Paula Bolyard – July 12, 2021
In a silly non-scientific op-ed at Scientific American, Allison Hopper declares that “denial of evolution” is a form of “white supremacy.” No, it’s not a satire piece. It’s a bigoted anti-Christian rant masquerading as a science op-ed. In it, Hopper, whose bio says she’s a “filmmaker and designer,” claims that “evolution denial” perpetuates violence against black people:
I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion 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 biblical view of creation—that God created the Earth, including man, out of nothing (ex nihilo) in six days—wasn’t invented in the 1920s when secularists were forced to go “on the defensive” against religious activists. It was the secularists, in fact, who went on the attack, portraying orthodox Christians as anti-science backwoods yahoos and bullying school districts and book publishers into removing all references to religion—not just creationism—from public schools. The anti-God mob has been on offense in this fight from Day 1. Hopper’s assertion that “rejection of evolution” (by that she means macroevolution, rather than microevolution, which Christians do not reject) is overtly racist doesn’t pass the smell test.
