Young Minds: Evangelical Homeschoolers Embrace Evolution

[doggie]

This is a bit surprising and good news. Hopefully it will have enough power to overcome the dugger version of education.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... on/273844/

For homeschooling parents who want to teach their children that the earth is only a few thousand years old, the theory of evolution is a lie, and dinosaurs coexisted with humans, there is no shortage of materials. Kids can start with the Answers in Genesis curriculum, which features books such as Dinosaurs of Eden, written by Creation Museum founder Ken Ham. As the publisher's description states, "This exciting book for the entire family uses the Bible as a 'time machine' to journey through the events of the past and future."

It's no secret that the majority of homeschooled children in America belong to evangelical Christian families. What's less known is that a growing number of their parents are dismayed by these textbooks.

Take Erinn Cameron Warton, an evangelical Christian who homeschools her children. Warton, a scientist, says she was horrified when she opened a homeschool science textbook and found a picture of Adam and Eve putting a saddle on a dinosaur. "I nearly choked," says the mother of three. "When researching homeschooling curricula, I found that the majority of Christian homeschool textbooks are written from this ridiculous perspective. Once I saw this, I vowed never to use them." Instead, Warton has pulled together a curriculum inspired partly by homeschool pioneer Susan Wise Bauer and partly by the Waldorf holistic educational movement.

[merrily]

Well a broken clock is right twice per day. (I don't think these people are fundies though)

[Gwen]

There are a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, including homeschoolers. The Christian school I went to for two years did an entire unit on dinosaurs.

[debrand]

There are a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, including homeschoolers. The Christian school I went to for two years did an entire unit on dinosaurs.

My neighbor is a right wing conservative, Baptist who believes in evolution. They exist. It is just that for a long, long time they remained silent about disagreeing with other right leaning Christians.

[Ellimenopy]

There are a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, including homeschoolers. The Christian school I went to for two years did an entire unit on dinosaurs.

I don't think people realize that the whole-scale rejection of evolution by evangelicals is still a relatively new thing. Yes, there have always been deniers, but in my experience, the rise of anti-evolutionism as a shibboleth has happened in tandem with the rise of hardcore fundamentalists. Even my fundie lite church was soft on it in the 90's. They aren't soft on it now. It doesn't surprise me that some mainstream evangelicals or even fundie lite homeschoolers would not want their children to be unexposed to something they took for granted growing up.

[DarkAnts]

I think it depends on what brand of fundamentalism you follow. The LCMS high school I went to had a pasture who promoted creationism. The science teacher taught evolution. I hated the theology class for promoting creationism when it was not a science class. The science teacher told me to just give the theology teacher the answer he was looking for. It did not matter if I believe it. I just had to show that I understood the material. Its the same speech he gave to kids who did not believe in evolution. It was in a way preparing me for college and the adult world.

[hearyoume08]

Besides as us millennials and those after us become more secular (not necessarily non religious, though that is a trend) the population demographics will shift more to scinces side anyway.

[GenerationCedarchip]

Not that they care, but I always thought the insistence on young earth creationism(YEC) was tactically stupid. Even among fundies, the view that God-directed evolution could have occurred was pretty well tolerated at least into the late 90s. There were certainly people who believed in YEC but it hadn't been turned into a tenet of the faith yet - at least not in reformed circles, I can't speak for IFB and others. However, Vision Forum and others jumped on that YEC bandwagon and as they went hard right and as these groups got more prominent in homeschooling circles, everyone else started to get drowned out. I had left the fundie world by that time, but through family members, I watched it happen in the church where I grew up and other affiliated with it. And as YEC became the only way to believe, I've seen more and more of the younger people leave the movement. Most of the ones I know of just go fundie-lite, but that's still going to be a blow to the hardcore fundie congregations.

[Lady]

This scares me because now the crazy can appear more normal.

[Mama Mia]

Besides as us millennials and those after us become more secular (not necessarily non religious, though that is a trend) the population demographics will shift more to scinces side anyway.

I think the direction has gone the other way. I was 20 years old in the early 80's before I even met someone who didn't believe in evolution. I was completely shocked.

The swing to the extreme conservative anti-science view is pretty recent. At least in a visible way. Of course that is probably due to the internet.

[doggie]

I think the direction has gone the other way. I was 20 years old in the early 80's before I even met someone who didn't believe in evolution. I was completely shocked.

The swing to the extreme conservative anti-science view is pretty recent. At least in a visible way. Of course that is probably due to the internet.

Plus the fear of science in general. Science is a threat to religion if you think everything in the bible is true.

[BravaAmica]

There are a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, including homeschoolers. The Christian school I went to for two years did an entire unit on dinosaurs.

It's science. It doesn't matter if someone "believes" in it or not. Science is verifiable through experiments that demonstrate tangible results.

[nelliebelle1197]

The dresses only fundy church school I attended in the 1980s used Abeka and BJU materials and evolution was pretty much glossed over but not denied; we had to count back the generations through to Genesis to determine the age of the earth but in Bible class not science. Thinking of it in this context I can see strong rooting of YEC mixing with actual science. Very strange in retrospect.