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Working last night, I spent time with one of my favorite customers.  For the sake of this discussion, we’ll call him Johnny McBornAgain.  Now, Johnny is by all accounts, an affable sort.  He’s chummy, witty, knowledgeable about all sorts of technical and geeky issues and dearly loves his wife and five kids.  He also has this image of a bacterial flagellum on the desktop of his computer:

Now, if you are familiar with the ongoing battle between creationists and evolution scientists, you’ll immediately identify that image as the proof used by creationists of what they call “irreducable complexity“.  In other words, something in the natural world that cannot be explained by the gradual natural selection of Darwinist evolutionary theory.  I’m not going to debate its veracity, it’s simply being used as a jumping off point for a discussion of religion and politics.

As we waited for a storage array to update its microcode and without being judgmental or acting like a condescending prig, I asked Johnny to explain to me how he came to believe in this “science” and eventually we came around to how it governs his worldview.  I was given some insight into a part of society into which I rarely gain visibility…fundamentalist evangelical christianity.

You see, Johnny is a “young earth creationist“.

Young Earth creationism (YEC) is the religious belief that Heaven, Earth, and life on Earth were created by a direct act of God dating between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Its adherents are those Christians and Jews who believe that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days, taking the Hebrew text of Genesis as a literal account. Some adherents believe that existing evidence in the natural world today supports a strict interpretation of scriptural creation as historical fact. Those adherents believe that the scientific evidence supporting evolution, geological uniformitarianism, or other theories which are at odds with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account, is either flawed or misinterpreted.

As Johnny explains it, men and dinosaurs simultaneously occupied the earth and the rejection of this “science” or evidence to the contrary ofit being the actual record of what happened is due to the “elite” of this country being biased against religion.  I nodded along as I listened and I didn’t attempt to argue or counter his statements, he is a customer after all.  In essence, he has invested in what what is called the inerrancy of biblical text.  That is, the bible is without error as it is the word of God and attempts to disprove it are to be seen as attempts to disprove the existence of God.  Now, biblical inerrancy is much different from the theories of biblical infallibility which are core tenets of Roman Catholic and many Protestant faiths.

What goes along with such a belief system that promulgates a strict adherence to biblical text comes a certainty on all issues that is troubling to those of us invested in scientific theory, logic, reason, and critical thought.  It is what informs the worldview of members of Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Churches, and many other evangelical faith based organizations.  Biblical inerrancy leads to a belief that we are living in “end times” and that the end of the world is nigh and the end times will originate in the middle east.

The conflict between these two schools of thought is at the core of this Presidential election.

On one side of the campaign, we have the Republicans, John McCain and Sarah Palin.  Now, McCain has worn religion like a hairshirt for the better part of a decade as his party has moved farther to the right to capitalize on the growing fundamentalist movement.  When he won the party’s nomination, the fundamentalist wing of the party was nonplussed.  They liked Huckabee and to a much lesser extent, Mitt Romney.  McCain was seen as an old school Goldwater Republican who never invested much time into pandering to the fundamentalists and in fact, had never stated his adherence to biblical inerrancy.  He wasn’t one of them.  So, he brought Ms. Palin onto the ticket and all of a sudden, James Dobson and the other denizens of the far right hopped onboard with enthusiasm.  Why?  Was it Ms. Palin’s record as a small town Mayor and two years as Governor which amped them up?  No.  Perhaps it was her membership in the Assemblies of God church and her belief in all the things they hold as central to their world.  Ms. Palin, of course, has made no public statements since her nomination about her faith and her adherence to biblical inerrancy.  However, the right knows that in her, they have a friend in the White House.  Someone who will work to implement their vision and plan as national policy.  That is why JohnnyMcBornAgain in Buffalo, NY will proudly cast a vote for McCain and Palin in 2008.

On the other side of the campaign, we have the Democrats, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ and Joe Biden is an old school Roman Catholic.  UCC is widely panned in the evangelical community as a centrist/moderate church which is an offshoot of the reformist protestant movement which many see as a sullied version of Christianity.   To make matters worse for evangelicals, the UCC was the first major Christian deliberative body in the U.S. to make a statement of support for equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender.  That’s not small town values!  There are a hundred other reasons why those on the right do not support an Obama candidacy, but the primary reason is that he is not religious enough for their taste.

The core belief in biblical inerrancy and support for candidates who ascribe to that ideology is what has permeated the political discourse at a visceral level.  The inerrancy doctrine implies that those who believe in it are also inerrant.  Thus, when the media or those opposed to the candidate question them, they are seen as attack dogs, not those interested in debate or reason.

You see, there is no such thing as debate.  There is right and wrong, and not much ground in the middle.

It is what has fostered the right wing media machine to attack the establishment media and now informs the discussion amongst us on blogs, talk radio, and elsewhere.  It is why there seems to be a greater separation and anger in our politics that we haven’t seen before in America.  We have all bought into this argument on some level, whether we know it or not.

When I watch Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or read the Huffington Post, listen to left wing radio, or read columnists with whom I generally agree, I am struck by their lack of understanding as to what is happening around them.  They are shocked and dismayed at the lack of intelligence in the American voter as they lap up plates of lies and disinformation.  They simply can’t believe that people would cast a vote based on personal narrative, personal identity and ideology over what is right for the collective of the country.  That “not blinking”, gut decisions, and adherence to core ideology which is completely incommensurate with knowledge or experience of an issue is something valued by the fundamental right.  Their shock about all of this demonstrates a disconnect from the wave of fundamentalism in this country.

They still believe in a world where religion is something private, something to keep to oneself, not something which governs every aspect of life.  They fondly remember John Kennedy standing before a group of ministers in 1960 and giving one of the most important speeches about religion and government in this nation’s history.  How politics and government is a fact based business and one’s faith should be left out of the equation.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2Jr03ADQmk[/youtube]

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe, a great office that must be neither humbled by making it the instrument of any religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding it — its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

If only we still lived in that America.