The Anointed Leaders of the Religious Right
Unfortunately Barton shares the Right’s academic stage with discouragingly similar leaders in other fields. In The Anointed, Stephens and I note the degree to which American evangelicalism has created its own set of homegrown academic “experts” who preach comforting messages at odds with generally accepted understandings of the modern world.
Many evangelicals get their ideas about origins from Ken Ham, architect of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which features stunning dioramas of Adam and Eve interacting with dinosaurs. The result is that most evangelicals think the earth is a few thousand years old and that evolution is a conspiracy. When Republican presidential hopefuls are asked if they believe in evolution, they dare not answer yes, for fear of offending their antievolutionary base. Unfortunately, most of them don’t even want to answer yes. And this, despite the highly visible presence of Francis Collins at the helm of the NIH. Collins is thoroughly evangelical and, as he and I have argued in our recent book, The Language of Science and Faith, there is simply no reason why evangelicals need to reject evolution in favor of the fanciful tales told by Ken Ham and other creationists. But Collins exerts no more influence on the science of the religious Right than Noll does on its history.
In the social sciences, James Dobson is the anointed leader. For years he has assured his millions of followers, through his Focus on the Family organization, that toddlers should be spanked, homosexuals should be straightened through repentance and “therapy,” and children should be raised by stay-at-home moms subservient to their husbands. It made no difference that social science research steadily and surely contradicted all those positions. Dobson was certain that a few well-chosen if ambiguous proof-texts from the Bible held far more authority than secular research.