ruled that creationism was religion, not science, and so “creation science” couldn’t be taught in public school classrooms. So, instead of pushing for creationism to be taught in public schools outright, they tried to sneak it past the gatekeepers by calling it, “Intelligent Design Theory.” Their landmark attempt at this was the 1989 book, “Of Pandas and People,” which the creationists tried passing off as a textbook. over the next decade and a half, religious groups tried to force this book into the classrooms as a way of indoctrinating public school children who didn’t belong to them.
It ALMOST worked. Things finally came to a head in a landmark 2004 court case called
Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which eleven parents sued the Dover school district to keep this so-called “textbook” out of the classroom. (I rafted the Grand Canyon with the National Center for Science Education in 2005, and I met some of the plaintiffs in the case!) The media dubbed this “Scopes Trial II,” which it often did whenever creationism was taken to court, but this time the headlines were correct. This really was as big as the Scopes Monkey Trial, and newspapers started calling it the
Scopes Panda Trial. In 2005, the federal court ruled that Intelligent Design Theory was religious doctrine and couldn’t be taught in classrooms.
What happened after that was truly interesting. Instead of just backing off outright, they tried softening the sell again. This time they tried getting creationism into public schools by advocating that schools “teach the controversy!” They reasoned that if they couldn’t get creationism in directly, they could at least muddy the water. “Evolution is controversial, teach kids about how controversial it is!” In other words, get kids doubting evolution right away so that they’ll be more receptive to a creationist’s message later on.
On the Republican side, they seemed to pick up what the creationists were doing here and echoed it. During the 2004 elections, Republicans muddied the water as much as possible rather than attack directly. They manufactured outrage about gay marriage and made that a key issue for conservative Christians. Then they spat a bunch of disinformation regarding the military career of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate at the time. Since Kerry had been a swift boat pilot during his military service, this sort of disinformation campaign became known as “Swift-Boating.”
Creationists certainly seem to have learned from this. They did a Swift-Boating move of their own. The several creationists who happened to have scientific Ph.D.’s (there are still not that many) got together and formed a team called RATE, for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth. These people deliberately and maliciously concocted bad data regarding radiometric dating, disseminated it in a very scientific-looking book, and falsely declared that the “millions of years” hypothesis had been disproved.
I mean, you have to admire the commitment to the bit, on a certain level. This two-volume publication is truly a monumental achievement in utter bullshit!
Institutionalized Disinformation works in any sphere of bullshit, whether it be Mormonism, Flat-Earthism, Holocaust Denialism, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Moon Landing Denialism, etc., etc. The bad ideas all subsist on the institutionalization of that which is empirically false. And then people assume, wrongly, that so much superstructure wouldn't or couldn't be built upon pure crap. But of course, it would, it can, and it has been.
Today, creationism has been waning. The latest polls show that the creationist view, which Gallup defines as humans being "created pretty much in present form," has crashed, from a steady 47% of Americans through 2006, to 37% today. About 34% are theistic evolutionists, believing that humans evolved, but God guided the process. And the number of Americans who feel that evolution happened without God's guidance at all has grown to 24%. That means 58% of of America accepts evolution now. Up from 45% prior to 2007. If you want to see the poll numbers yourself, click here.
Creationists know they are losing.
So what do they do? They go all-in for Trump, hoping he can force the issue rather than have them try to compete in the free marketplace of ideas, where they are steadily losing.
But it's a fools' hope. In siding with Trump, American Christians have signed the death warrant on Christians being a majority. Already, the number of Americans who never or seldom attend church has swelled to 56%. Young people increasingly hate Trump, are leaving every church which supports Trump, and that means the next generation of leaders will be solidly Secular.
Almost as if they feel that coming, the Right-Wing Media Machine has amped up its commitment to Institutionalized Disinformation. The lessons it learned from the creationists about pushing disinformation are being applied on a massive scale. They may have even destroyed the nation permanently already!
Certainly, they've destroyed most of the news media. Most of it, especially the social media aspect of it, has been lost to disinformation and outright propaganda.
In short, our nation's institutions have become, essentially, one giant Creation Museum, not unlike the one in Kentucky.
The superstructure is a lie, people. The superstructure is a lie.
Eric
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