I was always excited to go to college and get away from Dallas, Texas, and what I saw as its close-mindedness and paternalistic Southern racism masquerading as good ole' southern values. Having finally escaped to the blue states and their promise of like-minded people, I now feel used to having my political opinion corroborated and reaffirmed; scenes like the spontaneous celebration at the Frist Campus Center during the Democratic congressional victory would have never happened at home. By the time I traveled home for Thanksgiving, I had more or less forgotten that there were people who still thought the war in Iraq was a good idea or were disturbed at the prospect of a Democratic Congress.
It is an unwritten rule that every time my extended family gathers together for a holiday, we end up in some religious or political debate. This is probably the result of having four lawyers and a horde of hotheaded kids. But I was surprised by the topic of discussion that began the dispute this year: the validity of the theory of evolution — something I had assumed any rational person (which I, for the most part, consider my family to be) accepted by now. But here was my aunt saying, "If we're evolved from apes, why don't we see any ape-men today?"; my dad arguing that random mutations and natural selection are not enough to justify interspecies modification; and my cousin quietly whispering dirty words in my ear to distract me.
The argument reminded me of a scene in the documentary "Jesus Camp." The film told the story of a bizarre woman named Becky Fischer who runs an evangelical Bible camp for little kids that resembled some kind of Fascist brainwashing experiment. Children as young as six were encouraged to speak in tongues, exhorted to cleanse themselves of sin, impelled to clap wildly for a cardboard cutout of George Bush and urged to become warriors for the Christian right. The sight of a grown man handing out dolls shaped as dead fetuses to six-year-olds while covering the kids' mouths with tape reading "LIFE" was only slightly less disturbing than seeing a cute, blonde, seven-year-old boy convulsing on the floor in tears as other kids wailed and chanted in tongues over his body. My family's Thanksgiving argument reminded me of a scene where a home-schooled boy — fulfilling the government's "science" requirement — watched a video of anti-evolution propaganda that distilled all the findings of the fossil record, our knowledge of homologous structures in animals and investigations into the genetic configuration of man into a simple question asked by a man in a knockoff ape suit (he asked it in a singsong voice as chimp sounds played derisively in the background): "Scientists say I'm a monkey. Are you a monkey?" The boy, of course, emphatically shook his head.
But my family is nothing like these nuts. They are hyper-rational, and, frustratingly, my father's argument was more eloquent and coherent than my own. The more I argued with them, the more I resorted to retorts like, "Well, that's just stupid," and "Look, everyone knows you're just wrong." I slowly began slipping into what I call the Jesus Camp Syndrome, the pejorative liberal assumption that all people who do not accept what the left considers fundamental truths are as wacky as the families in Jesus Camp. But the Jesus Camp Syndrome ignores the wide spectrum of the Bible-Belt; it lumps my family, who I consider to be intelligent, loving and compassionate, with the idiots at the rodeo in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," who cheer wildly as the blissfully ignorant Kazakh professes his support for America's "War of Terror."
As I slipped into the Jesus Camp Syndrome, failing at any level to engage my opponents and eventually just talking pedantically to them, I found myself stooping to demagoguery instead of appealing to reason. In a way, my method of argument reminds me of the current dialogue between the political right and left. Sure, a good deal of the core conservative beliefs these days are absolutely untenable, but as long as the left treats its adversaries like half-wits, the right will continue to see the left as a horde of snooty sophisticates, summarized and dismissed by the ultimate pejorative in the south: liberal. For that word to take on a new meaning, liberals will have to rid themselves of the notion that all Christians are Becky Fischer and everyone who does not believe in evolution is as ignorant as the man in the ape suit, filling little kids' heads with nonsense. Rob Madole is a freshman from Dallas, Texas. He may be reached at madole@princeton.edu.
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