The Creationist United States of America

Yesterday, Eric Kleefeld wrote:

Think about this.  The combined vote total at Ames for Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo — the three candidates who have professed to not believe in evolution — was 47.1% among these core GOP activists in Iowa.

Sure, there must been some science-based people who voted for these faith-based candidates. But there were probably just as many creationists, if not more, voting for the publicly evolutionist candidates.

Today, Matthew Yglesias writes that he is "consistently taken aback by how unaware people are of the popularity of creationism." Same here. For the uninformed, Wikipedia tells us:

* A decade ago, 44% of the public believed in "young earth creationism" -- i.e., a biblically literally understanding of the planet's development.

* This year, 43% of the public believes "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

* In 2005, "70 percent of evangelical Christians felt that living organisms have not changed since their creation, but only 31% of Catholics and 32 percent of mainline Protestants had the same opinion."

* And speaking politically, in 2005 "63 percent of liberals and 37 percent of conservatives agreed that humans and other primates have a common ancestry," although that is technically a different question than age of the earth stuff.

Creationism is as American as  baseball and apple pie, especially in the South and Midwest.