A lot of the problem is that a strange form of Christianity has become very mediasavvy . When I was a kid in the seventies , most of the US Christians were either mainline Protestant or Catholic . Evangelicals were a smaller set then and not particularly political . The idea of challenging scientific consensus on evolution was fringey . During junior high I remember seeing a local theater production of Inherit the Wind and thinking of it as a historic artifact . It dramatized an actual 1925 trial about teaching evolution in schools . Nobody serious debates that anymore . Then a new set of televangelists politicized the matter and suddenly it was a serious issue . Didn ' t take long . By the time I was a junior in high school my AP biology class took a straw poll half of the class were creationistsand these were kids who were serious about science we could get university credit by taking a test at the end of the year . Later I learned that behind the scenes the accreditation rules for higher education were also changing . So it ' s become possible to get a university degree in the United States where you pass your science classes by regurgitating Biblical literalism and where they teach that climate change isn ' t happening . The mainline Protestant denominations have largely kept up with the times quite a few of them now hold same sex weddings . Yet those denominations ' membership has dwindled as the evangelical megachurches grew . The evangelicals were very shrewd at getting one of their talking heads on the air whenever CNN and the other news broadcasters held a segment where the debate touched on religion . So these really weird extremist views became mainstream .