A Powerful Correlation
The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby
Yet inconsistencies abound even among the one third of Americans who say that they consider the Bible the literal word of God — not merely “inspired by God” but, from the serpent in the Garden of Eden to Jesus’ resurrection from the grave, an explicit blueprint handed down by the deity, with Part I going directly to Moses and Part II through Jesus to the twelve apostles. Even more Americans — four in ten — believe that God made man in his present form, in one distinct act of creation, during the past 10,000 years. There is something mysterious about the finding that Americans are more likely to believe in the creation account set forth in Genesis than they are to credit the literal truth of the whole Bible. Apparently many people accept the story that God created Adam out of dust and Eve out of Adam’s rib but balk at subsequent whims of the Supreme Being, say, sending a flood to destroy everyone on earth but one family or making a ninety-year-old woman pregnant by her hundred-year-old husband Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish people, and then asking Abraham to kill his only son. A similar inconsistency is apparent in polls showing that nearly two thirds of Americans believe in heaven but fewer than half believe in hell. It seems that the American tendency to choose from a cafeteria-style theological menu is not limited to Catholics.
Regardless of how fundamentalists fine-tune their beliefs, there is unquestionably a powerful correlation between religious fundamentalism and lack of education. Approximately 45 percent of those who have no education beyond high school believe in the literal truth of the Bible, while only 29 percent with some college — and just 19 percent of college graduates — share that old-time faith. Secularism, skepticism, and acceptance of mainstream science all rise with education; two thirds of college graduates, but only about one third of high school graduates, believe that living beings have evolved over time — with or without the guiding hand of a creator.
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