For all you secular people out there: Have you ever wondered why so many religious people seem determined to make themselves look as stupid as they possibly can? And for the Christians: Tired of people assuming that you hate science? If so, my new book is just for you. I’m happy to announce that I’ve signed a contract for my new book about American creationism and evolution. Jesus and the Dinosaurs: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution will be published soonish with Oxford University Press.

Why???

Why another book about creationism? A bunch of years ago, my sister-in-law asked me why so many Americans believed in outlandish things, such as a 6,004-year-old planet, and a real, literal, even-though-it-is-absolutely-impossible worldwide flood. As she put it back then, “Why do they keep putting Jesus on a dinosaur?”

This book is my way-too-long answer to her question. I argue that secular people like me and my sister-in-law tend to misunderstand creationism. We tend to think that most creationists hold fairly radical views about religion and science. We tend to think that tons of our fellow Americans–up to 40% if we believe the new Gallup numbers–think that God created our species recently in Iraq.

In my new book, I’m arguing that we Americans have always had the wrong arguments about evolution and creationism. In fact, when it comes right down to it, the crux of our arguments have not really been about evolutionary science at all. Rather, the idea of evolution has been smushed into a contorted shape; “Evolution” has become an ill-fitting stand-in for all kinds of modern and post-modern cultural norms.

…can this really be true? Can this many Americans really believe in a radical creationist idea?

When radical creationists like Ken Ham and Henry Morris fume and fret about evolution, they are fighting about something much bigger. Yes, they dislike evolutionary ideas. Those ideas, however, are only the canary in the devil’s coalmine. The real dangers–from their perspective–come from a spiritual attitude that spurns God’s authority, that questions gender roles and sexuality, that allows abortion rights and encourages religious skepticism.

Answers In Genesis, “One Generation Away,” 2015

As Ken Ham’s organization loves to point out, thinking in evolutionary terms is not necessarily dangerous in itself, but it is very dangerous in its spiritual implications, especially for innocent young minds. Once people believe in a long evolutionary history, Ham warns, they will be open to changing their ideas about sexuality and morality. The public-school bus, Answers In Genesis warns, takes kids down the road to environmentalism, abortion rights, and LBGTQ rights.

So when the radical fringe of young-earth creationism warns about the dangers of evolutionary thinking, they’re not actually angry about evolution itself. Indeed, as I found in the research for my book about evangelical higher education, conservative-evangelical colleges –even including the uber-conservative ones that Ken Ham calls “Creation Colleges” –teach evolutionary theory to their students. They just do it in their own way.

More than that, once we really understand American creationism, we understand that radical young-earth creationists are not typical creationists. When it comes right down to it, most Americans are creationists of one sort or another. Most religious people embrace some vague idea that God (or gods) had a role in creating life. But for most people, that doesn’t mean that we don’t want our children to learn the best modern science. Most Americans are creationists, in other words, and most creationists want their children to learn evolutionary theory.

So why do we keep fighting about evolution? In the new book, I’m making the case that “Evolution” stopped being about evolutionary science a long time ago. When we fight about “Evolution,” we’re not fighting about evolutionary science. We’re fighting about LGBTQ rights, and abortion, and the proper role of evangelical Christianity in our government.

Will my lil book stop all these fights? Course not. But it can’t hurt to clarify the real terms of our culture-war disagreements and stop shouting uselessly across our culture-war trenches.