Why is creationism so popular in the US?

 Allan:

Because a fundamentalist/Biblical literalist movement got started in the US in the 19th C. Because of racism - a lot of white Creationists in their heart of hearts just don’t want to admit their ancestors were Africans, and Darwin was passionately opposed to slavery.

Also, in the early 20th C the US had a very strong eugenecist movement which led to many poor whites being sterilised against their will, and there was serious pressure to just execute whites with low IQ. Then after WW2 there was the Tuskegee Experiment, where poor black men with syphilis were deliberately deprived of modern treatments in order to preserve their value as a data sample - so both poor white and poor black communities have historical reasons to be nervous of scientists, especially biologists.

Plus, by the standards of most of Europe the US is so far right it’s falling off the cliff into outright fascism, and ignorance and the far right go together. It’s not surprising that one place Creationism *is* common in Europe is in Northern Ireland, among the Protestant Unionist hard right.

Claire Jordan