The Political Left is all about redefinition. For example, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is said to be (and is) “an academic theory mostly taught at the grad-student level.” But CRT has evolved into something like Frankenstein’s monster that was pieced together from the dead.
The latest example of CRT thinking is the claim that the “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.” The author of the Scientific American opinion article, Allison Hopper, begins with the following assertion:
The global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent…. We are all descended genetically, and also culturally, from dark-skinned ancestors. Early humans from the African continent are the ones who first invented tools; the use of fire; language; and religion. These dark-skinned early people laid down the foundation for human culture.
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Embracing humanity’s dark-skinned ancestors with love and respect is key to changing our relationship to the past, and to creating racial equity in the present. These ancient people made the rest of us possible. Opening our hearts to them and embracing them as heroic, fully human and worthy of our respect is part of the process of healing from our racist history.
As I’ll show below, Hopper is completely unaware of the innate racist history of the theory of evolution. Not only is the theory of evolution being questioned on scientific grounds, but it is also being critiqued for its social and moral implications.[1]
Political pressure is being exerted on school boards across the United States to teach CRT in grades K through 12 as a way to introduce destructive leftwing topics like the following:
Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.
Does anyone want Leftists who control our nation’s government schools teaching anything using the CRT label? “1619 Project writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said in a podcast that she believes Cuba is the most equal country in the Western hemisphere and could serve as a model for its integration agenda.” (Source) In a sense, Cuba is the most equal country in the Western hemisphere because nearly everyone is equally poor because of the island’s communist social and economic policies that began in the mid-1950s.
For my evaluation of “The 1619 Project,” see the Foreword to THE 1776 PROJECT.
The 1776 Project
Why is the Left so determined to rewrite history? Are they terrified that Americans will dig deeper into the failed policies of socialism and communism? Is it because their ‘progress’ demands regression into government control, elitist power, and the censorship of a formerly free people? Decide for yourself. Think for yourself. And enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own this beautiful 1776 Project as a lasting gift to the American people: the gift of history unaltered.
Buy NowLook up the following to see how radicalized CRT has become:
• cisheteropatriarchy
• anthropocentrism
In the right hands, for example, critiquing “empire” can be a good thing. Christians have been doing this for a long time, but do you think the NEA wants a Christian critique of empires and how God has dealt with them? To do so would mean dealing with the biblical view of Empire as God’s government over us and that all governments — self, family, church, and civil — are bound to follow His moral standards for these jurisdictionally limited governments. That’s not going to happen.
Why no discussion of what the Bible says about “man stealing” (Ex. 21:16; 1 Tim. 1:10) and how following this law would have stopped the slave trade in its tracks? Why no history about how the Christian William Wilberforce (1759–1833) worked tirelessly to stop the slave trade based on a biblical analysis of the moral injustice of the inhumanity?
The 1925 Scopes Trial is often seen as the obscurantist William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) defending an archaic and irrelevant religion against the enlightened views of the jurist Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) who extoled the virtues of Darwinism. What few people realize, and CRT advocates don’t want you to know, is that Bryan pointed out the moral dangers of evolutionary theory, a history that Allison Hopper seems to be unaware of:
“We must be careful how we apply this doctrine of the strongest.” Bryan feared what came to be known in the next decade as “social Darwinism”—the idea that human society is an arena of struggle in which the strongest prevail, the fittest survive, and poor “misfits” must be neglected in the name of progress through “betterment of the race.”[2]
If dark-skinned people were the first to develop civilization, then dark-skinned people were the first to act out “nature, red in tooth and claw” and “survival of the fittest.” There are no advances in evolution except by way of violence. Step on or be stepped on to advance evolutionarily. Kill or be killed. Let’s not forget what evolutionist Richard Dawkins has said:
In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.[3]
According to Hopper, this would first apply to our “dark-skinned ancestors.”
We forget the subtitle to Charles Darwin’s 1859 evolutionary blockbuster The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin’s supporters claim that his use of “races” was meant to describe subspecies of animals. To a certain degree, this is true. But what did Darwin mean by “subspecies”? What if Darwin thought of non-whites as “subspecies” of animals that had not reached their full evolutionary potential? In his evolutionary sequel, The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.[4]
In the 1925 Scope’s “Monkey Trial,” the defendant, John Scopes taught from “an approved school text called A Civic Biology by George Hunter.”[5] The book is not so much a scientific defense of Darwinism but a rehearsal of “Darwinism’s social implications. In particular, chapter seventeen discusses the application to human society of ‘the laws of selection’ and approves the eugenic policies and scientific racism common in the United States at the time.” (Scopes, a substitute teacher planted by the ACLU to test Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, was teaching his students from chapter seventeen.) In Civic Biology, “Hunter believed that it would be criminal to hand down ‘handicaps’ to the next generation and regarded families with a history of tuberculosis, epilepsy and feeblemindedness as ‘parasitic on society.’ The remedy, according to Hunter, is to prevent breeding.”[6] His textbook taught high school students that Caucasians “represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” were “the highest type of all.” “In a section labeled ‘Blood Tells,’ Hunter wrote, ‘brilliant men and women … have received the good inheritance from their ancestors.’”[7]
These were the views of the Progressives of that time:
The views espoused in the book about evolution, race, and eugenics were common to American Progressives (especially in the work of Charles Benedict Davenport, one of the most prominent American biologists of the early 20th century, whom Hunter cites in the book). (Source)
Hunter’s “remedy” to purge the unfit from society was to treat these undesirables like they “were lower animals … [and] … probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.” (Source)
Allison Hopper is a filmmaker who has been creating content for young people on the topic of evolution. She might want to include this observation from Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today:
Prohibiting the teaching of creationism in favor of evolution creates an atheistic, belligerent tone that might explain why our kids sometimes perform like Godzilla instead of children made in the image of God.
While evolution teaches that we are accidents or freaks of nature, creationism shows humankind as the offspring of a divine Creator. There are rules to follow which govern not only our time on Earth, but also our afterlife.
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If evolution is forced on our kids, we shouldn’t be perplexed when they beat on their chests or, worse yet, beat on each other and their teachers.[8]
Reynolds’ comments are reminiscent of what C.S. Lewis wrote: “We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”[9] We strip men and women of the certainty that they are created in the image of God, and we are surprised when they act like the beasts of the field.
If Evolution is Right Can Anything Be Wrong?
Atheistic evolutionists express moral outrage against murder and rape, but if evolution is true, how can there be moral outrage since it was killing and rape that got us where we are today as a species? Animals kill and rape every day. Why are killing and rape OK for animals but not for humans, who are only supposedly highly evolved animals? If evolution is true, at death we are nothing more than dust in the wind and in life we are nothing more than a bag of meat and bones.
Buy Now[1]For example, Tom Bethell, Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey through the Darwin Debates (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2017) and Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, [1992] 1997), especially chap. 15.
[2]Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 101.
[3]Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133.
[4]Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1874), 178. Quoted in Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 60.
[5]Philip J. Sampson, 6 Modern Myths About Christianity & Civilization (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2001), 54.
[6]Sampson, 6 Modern Myths About Christianity, 54–55.
[7]Eliza Dexter Cohen, “The Book of Life Civic Biology in Progressive-Era New York” (April 15, 2015), 85. Also see Richard Magat, “The Forgotten Roles of Two New York City Teachers in the Epic Scopes Trial,” Science & Society 70:4 (2006), 541.
[8]Barbara Reynolds, “If your kids go ape in school, you’ll know why,” USA Today (August 27, 1993), 11A.
[9]C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, [1947] 1972), 35.