12/12/2005
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Picking and Choosing Your Darwinism: The Christian Rights’ Choice
The Christian Right continues to press its attack on the teaching of evolution
because that complex Darwinian biological process appears to in conflict with a literal
interpretation of the Bible. At the same time, most of the Christian Right implicitly
endorses a social Darwinism in which the economically fit survive and accumulate
wealth in a free market setting while the less economically virtuous losers in the
competitive market decline into poverty and misery.
This picking a choosing between two quite different “Darwinisms” 1 is quite
curious. It certainly is not based on the Bible since both the Old and New Testaments
explicitly condemn those who accumulate wealth and praise the virtue of the poor.

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to
enter into the kingdom of God…”

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
Those, and many other Biblical passages, are so explicit that biblical literalists on the
right ought to be roundly condemning the growing inequality in this country that is the
cornerstone of the Bush economy. Yet they ignore these literal Biblical messages on
wealth and embrace Social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest.
This preference for Social Darwinism and rejection of biological Darwinism is not
based on science either. The empirical evidence supporting natural selection and
evolutionary forces in biology is overwhelming. The evidence to support the idea that
unbridled free market forces always reward the virtuous and punish only the lazy, dumb,
1
See Robert B. Reich, “The Two Darwinisms,” The American Prospect, 16(12):56, December 2005.
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and morally degenerate is sorely lacking. Most of us personally know of many examples
where that simply not the case is.
Of course, Darwin was not the source of Social Darwinism. It was British
philosopher Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” not Charles
Darwin. Spencer’s defense of a competitive society and economy provided an unlikely
moral justification for America’s Gilded Age and the concentration of wealth and
economic power in the hands to the “robber barons” of the late 19 th and early 20th
centuries. It allowed, for instance, John D. Rockefeller, a century ago, to claim that his
fortune built around the Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest...the
working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
That remains the attraction of Social Darwinism to today’s neo-conservatives and
the Christian right: It justifies the existing concentrations of wealth, defends deference
to those with that wealth, while criticizing any social programs aimed at alleviating
poverty or promoting a somewhat less extreme distribution of income and wealth.
Social Darwinism has the distinct conservative advantage of telling us that what we
have is what we ought to have and that any effort at correcting imbalances in wealth
can only make things worse. The status quo is not only right and virtuous but also
inevitable.
Therefore, the religious right picks and chooses what parts of the Bible to
interpret literally and then rejects real science for pseudo-science. The vast sociological
and economic literature that documents the role of the economic status of one’s
parents, the models of success available while growing up, the educational
opportunities actually open along the way, and just plain luck in determining the
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distribution of economic outcomes simply gets ignored. Does anyone but the most
biased partisan believe that George W. Bush’s rise to power was tied to virtuous living,
hard work, business acumen, and intelligence? Setting aside his performance in office,
his entire life previous to assuming the presidency contradicts such claims. His family
connections, their arrangements so that he could attend elite educational institutions
and avoid military service, his associations with the very wealthy and just plain luck
certainly played dominate roles.
This is not just a matter of partisan political concern. The right wing’s attack on
science and its indifference to the growing number of children trapped in poverty with
dead end prospects does not bode well for the productivity of our economy and our
competitiveness as a nation. We need a highly trained, energetic, and responsible
citizenry that is scientifically literate and competent. The right wing’s agenda, led by
President Bush, has serious long run consequences for both our social fabric and our
economy.
These are not just partisan cultural wars. These attacks on science and equality
are attacks on the very heart of a modern liberal democracy and prosperous economy.
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