Until around 1980, “the Christian right” was not a phrase in American politics. In 2000 my widowed seventy-eight-year-old mom, having voted for fourteen Republican presidential nominees in a row, decisively quit a party that had become too religious for her. The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008 three-quarters of the GOP presidential primary candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016 only one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say evolutionary biology was
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