I agree that many Christians (especially scientists who are Christian) take this pragmatic view and despair of their fellow believers who are 'literalists'.
Now, given that eh is a young American, I recalled reading recently about the proportion of Americans (in general, not just Christians) who believed in Biblical explanations of creation. When I looked it up, it was a from a talk given in the 1980s and referring to surveys taken in the 80s. Back then, large proportions did not believe in evolution (man was created in current form) and that the universe is a few thousand years old, with fossils being fakes.
If the US Christians have really changed their minds in the meantime, then this is a really positive move and one we must surely congratulate the Christians in America on their progressive approach. (Seriously - it is quite an achievement to change people's views in this way).
eh - do you have more up-to-date stats on the proportions who reject the 'literalist' view of the Bible's explanations for creation etc? To what extent are people like Dawkins etc responsible for this decrease in 'literalist believers'? (I'm assuming that there has been a decrease).
Anyhoo - here is what Chomsky said in 1989 (taken from pg 50 of 'Understanding Power - The Indispensible Chomsky')
Footnote 34:
For polls on Americans' religious beliefs, see for example, George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People's Religion: American Faith in the 90's, New York: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 46-48, 4, 14. This study gives the United States a rating of 67 on its "Religion Index," based on various indicators -- whereas West Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and France all had scores in the thirties, and Denmark brought up the rear with a 21. It also finds that:
• Nine Americans in ten say they have never doubted the existence of God.
• Eight Americans in ten say they believe they will be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for their sins.
• Eight Americans in ten believe God still works miracles.
• Seven Americans in ten believe in life after death.
Richard Severo, "Poll Finds Americans Split on Creation Idea," New York Times, August 29, 1982, section 1, p. 22 (reporting a Gallup poll which found that 44 percent of Americans believe "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years," 38 percent accept divine guidance of evolution, and a mere 9 percent accept Darwinian evolution -- a number not much above statistical error).
Religious Fanaticism
WOMAN: Fundamentalist religion has really taken off in the last decade,
maybe as an outlet for some of this despair. Do you have any thoughts
about the significance of that development in the U.S?
It's pretty amazing what's happened, actually. There have been a lot of cross-cultural studies of what social scientists call "religious fanaticism" not people who just believe in God or go to church, but they're really kind of fanatic about it, it's the kind of fanatic religious commitment that permeates your whole life. And what these studies demonstrate is that this is a typical characteristic of pre-industrial societies-in fact, it correlates very closely with industrialization: as industrialization goes up, this kind of religious fanaticism goes down. Well, there are two countries that are basically off the curve. One of them is Canada, which has more fundamentalist commitment than you would expect given its level of industrialization. The other is the United States-which is totally off the chart: we're like a shattered peasant society. I mean, the last study I saw of it was done in around 1980, and the United States was at the level of Bangladesh, it was very close to Iran.33 Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or something-half the population. You just don't find things like that in other industrial societies.
Well, a lot of political scientists and others have tried to figure out why this aberration exists. It's one of the many respects in which the United States is unusual, so you want to see if it's related to some of the others and there are others. For instance, the United States has an unusually weak labor movement, it has an unusually narrow political system. Think: there is no other industrialized Western country that doesn't have a labor-based political party, and we haven't had one here since the Populist Party in the 1890s. So we have a very depoliticized population, and that could be one cause of this phenomenon: if social and political life don't offer you opportunities to form communities and associate yourself with things that are meaningful to you, people look for other ways to do it, and religion's an obvious one. It's strikingly the case in the black communities, actually, where the black churches have been the real organizing center which holds life together: I mean, there's terrible oppression, a lot of families are falling apart, but the church is there, it brings people together and they can get together and do things in that context. And the same is true in many white communities as well.
Now, I don't think you can draw too many sweeping conclusions from religion itself-it's kind of like technology, it depends what you use it for. Like, even among the fundamentalists, you've got Sojourners [a politically progressive religious group], and you have Jerry Falwell [a right-wing televangelist]. But it certainly does carry with it the potential of aligning with other forms of fanaticism-and that's a big danger in the United States, because it's a very significant movement here. In fact, by now just about every major political figure in the country has to associate himself with it in some way. In the 1980 election, for example, all of the three candidates [i.e. Carter, Reagan, and independent candidate John Anderson] advertised themselves as Born Again Christians. In the 1984 election, one of the candidates advertised himself as a Born Again Christian, and the other was a Methodist minister or something.35 In the 1988 election, Dukakis was secular, which is unusual, but Bush said he was religious.
loool