Don’t you know that denying evolution is the main purpose of Christianity?

In a classic example of confusing belief with historical fact, Kylee Zempel at The Federalist is outraged at the very idea that Christians could be racist. She is so mad that she is going to defend her beliefs by misinterpreting Scientific American.

The Left Wants You To Believe The Bible Is White Supremacist So They Can Force Evolution Down Your Throat
It’s a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity to advance the opposing worldview, and if that means smearing as racist a — *checks notes* — time-tested historical account in which a divine Middle Eastern man is the central figure, so be it.

Can we right away clear up some misconceptions?

  • The Bible itself is a document written by diverse people over a long complex history. In itself it is not “white supremacist” — although you could argue that it promotes a belief in a kind of tribal supremacy.
  • That tribe was not white Europeans.
  • However, while the Bible is not a white supremacist document, your interpretation of the Bible can be.
  • Forcing evolution down people’s throats is not and has never been good pedagogical technique.
  • Your religion, Christianity, is not necessarily opposed to evolution, so teaching evolution is not teaching that Christianity is wrong.

Most importantly, I would point out that waving broadly at a Middle Eastern Jesus does not protect you from accusations of racism, especially when there’s such a long history of your peculiar, particular branch of the Christian religion portraying Jesus as a light-skinned Northern European man. But Zempel’s main point is that her narrow clade of fundamentalist, evolution-denying religion is the entirety of Biblical belief, and therefore supporting evolution is a direct attack on the whole of Christianity, which isn’t true.

“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” is Scientific American’s not-so-subtle way of saying this synonymous phrase: “The Bible is racist.”

Oh, that’s a synonymous phrase? Break it down. “Denial of evolution” is a synonym for the Bible? I don’t think so. The Bible contains a half a page of poetry about a creation week that is then denied in the next chapter by a completely different creation story. There is clearly some latitude of interpretation permitted in Genesis. Furthermore, I think most Christians, other than this narrow sect of fundamentalist literalist creeps, would be horrified that you can equate all the complex moral and ethical and historical lessons of their very messy holy book with “denial of evolution”.

Of course, I’d fully agree with the other half of her equation: white supremacy is a synonym for racism.

She rages on a little more.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole article as record-setting idiocy or editorial catfishing. After all, what editor at a magazine with “scientific” in the name green-lights an article arguing that the religion that worships a man born between Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq is “white supremacist”? There’s something more nefarious under the brainlessness, however, and we shouldn’t breeze past it.

This headline is just the latest in the left’s crusade not only to brand everything that challenges their worldview as racist, but also to grant scientific legitimacy to their race-baiting. This time, however, they’re aiming their fire straight at the heart of the scriptures on which Christians base their beliefs — and they aren’t trying to hide the reason why.

So the heart of the scriptures is evolution denial? What did Christians do in the 1800 years before Darwin published The Origin? Let’s take a look at the SciAm article.

I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion…

Wait, stop right there. So one of the arguments is that evolution denial is NOT about religion, and Zempel has distorted this into her view that evolution denial IS her religion? OK.

…and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies. Under the guise of “religious freedom,” the legalistic wing of creationists loudly insists that their point of view deserves equal time in the classroom. Science education in the U.S. is constantly on the defensive against antievolution activists who want biblical stories to be taught as fact. In fact, the first wave of legal fights against evolution was supported by the Klan in the 1920s. Ever since then, entrenched racism and the ban on teaching evolution in the schools have gone hand in hand. In his piece, What We Get Wrong About the Evolution Debate, Adam Shapiro argues that “the history of American controversies over evolution has long been entangled with the history of American educational racism.”

The major point of the article is that the scientific view encompasses the totality of human history, and that humans aren’t always light-skinned, and even modern light-skinned people had darker-skinned ancestors, so what’s with this idea that humans are only 6,000 years old and the different races were established at the time of Noah’s Ark? It doesn’t argue against Christianity at all, but only that one bad idea that creationists strive to get into our educational curriculum, and that historically, creationism has used racial divisions in America to promote itself.

The KKK was and is a white Christian organization. Pointing that out is not the same as saying Christianity and the KKK are synonymous.

Zempel continues on in her naive lumper ways and makes another point that I agree with, but that also undermines her argument.

The complete title of Charles Darwin’s seminal book was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” In his book “The Descent of Man,” Darwin recorded, “The Western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization,” and said, “The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.” In other words, Darwin’s white supremacy was underpinned by his evolutionary theory, the same theory Hopper champions.

Darwin’s white supremacist musings weren’t confined to the page. As Phil Moore noted, Darwin’s evolutionary theory influenced racism and genocide the world over. In America, it was used to justify the killing of Native Americans. In Germany, the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the murder of non-Russian people. The Serbs used it to rationalize the genocide against Kosovans and Croatians.

Yes! Darwin held racist views, as did many of the promoters of evolution in the 19th and 20th century. The theory has been greatly abused as an endorsement of genocide and oppression. That is entirely true.

But I can also say, in an accurately synonymous way, that Christianity has been greatly abused as an endorsement of genocide and oppression.

That does not imply that the theory or Christianity are necessarily false, or that opposing genocide and oppression are therefore directly opposing the science or the religion. You won’t see many scientists or Christians saying that we can’t condemn King Leopold II’s brutal and inhuman treatment of his African colony, or the slave trade, or the Holocaust, because that would be anti-evolutionary, or anti-Christian. We can oppose the false interpretation of science or religion without being anti-science or anti-faith.

But that’s what the goons at the Federalist want you to believe: by opposing their racism and misogyny and ignorance, we are opposing God himself.

How to shame a mob of racists

Nikole Hannah-Jones has one answer: be so damned good at your job that you can humiliate them by walking away. Read her statement on the chaos caused by the racists who tried to undermine her career at UNC.

“Being asked to return to teach at Carolina had felt like a homecoming; it felt like another way to give back to the institution that had given so much to me. And now I was being told that the Board of Trustees would not vote on my tenure and that the only way for me to come teach in the fall would be for me to sign a five-year contract under which I could be considered for tenure at a later, unspecified date. By that time, I had invested months in the process. I had secured an apartment in North Carolina so that I would be ready to teach that January. My editors at The New York Times had already supplied quotes for the press release of the big announcement. I did not want to face the humiliation of letting everyone know that I would be the first Knight Chair at the university to be denied tenure. I did not want to wage a fight with my alma mater or bring to the school and to my future colleagues the political firestorm that has dogged me since The 1619 Project published. So, crushed, I signed the five-year contract in February, and I did not say a word about it publicly.

“But some of those who had lobbied against me were not satisfied to simply ensure I did not receive tenure. When the announcement of my hire as the Knight Chair came out at the end of April, writers from a North Carolina conservative think tank called the James G. Martin Center railed against the university for subverting the board’s tenure denial and hiring me anyway. The think tank had formerly been named after Art Pope, an influential conservative activist who now serves on the UNC Board of Governors, who had helped birth the center. The article questioned how I had been hired without the Board of Trustees approval, and its writer argued that, because the university hired me anyway after the board stymied my tenure, the Board of Governors “should amend system policies to require every faculty hire to be vetted by each school’s board of trustees.” And yet, when that article was published, it had not been made public that I had been hired without the board approving my tenure or my hire. Even faculty at the journalism school were not aware that I had not been considered for tenure and would not learn this until some days later.

“Nine days after the James G. Martin Center published this piece, reporter Joe Killian at N.C. Policy Watch broke the story that, because of political interference and pressure by conservatives, I had been denied consideration for tenure and instead offered a five-year contract. The story about the denial of consideration went viral, and I was dragged into the very thing that I had tried to avoid as the actions of the Board of Trustees became a national scandal.

I did not know that ironic detail. She’d been willing to quietly accept a compromise until the conservatives themselves balked, and they triggered the whole colossal scandal.

“To this day, no one has ever explained to me why my vote did not occur in November or January, and no one has requested the additional information that a member of the Board of Trustees claimed he was seeking when they refused to take up my tenure. The university’s leadership continues to be dishonest about what happened and patently refuses to acknowledge the truth, to offer any explanation, to own what they did and what they tried to do. Once again, when leadership had the opportunity to stand up, it did not.

“At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you, when you’ve proven you can compete and excel at the highest level, you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.

“I fought this battle because I know that all across this country Black faculty, and faculty from other marginalized groups, are having their opportunities stifled, and that if political appointees could successfully stop my tenure, then they would only be emboldened to do it to others who do not have my platform. I had to stand up. And, I won the battle for tenure.

“But I also get to decide what battles I continue to fight. And I have decided that instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending, I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were. For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.

“I will be taking a position as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, founded in 1867 to serve the formerly enslaved and their descendants. There, I will be creating a new initiative aimed at training aspiring journalists to cover the crisis of our democracy and bolstering journalism programs at historically Black colleges and universities across the country. I have already helped secure $15 million for this effort, called the Center for Journalism and Democracy, with the generous grants from the Ford, Knight, and MacArthur foundations, and have set a goal of raising $25 million. In the storied tradition of the Black press, the Center for Journalism and Democracy will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that another outcome will be that UNC will repudiated the influence of wealthy bigots like Walter Hussman, everyone at the James G. Martin Center, and certain old rich racists on the UNC Board of Governors. North Carolina has resisted supporting black students and faculty and made life difficult for Hannah-Jones in every step of her career, and she still loves the place despite the actions of the rich and powerful, who have managed to do great harm to the reputation of their school.

How long have queer folk been fighting Nazis?

As long as there have been Nazis. It’s a natural enmity. Today I learned about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, two non-binary people who battled the Germans in occupied Jersey.

Lucy Schwob is better known by their pseudonym, Claude Cahun, and Suzanne Malherbe by her pseudonym, Marcel Moore. Theirs was a creative partnership, as well as romantic. Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, writer, and sculptor, while Moore was an illustrator and designer.

Cahun is the more renowned of the pair. She used her work to challenge notions of identity and gender with androgynous self-portraits that bring to life an array of characters. In one, she’s a bodybuilder holding barbells and hearts drawn on their cheeks; in another, she’s a lady of the manor swathed in velvet. Her work is a playful clash of the masculine and feminine, but also a critique of the societal norms she spent her life refusing to adhere to.

Cahun believed that gender was transmutable. Assuming different identities was her forte, and she regularly performed in avant-garde theatre in 1920s Paris (experts still refer to her using feminine pronouns, but it is likely she would have identified as non-binary today). Moore would create the costumes that Cahun would wear to tread the boards. A forerunner of the modern artist, Cindy Sherman, she was ahead of her time in more ways than one.

They were also uncommonly brave.

Three years after her arrival, on June 30, 1940, the Germans invaded. The islanders knew early on that Jersey was likely to be occupied – 6,600 fled on evacuation ships – but Cahun and Moore chose to stay. “They’d spent their entire lives resisting authority, so this was an opportunity to be part of the resistance on the island,” says Downie.

Together, the pair created a two-person resistance campaign, with the main focus being what they called their “traps”. Cahun would draft notes addressed to the German troops, which Moore would translate into German, signing them ‘Der Soldat Ohne Namen’ (‘The Soldier Without a Name’).

Their aim was to inspire dissension amongst the troops by pointing out the idiocy of war. Professor Shaw says they would do it in a cryptic way, using poetry, reminiscent of the surrealist sensibility: “It wasn’t like propaganda telling you ‘Here’s what you need to do’, it spurred the soldiers to think their own thoughts about it.” They would catch the bus into St Helier, disguised as old ladies to deliver the messages, placing them on parked cars and inside cigarette packets. They kept as quiet as they could about their resistance – not even their housekeeper suspected them.

Subversive poetry is a perfectly legitimate means of resistance. It bothered the Nazis enough that when they were captured after four years of making nuisances of themselves, they were sentenced to death — they were only spared because the Allies were timely in their liberation of island ports and the French mainland.

Hooray for courageous weirdos!

A fascinating correlation

One of Biden’s declared goals was to see 70% of the population vaccinated by July. He didn’t quite make it. The states that did reach the goal are in green.

Compare that to the electoral map.

Huh. Wonder what that means.

A finer-grained analysis might be interesting. My county went for Trump; it also has a vaccination rate currently around 50%.

Who are these “New Atheists” of which you speak?

It was stupid, misleading terminology when it was coined (by Gary Wolf in Wired in 2006), and it just became more muddled as everyone tried to make sense of it, and now it’s an embarrassing liability. Even before organized atheism imploded, “New Atheist” confused everyone — it wasn’t “new” after all, and it was only defined by listing a small group of people who were somehow representative. And now there’s more wrangling in the atheosphere about who belongs. Simple answer: no one, and we shouldn’t care.

Anyway, after a brief discussion with Abbey on our Discord server, I do decree a new title that is far more descriptive and less divisive, in some ways. Henceforth, the group of people previously described as “New” shall be addressed as the Smug Atheists. It covers a broader swath of the community and also has a more explicit and accurate quality.

So it shall be done.

Nikole Hannah-Jones gets the last laugh

First, her tenure was denied by UNC, thanks to a meddling rich donor; then UNC worked past that and belatedly offered her tenure; now Hannah-Jones has turned them down and taken a tenured position at Howard University. Sweet.

UNC gets its comeuppance and Howard wins out. This is what happens when institutional racism conspires to deny talent.

Big bonus: Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to be teaching creative writing at Howard! Man, all the great students are going to be applying to Howard this coming year, and UNC is never going to live this screw-up down.

What took them so long?

You’d think global warming and climate change would be topic #1 at the Weather Channel, but they’ve only just now announced that they’re going to make it the focus.

The Atlanta-based Weather Channel said it’s committed to tackling climate change with more vigor than it ever has.

In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nora Zimmett, The Weather Channel’s chief content officer and executive vice president, said they are “doubling down on climate. Climate and weather coverage are completely linked. It’s the most important topic of not just our generation, but generations to come. We have a front seat.”

She said the channel has been addressing the subject for years but not on a regular basis. “We intend to do that now,” she said. “American sentiment only recently caught up with the urgency of the issue. Years ago, our audience didn’t want to hear about it. They are much more interested in it now.”

I guess I’m not their audience, because I’d have liked to have heard more about it 40 years ago. Maybe they’re just now catching up with me?

I also immediately wondered why now, what’s changed, why weren’t they on top of this years ago? The reporter read my mind.

When Zimmett informed the owner and media mogul Byron Allen about the shift, he told her, “Why didn’t you do this sooner?

“He is the biggest advocate for climate coverage and environmental justice coverage,” she said.

Since Allen’s Entertainment Studios purchased the station for $300 million in 2018 from NBCUniversal, Zimmett has noticed his positive impact. “Byron rewards good ideas,” she said. “He’s not big on red tape and bureaucracy. This funnels down to every level. If you’re an associate producer with a great idea to shoot a story, you come up with a reasonable budget and schedule, we say, ‘Go do it!’ I’ve worked at places where they say, ‘Stay in your lane.’ Byron fosters an entrepreneurial attitude. It’s a really exciting place to be.”

You know, that doesn’t answer the question. Telling me the owner is also asking why they didn’t emphasize climate change sooner doesn’t explain why they didn’t.

Another reason to shun Shark Week

I haven’t watched it in years — decades, even — and that’s my excuse for not knowing about its sexist culture.

Shark Week, a celebration of sharks on the Discovery Channel that attracts millions of viewers, is marine science’s premiere annual television event—and it rarely features women scientists or scientists of color in leading roles. Many women I’ve spoken to were passionate viewers as children, but when they became scientists, found “it wasn’t what it used to be, or what I remembered it to be,” said Carlee Jackson, a co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS). Another scientist told me that Shark Week stopped feeling “pure,” to her, because she increasingly “saw it through a lens tainted by sexism … and I wonder what would be different if I’d had a positive, inclusive experience in science from the start.”

To call shark science a “boy’s club” is an understatement—although more than 60 percent of graduate students in my field are women, the vast majority of senior scientists are white men. During my research talk at my first shark science conference, a senior male scientist was so rude and aggressive during the question period that another male scientist apologized for him afterward, telling me “he does that to a female graduate student every year or two”. I have seen it happen to others since; at least one woman he targeted left the podium in tears.

For years, the annual conference “officially” ended at the beginning of the closing banquet so organizers wouldn’t be responsible for what came next. “Next” included a fundraiser in which scantily clad female graduate students were expected to parade auction items around the room, a dinner at which one senior scientist demanded to sit with only the “prettiest” students, and an alcohol-fueled mixer where women needed to be on constant guard against roaming hands. The first male Ph.D. student who volunteered to display auction items to help his female colleagues had his rear laughingly slapped by a male senior scientist “for old time’s sake.” A photograph from a past meeting shows a senior scientist with his hands between the legs of two women graduate students, lifting them off the ground—one of them smiling, the other appearing on the verge of tears.

Uh, what?

I’ve been to post-conference shindigs in my fields of study, and they’ve been relatively benign (given that as a man, there may have been undercurrents to which I was stupidly oblivious), but they’ve never this ridiculously sexist. It helps that most of those fields, developmental biology and now spider biology, have been filled with a woman majority, but then marine biology is similarly popular with women. I guess one difference is that we’ve never had a wealthy influencer, like a whole cable TV channel, tilting the playing field and fueling bias with unwarranted favoritism for male presenters.

Read the whole article and be appalled. One disappointment, though, is that none of the assholes (the best term for the men described in that quote) get named, and that’s a shame, but understandable. They’ve still got the power. Nothing has changed to make the power differential shift, so a woman calling them out is going to get an absurd amount of shit showered down on her. But jesus, shark researchers of any gender: next time you see a senior man browbeating a woman graduate student, or fondling her, or asking her to parade around in skimpy clothing, say something. Make it unacceptable to behave that way. If you want to be an ally, don’t acquiesce.

And yet another reason!

“He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Daniels told In Touch Weekly, again recounting Trump watching “Shark Week.” “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities, and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was, like, riveted. He was, like, obsessed.”