Jesus, Meet Evolution

[Editor's Note: This interview was originally published on Campus Progress.]

It used to be that if you wanted to provoke the wrath of God, you had to do something really horrific, like enslave an entire race of people to build your pyramids.

These days, though, you just have to vote for the wrong school board candidate. At least that's televangelist Pat Robertson's take on the ousting of eight Dover, Pennsylvania school board members who had mandated the teaching of intelligent design in local science classrooms.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson warned on the November 9 broadcast of his televised insanity (also known as The 700 Club). "And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city."

Of course, even many conservative Christians dismiss Robertson as a shamelessly immoral fraud (though the White House apparently does not). His tirade, however, was only the latest in a series of attacks on the religiosity of those Doverites who dared oppose teaching intelligent design as science. During the campaign even neighbors accused the challengers for school board of being un-Christian, anti-God, and in bed with the dreaded ACLU, terrorists, and pedophiles.

There's only one problem: Most of the newly elected board members are people of sincere and devout faith. Of the four Republicans and four Democrats (although they all ran on the Democratic ticket), at least two hold leadership positions in local churches, and even the group's stance on intelligent design can't be construed as anti-religious: They simply assert that since the concept is more about faith than science, it is more properly broached in religion and humanities courses.

For the countless Americans who comfortably balance belief and science every day, the discovery of Christian evolutionists in Dover won't raise any eyebrows. But it will strike many others as a rare contradiction. This is understandable: Conservative Christian leaders have been working for twenty years to reshape the American lexicon and popular consciousness until the word "Christian" refers not to a broad range of self-professed--and often progressive--followers of Jesus Christ, but solely to right-wing fundamentalists like themselves.

These efforts, however, cannot mask the reality that it is perfectly possible to be a good Christian and embrace evolution at the same time.

How? The simplest explanation is that science answers "how" questions while faith answers "why" questions, and never the twain shall meet. Unfortunately, it's not always that easy: Faith often embraces and builds upon certain assumptions about how the universe works, and science often digs beneath those assumptions, seeking to unlock the secrets of what many consider the divine.

Evolution is a case in point: For certain Christian traditions, science's contention that all life on Earth developed through millions of years of mutations clearly invalidates their assertions that everything originated exactly the way it's described in Genesis.

This might not be so bad, except that that "how" creation story is intimately tied to the "why" of these believers' faith. For very conservative and fundamentalist Christian traditions, a literal reading of Genesis sets up many of the religious concepts and morals they hold dear: that men and women were created for biological partnership with distinct gender roles, say, or that our ancestors' eating of forbidden fruit makes all humans sinners, with salvation available only through Jesus Christ.

Moreover, this approach to the creation story is the first expression of a central tenet of fundamentalist faith: that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God, and that as such it offers clear, unquestionable lessons for how we should live our lives. After interpreting Genesis in this way, conservative Christians proceed all the way through Exodus and Leviticus to the Book of Revelation, constructing their entire edifice of theology and morality from a narrow reading of carefully selected passages.