In 2008, the big Republican presidential candidates
were asked: “How many of you believe in Darwinian biological evolution?” Two-thirds or three-quarters said, “I do.” In 2012, the same question was asked, same
group of people—Republican presidential candidates—and it was already down to a
third. In 2016, the 17 main candidates for the Republican
nomination were asked: “Do you believe in evolution?” One, Jeb Bush, brave Jeb Bush, said he did—”but,”
he said, walking it back even as he said it, “I’m not sure it should be taught in our
public schools, and if it is, it should be taught along with Creationism.” So from 2008 to 2016, that was the change
and that change is—I don’t believe all those people believed what they said; I don’t
think all of them disbelieve in evolution, just some of them—but they were all obliged
to say yes to falsehood and magical thinking of this religious kind and that’s where
it becomes problematic. America has always been a Christian nation. That meant a very different thing 100 years
ago or even 50 years ago than it means today. I grew up not going to church very often at
all and not with much religious education, but all of my friends were weekly, regular
churchgoers of various kinds. Christian Protestant religion became extreme,
it became more magical and supernatural in its beliefs and practices in America than
it had been in hundreds of years and more so than it is anywhere else in the developed
world. So you have that happening. At the same time, not coincidentally, you
have the Republican Party, beginning certainly about 30 years ago, becoming more and more
a party of those religiously extreme Protestants. So one thing that has happened and one thing
that has led, I think, the Republican Party to accept fantasy and wishful untruth more
and more into its approach to policy—whether it’s climate change or the idea that a secret
Muslim conspiracy is about to replace our constitutional judiciary system with Sharia
law, or any number of other simply untrue tenants of republicanism—all these things
which were nutty fringe ideas as recently as 30 years ago are now in the Republican
mainstream. I think there’s a connection. I think once you have a political party, more
and more of whose members believe in religious and supernatural fantasies of a more and more
extravagant kind, it stands to reason or to unreason that you will have a party that is
more and more inclined to embrace the fantastical in its politics and policy. Believe whatever you want in the privacy of
your home, in the privacy of your family, in the privacy of your church, but when it
bleeds over, as it inevitably has done in America, to how we manage and construct our
economy and our society, we’re in trouble.