Religion Not Extinct In Terms of Evolutionary Theory

The question of whether we remain a Judeo-Christian nation or if we've moved past "that whole religion phase" isn't unfamiliar to voters.  In fact, it's the fundamental debate to much of our political discussion these days.  The so-called faith question determines what we teach in schools and forms the base of morals which create our legal system, just to name a few examples.  But despite cries to remove religion from all aspects of our collective society, we still find ourselves leaning toward a belief in some higher power as a whole.

Today, in an honors anthropology class at Keene State, I found myself in a room full of very intelligent and well-educated peers who were absolutely floored to find that most Americans believe that in some way, a god or higher power is responsible for human presence on earth.  We were discussing evolutionary theory, and our professor showed slides full of polling information, spanning the mid-eighties to present across a variety of sources, from Gallup to Pew to Fox. And, to my classmates' surprise, all of the statistics consistently showed the same thing: only roughly 15 to 25 percent of Americans believe the theory of evolution as according to Darwin, a process completely random and independent of divine intervetntion.  After seeing these numbers, the room was silent and filled with unease.

Now, there was a second split in the data, asking whether evolution occurred over time with the assistance of a higher power or if the earth and humans were created in six days, as written in the Book of Genesis.  These numbers varied depending on the year and the specific question asked, but overwhelmingly, all of the numbers indicated the presence of humans is not chance, but very deliberate.  Regardless of the way the question was phrased, the majority of Americans answered that they believe that something more than chance brought us here.

But who cares?

Well, this is quite indicative of a religious nation, something we've hailed ourselves not to be.  Surely, religion comes in many flavors and each has its own way of dealing with the human existence.  But in the end, they can agree humans are no accident.

When talking politics with my peers, they're often opposed to certain stances based upon some argument about religion being unimportant to Americans, a minority of the public, or irrelevant.  But in fact, religion in some form is still important to the greater portion of Americans.

These polls bring up an important fact: we're so sure of what the nation wants based upon the knowledge of our own corner of the country, but we all too often forget to consider the other 49 states.  Our neighbors will often look to their left and right to find athiests, and invoke the argument that we're not a religious nation.  Maybe it's not that we're not a religious nation, but rather we're not a religious region.  

Whether our faith should play a role how we govern ourselves is another question altogether, and one which deserves careful attention.  But in conversation and in the voting booth, we must remember to step outside the bounds of our local communities and our individual biases to look at the larger picture. Like it or not, faith, in some way or another, is still important to a significant number of Americans.