Evangelical Christians & Intelligent Design

On NBC's Dateline Friday night, Tom Brokaw spent the hour exploring the world of evangelical Christianity. The episode, "In God They Trust," focused on one of America's newly emergent mega-churches in Colorado Springs, CO -- Ted Haggard's New Life Church.

Brokaw: Most of the churches that I know of, and certainly the ones I attended, at some point, you out loud acknowledge that you were a sinner or that you came face-to-face to guilt that you may feel.

Haggard: Right.

Brokaw: I didn’t see any of that here.

Haggard: Well, we do talk about sin. But, see, the issue is Jesus took care of our sin. And Jesus removes guilt from our life. So the emphasis in our church isn’t how to get your sins removed because that’s pretty easy to do. Jesus did that on the cross. The emphasis in our church is how to fulfill the destiny that God’s called you
to.

____

Along with other religious conservative leaders, Haggard belongs to an association called the Arlington Group, the members push for common goals such as banning gay marriage and restricting abortion.

Brokaw: Let me read you what Senator John Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest, a Republican says, “Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God’s mind and they can advance God’s will through government.” Is he talking about you?

Ted Haggard: Well, I think all of us have a responsibility to advance God’s will through government. But we are in a pluralistic society. We’re not talking about theocracy. We’re not talking about some group of religious leaders dictating to the government how to write law.

While it's easy for some of us to look at these people as fundamentalists and radicals, especially considering that they hold a literal interpretation of the Bible, there is more to the movement than a strict religious vision. They want their government to reflect their views -- and this is where many of us feel uncomfortable -- so it is important that we understand the source of their views and how we might change them.

In the language of Spiral Dynamics, evangelicals are Blue to the core [a mini-course on the Spiral is available here]. The Blue Meme emerges in response to the previous Red Meme, which is egoic and power-driven. Red is unstructured, violent, and lacking any guilt in the satisfaction of its needs. Blue rises to provide boundaries to that egoic drive, to sublimate egoic needs into culturally agreed-upon values.

To provide a foundation for this set of collective values, Blue invokes a divine power and the threat of eternal punishment, as well as the promise of eternal bliss if you simply follow the rules. However, the emphasis should not be on the divinity -- it should be on the need for order and meaning that religion offers. This is where we can talk to Blue and expand its worldview.

One of the reasons evangelicals reject science is because they sense that it removes meaning and order from the world -- science killed God in their eyes. One of the most disturbing things to a Blue person is a world without order and meaning; as long as they believe science removes those values from their world, they will reject science and remain ensconced in their evangelical worldview. This viewpoint is precisely why conservatives, especially evangelicals, despise postmodernism's relativism -- it makes all things equal and in doing so removes meaning from the world (as they see it).

What would happen if science and religion could peacefully coexist? I have been harshly critical of "intelligent design" and still maintain that it is faith and not science, but we should be encouraging evangelicals to adopt the intelligent design (ID) worldview and to reject strict creationism. We also should fight to the death all attempts to teach ID as science.

Intelligent design offers a new set of life conditions that can open the possibility of Blue moving toward Orange, resulting in a BLUE-orange transitional Meme. In an ID world, science will no longer be seen by evangelicals as a value system that rejects God and an ordered, meaningful universe.

If we want to create an integral world, and particularly if we want to create an integral politics, we will need to find new ways to alter the existing life conditions to facilitate change and emergence. As much as it might pain us, ID is one of the ways we can create life conditions that will allow some evangelicals to move toward a more expansive worldview.