Evolution and climate change within the political project of conservative Christian homeschooling

Abstract

This Forum article extends themes and critical observations within Jenna Scaramanga and Michael Reiss’s article ‘Evolutionary stasis: creationism, evolution and climate change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum,’ published in CSSE. The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum is a package of homeschool units and lesson designed to underscore and support conservative Christian students, teachers, and/or parents in their mission to align their students unfolding understanding of the world within the strict cognitive bounds of fundamentalist Christianity. Within this curriculum, both evolution and climate change are presented as unreasonable and/or silly against the purported superior evidence of the inerrant ontology of (their extremely narrow interpretation of the) the Bible. Scaramanga and Reiss’s analysis frame this kind of understanding within fundamentalist Christianity as indicative of a conspiracy theory. This article extends, questions, and suggests reframing these rhetorical moves toward a more robust and straightforward question of conservative Christianity as a player within a political economy. I suggest we take such groups more seriously for their highly effective if to some perspectives silly interpretation of Biblical text. For many, this movement is simply the maintenance of white male patriarchal power via religious identity. Implications, given the ease of movement of such texts in our digital age, are drawn for the use of such curricula in many other sites around the world.