Religion and Politics

Larry Mantle's excellent Air Talk today featured evangelical theologians from a couple of southern California schools & churches, forthrightly answering probing questions about evangelism and politics. Fascinating stuff, about which I know little - mainly because there is almost no access to evangelical thought for those who are not already true believers.

One of his guests pointed out the irony of conservative evangelicals raising such a ruckus about teaching evolutionary theory in schools, then turning around and espousing a version of so-called "social Darwinism," positing that the poor deserve to be poor, that it's their own fault.

(I suspect they like to refer to "Darwinism" rather than "the theory of natural selection" because calling it "natural selection" might lead people to give some thought to what that meant, and conclude that it was actually quite reasonable. A book called "The Beak of the Finch" contains an anecdote about an evolutionary biologist who does field work in evolution [yes, that's what I said] who found himself on a plane flight telling an evangelical Christian about his work; the eC got very excited about it, thought it was just about the coolest thing ever... till, at the very end, the biologist told him that he was actually talking about evolution.)