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Wiccans v. Creationists: an empirical study of how two systems of belief differ.

Article Excerpt
IN A 1991 BOOK ENTITLED The Creationist Movement in Modern America, (1) Frank Harrold and I ran through the gamut of explanations for why people believe in special creationism, or the belief that the Earth and life were created about 10,000 years ago. (About 40% of Americans believe in both creation and evolution--that evolution was guided by God and that the process took billions of years. These people are sometimes called theistic evolutionist, or old earth creationists, and contrast sharply with young earth creationists. (2)) When I use the term creationists, it is in reference to the special, or young earth creationists.

Initial explanations attributed creationists' beliefs to some sort of pathology. For example, in the aftermath of a 1974 controversy in Kanawha, West Virginia, triggered by the introduction of a new .series of Language Arts books for use in the public schools (that included evolution "presented as a fact"), the headmaster of the new reading program, James Moffitt, rendered his opinion. In a book he authored on the incident, (3) Moffitt attributed the source of anti-evolutionism to "authoritarian personalities." (4) Another popular explanation is that creationists are ill-educated ignoramuses, or backwoods bumpkins.

However, even if it were true that some creationists display a higher proportion of pathological waits than one would expect by chance, this not an adequate explanation. Frank Harrold and I, for example, collected a mass of survey information from a multitude of sources in which the data clearly demonstrated that explanations based on personal pathology could not account for a plurality of creationists. Instead, most of them appeared adequately-to-well educated, and generally seemed to be no more pathological than the rest of us. It may be that academic social scientists (who typically lean toward being politically liberal) are too quick to assign negative personality traits to adherents of conservative beliefs. (5)

Cultural Traditionalists, Modernists, and Postmodernists

An important sociological understanding of the origins of creationism was presented in 1978 by Ann Page and Donald Clelland, who suggested that conflicts such as the one that occured in Kanawha County could best be understood as a group-level phenomenon rather than a purely individual matter, and that these differences of opinion reflect conflicting worldviews held by each groups.

Page and Clelland labeled one such aggregate "cultural fundamentalists," or what I prefer to call cultural traditionalist--those who tend to employ a literal reading of scripture. (I prefer this label because Harrold and I found many creationists who live outside of the so-called "fundamentalist" religious denominations.) For cultural traditionalists what is good or evil is not up to humans to decide--God's revealed commandments uniquely serve that purpose. Additionally, cultural traditionalists see the purpose of life as to serve and glorify God, even if this means one must submit one's own being to hardship and toil. A second aggregate, termed "cultural modernists" by Page and Clelland, is described as being the paradignatic descendants of the Enlightenment and secular empiricism. As such, cultural modernists are said to believe that the road to truth lies in gathering data with which to test hypotheses, and then let the philosophical chips fall where they may.

As an example of the conflict of these two groups, consider the question "What is to be done about AIDS?" Cultural traditionalists sometimes see AIDS as God's will. (For example, in the opinion of many traditionalists, AIDS is weeding out drug-users, homosexuals, and prostitutes from society at large). Even at its most liberal, however, cultural fundamentalism would "hate the sin and love the sinner." In either case, traditionalists would say that the cure for AIDS would be to return to greater piety and commitment to biblical values and injunctions. Contrast this perspective with that of cultural modernists, who argue that the cure for AIDS involves conducting epidemiological studies to find its cause, and preventitative methods such as condoms and sterilized needles as part of a development of a technology-based cure.

Compared to modernists, cultural traditionalists have been shown to be a fairly homogenous group--specifically, they are more rural, older, white, and Protestant. In contrast, cultural modernists seem to have arisen in part, out of necessities brought about by urbanization and widespread migration. For example, cultural modernists seem to...