I personally know multiple people who homeschooled their kids to avoid discussing evolution. There's even been debate at state board of education levels about how evolution is taught in public schools. There's absolutely a lot of people who want to teach their kids humans and dinos existed at the same time.

I think their point wasn't that religious parents wouldn't be concerned about evolution too, but that in 2021 they would have expected LGBT issues to be at the forefront of the religious right's fears surrounding public schools.

For the parental fears to center on evolution either suggests either that the parents were censoring their larger concerns for OP, or it's an anachronism that brings the chronology into question.

I mean, you pick the subject, there's a hot-button issue.

Could be evolution in the science side of things, the legacy of slavery or colonization in the history side of things.

Math is generally pretty safe, although I do see a steady stream of "I'm so glad I'm homeschooling my kids, I can't believe what $currentEducationalBogeyman is trying to pass off as education" when presented with some way to understand math that I had to teach myself, in college, to do the math faster in my head.

Composition is pretty safe, but as its frequently combined with literature (that is, the study of rhetoric in other people's writing) which also has a lot of self-censorship. It's also unsteady ground, as the Bible should be study as literature as well as religious tome, but that can lead to kids thinking about the humans who wrote the bible and what rhetorical outcome they were reaching towards.

Physical education is safe so long as it limits itself to exercise, but health topics like human sexuality are obviously going to raise some hackles.

I think it really depends on the parent what is the absolute bogeyman of public schooling, but evolution has posed the most consistent existential threat to the stereotypical fundamentalist who is looking to avoid "sinful" public schools.

> Could be evolution in the science side of things...

I don't think that the theory of evolution was the issue in 2021...

Here's an example that happened in France: parents disgusted by a performance where an adult male performer was pretending, in front of kids, to eat vegetables in a garden, naked, in front of kids "because ecological art" (or whatever that performance was called) [1]

I'm sure I'm the evil, close minded, one, who refuses to see the "art" and the "ecology" in that performance and who sees instead the perversion of kids.

But while I'm the evil one who is seeing perversion, there were people involved in showing an adult male, on all fours, balls and dick out, ass spread, because he had an important message to pass (certainly).

Do that to my kid, and my kid is getting homeschooled the next day.

I don't have a problem with anyone but I do have a problem with proselytism.

[1] the art performance (call it what you want) is now forbidden to be shown to kids (so there's still some sanity out there)... Video of the performance kids saw (the one inside the tweet):

https://actu.fr/auvergne-rhone-alpes/lyon_69123/artistes-nus...

Note that I don't know and don't care if the person who revealed that is an ultra-fundamentalist christian, a neo-nazi, or an alien from outer space... You are not showing that to my kid without repercussion.

That's pretty hard to argue with, although (according to google translate, my french is a bit rusty), the performance was already banned from kids. Children weren't supposed to be there. So maybe that's less a question of "look at the filth they're showing our kids!" and more "why weren't the docents doing their jobs?".

> It's also unsteady ground, as the Bible should be study as literature as well as religious tome, but that can lead to kids thinking about the humans who wrote the bible and what rhetorical outcome they were reaching towards.

This is where public schooling is hypocritical. There are various forms of education about race, gender, etc., but almost no mandatory education on religion?

I'm not saying indoctrination, but education. Shouldn't everyone have a basic understanding of the history and tenets of Buddhism? Atheism? Hinduism? And so on? I think so. Even if the prism of importance is postmodern and focuses on respect fo others' self-identification, religion is clearly a major aspect in self-identification or we wouldn't treat the subject as controversial.

I very much agree with that. Unfortunately that idea is antithetical to most religious people because most religions claim that they are the only valid religion.

Teaching a kid about the variety of beliefs across the globe and the option of none is likely to make the kid less attached to the bubble of the religion of their parents.

In my country, religion is a 1h/week class from 1'st to 12'th grade and parents have to explicitly opt-out of it if they do not want kids to take part. Opting out is also slightly detrimental to a kids scores. What is thought is pure indoctrination and there is no element of multi-religious sociology and anthropology.

Half of Republicans don't believe in evolution

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/03/republica...

> While this may technically fit the definition of "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe what parents teach their own children.

I'm a former homeschooler that had to watch countless Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos. These videos were filled with strawmen and faulty logic. I distinctly remember one of them tearing into Lamarckism, a theory discredited in the 1930's, as if it were something that people actually believe in today. Indoctrination is exactly how I'd describe it.

Unless you wanted to be a research biologist, does the precise mechanism driving evolution really matter? And the ideas did turn out to have some merit with epigenetics, right?

Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about. Sort of like how we tell children the story about electrons being balls that orbit the nucleus. Wrong, but only important for physicists and chemists.

“tearing into Lamarckism” as in using it to discredit evolution.

Ah, right that makes more sense. I guess though it's still not clear that it really makes much difference. Like even when the intelligent design people acknowledge that plant breeding exists, but claim "macroevolution" is impossible or whatever, does that even matter? If you're not going to be a geneticist, it's basically just trivia.

The reason creationists push so hard against the teaching of evolution is that it fundamentally discredits their entire theology. It’s not just about the origin story.

If there wasn’t a literal Adam and Eve, then Adam and Eve never sinned by eating fruit from the wrong tree, and thus they never passed that sin down to all of humanity, meaning we aren’t all born with “original sin” for which we need to be forgiven and saved from being sent to hell when we die.

Nothing about Evolution disproves Adam and Eve. If an all powerful person is in the story, it's a theological and metaphysical question how Evolution and Creation fit together.

It's also kind of a boring question because there's no experiment we could run to explain how creation miracles worked. It's definitely a fountain of controversy, though.

Does plant breeding somehow imply macroevolution?

What I mean is things like plant breeding and genetics ("microevolution") have practical uses, and modern anti-evolutionists shifted to acknowledge it because it's so easy to demonstrate. Knowing how we came to be ("macroevolution") doesn't have practical uses. Tautologically, it happens on time scales far beyond our lifespans.

Almost everyone isn't going to do a deep dive into how it all works/become professionals in that area, so even the science is effectively just a story for them. If parents want to tell their kids a different story, it doesn't really matter much. Public school k-12 science is so basic that as has been said elsewhere in the comments, you can learn it all from Wikipedia in a few days anyway. The important topics are reading, writing, and math/logic. Ideally history and political philosophy, but it's not clear that schools meaningfully teach that anyway.

The thing about creationism is that it also inherently tells you science is wrong, not to be believed and that scientists and the government willingly lie to you. That doesn’t set you up to get far and do well in the world as it is.

Scientists and the government do willingly lie though? And a proper science education will have you go through the math and do experiments yourself so you don't need to believe it (well, you need to believe you are not being tricked by a Cartesian demon). If you're not doing that, then yeah all you have to go on is credibility of the people doing science, and several fields have replication crises, so it makes sense to not blindly believe them.

It does not. At least not in such absolute terms.

Some science is wrong, but not science in itself.

And mate, you don't need to go into religion or anything to find out that governments willingly lie to you. Also scientists, plenty of times, willingly or not.

> That doesn’t set you up to get far and do well in the world as it is.

There are loads of highly successful and relevant Christian people in every area, including science, right now and throughout history.

> Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about

That was just one example of a particularly egregious strawman. It made "evolutionists" out to be a lot dumber than they actually are by misrepresenting what they believe. They made similar arguments against some of Darwin's since discredited theories, again, as if they were things that modern scientists believe. And there were plenty of other untruths and logical errors, so much so that I think it's very likely these people were not arguing in good faith.

I agree that it's not a very important subject for everyday life or for most careers, but that kind of intellectual dishonesty being presented as the absolute divine truth is not good for developing a child's reasoning abilities imo.

And as another sibling comment points out, creationism tends to pit people against science and intellectualism in general. The only thing that can be truly known is the absolute truth of the Bible.

Creationism never went away, it just became less politically salient. Public belief in evolution has been basically static for decades.

Why does it matter? I'm not a creationist but the insistence that you take this tiny aspect of a science (origin of life) and make everyone field loyalty to that idea is just weird. It's probably important if you're doing scientific research but not for basic education. You can scoff at creationists about how they don't believe in fossils, but what can the everyday man tell you about fossils? Is it integral to their life? Do they make important decisions based on the existence of fossils? Its basically a bumper sticker belief to 95% of people anyway

All this to say who cares? People choose to believe what they want to believe. And for historical reasons there's this belief common that may or may not align with current scientific thought. Let's not make this a hill to die on if it drives parents away.

Not only is it a hot button issue, but the US still has a large number of creationist "museums" you can tour with your kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationist_museum

> Really? In 2021, the hot-button issue among religious parents was evolution?

In my area it certainly was. Vaccines were probably hotter at that time, but they tend to not be a major part of the curriculum, and transgender issues in public schools was just getting on parents radar here when COVID interrupted things.