I did not like this video. It’s titled “Meet the Evangelical Science Teacher Who Raised an Evolutionist“. It meanders. It’s slow. It’s from the perspective of a rational, evolution accepting person who has a father who is both a science teacher and a committed young earth creationist, and the problem is that it’s trying to humanize this man she loves, and present as much of his view as she can stomach, but everything he clings to is bullshit. She mainly struggles to keep their relationship tolerable, but he is wallowing in evangelical nonsense, soaking in creationist books and videos, and can never break out of his self-constructed pit of ignorance. It’s over an hour long, and the creator doesn’t break out of her own restraint until about an hour in, when she gets into an argument about climate change (he denies that it’s human-caused, of course).
I felt compelled to watch it because it reflects a perspective I don’t have — I grew up in a family that was open-minded and thoughtful. My family wasn’t atheist by any means, but they didn’t have the patience to put up with Christian lies, and I think they avoided church because it would have required that they think about the crap in the Bible, and it was safer to avoid confronting the beliefs they’d been brought up in. I didn’t have a father who sat around listening to old-time gospel hour shows, who had them playing as background noise (and I do mean noise) as he puttered around the house, and who as a consequence rejected scientific evidence. This video was infuriating because the pushback against this stupid man, who was smart enough to teach math to 3rd graders, was so tepid and weak, in spite of the fact that the creator was also infuriated with this old man’s intransigence.
I can only recommend it for people who are curious about what living the evangelical life is like. Short answer: it’s hellishly stupid.
I watched this a couple weeks ago, hoping it might offer some insight about how to reach these people. Alas, it only resurrected old frustrations about their inexplicably stubborn stupidity.
My parents were agnostics, having abandoned their ancestral Methodism around the time of (and partly due to) WWII; the Jesus-stuff was a bit of teenage folly. However, I never went as far down the rabbit hole as a lot of other people do. YEC for e.g. was something I flirted with, but in the end rejected — I already knew a lot about natural history, and understood that there was a consistent story there, across many scientific disciplines, and it didn’t seem likely that they’d got it that badly wrong. Many years later, I encountered talk.origins (and PZ!) which filled in a lot of the remaining blanks and (somewhat indirectly) led to me becoming an atheist.
I was raised in an Episcopal household and relished my days as an acolyte. I was the Lighter of Candles, the Carrier of Crosses. I sat apart from my subjects in the “congregation.” Respect my authori-TAY!
Our minister was a mechanical engineer to was “called to serve, probably after day drinking and a plate of spoiled potato salad. Anyway, his sermons were all about science and engineering. God is like a John Deere 4010 tractor with dual rear wheels.
Then, alas, my brain got into gear, I read Transcendental Meditation by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and I was off to Hippie Dippie Land. I studied chemistry, disappointing my mother to no end because I wasn’t a “real doctor.”
My family was pretty secularized as Christians, but we’ve all gone atheist as time went on. Mostly I think church was just a social club, and as it became more pre-MAGA evangelical, it became increasingly unwelcoming.
My formative experiences with evangelicals was encountering them lying about evolution and giving zero fucks about the intrinsic injustice of Hell.
My sperm donor was (and still is) a god-bothering, right-wing Republican, sexist, racist, philandering, alcoholic, narcissistic piece of human-shaped shit. I haven’t spoken to him in decades.
My egg donor was raised Catholic, but once married, sperm donor was too cheap to tithe. They both made sure my sister and I were Lutheran-churched through confirmation (age 12-13?), when we were allowed to quit. (I QUIT.) She is now a psychic- and astrology buff who yearns to go back to Catholicism. Yeah I don’t really talk to her, either.
They are both cruel, conservative, controlling assholes who were violent with us – mostly me – when we were children.
I am well aware things could have been much, much worse. I must say that putting distance between myself and people like them them makes a lot more room in my life for people who are truly kind, supportive, open-minded, loving, funny, smart, politically like-minded, amazing humans – including some religious ones. Go figure.
From the YT comments.
Rando 1: “‘[Dad at 40:37] A mouse in a maze can’t make sense of the maze’ Umm… no. […] mice can very much make sense of their maze. It led to a whole issue about if mice in mazes are even valid ways of doing research.”
* Slate – The end of the maze
Rando 2: “This left me feeling deflated and sad. What so many men do in their quest to be right, is they forget the people they injure along the way. And every single person in this family has been injured by this man. There is still love, because biological ties are almost mythical in their strength. But at what cost? I see a daughter and a teenager whose confidence has been eroded. I see another daughter who is unbelievably trepidatious about a conversation with her father. I see a woman who stays in a marriage that doesn’t provide the love or respect she deserves as a human being. This man says he has no problems with friends and colleagues, but does at home. Those friends and colleagues haven’t had a lifetime of being told how wrong they are for being who they are. He will leave this world having left deep scars with no regret.”
Katy Scoggin (Filmmaker daughter): “Thank you for expressing your insightful thoughts. They are well taken.”
Rando 3: “I was this man. I am ashamed of how I used to act. Now I am the ‘evolutionist’ in a sea of young earth creationists.”
Katy Scoggin: “You’re in good company!”
Here is a great piece by Lori Gottleib, the NYT Therapist columnist, on dealing with loved ones with repugnant views: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/well/mind/racism-family-relationship-therapist.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5VA.ri92.0ojxx0pgO1Ay&smid=url-share
Unpaywalled article @7: NYT – My son’s racist views are destroying our family
My mother was the main church-goer in our family, and in fact was both a Sunday School teacher and the church secretary for a while. That said, this was the Anglican Church of Canada, which was relatively laid back compared to a lot of other churches, and my mother was always more a ‘Church as center of community’ person than a ‘Church as moral exemplar’ person. Her grandfather having also been an Anglican minister as well as teacher at a seminary probably influenced her ‘it’s a job’ attitude towards the church. She also regularly complains that the temporary ministers and lay readers the church gets are always better than the ‘official’ ministers that eventually get assigned. You can’t be good as secretary without understanding the internal politics.
My father was the grandson of a Presbyterian minister who had joined with the United Church of Canada, and… well, when my parents had their 50th wedding anniversary, the local church that my mother had worked for published a commemorative booklet for them, and after listing my mother’s time in the church, they said of my father, “who had decided that religion was not for him…” (and, honestly, he got a lot of that from his father the high school principal who actively tried to stay out of any religious issues).
My little sister was Confirmed in the Anglican church and for a time was even the Crucifer (or, as Doc Bill says above, the Carrier of Crosses; the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is pretty much the American branch of the Anglican Communion/Church of England). We had a discussion at dinner at one point about what her great-grandfather the Anglican minister would have thought of his great-granddaughter being Crucifer, before sadly deciding that he likely would have been vaguely horrified a woman was allowed to have the position. She then married an ex-Catholic (long story) and isn’t particularly religious.
I started up Confirmation classes in high school and then never restarted them after the priest who was teaching them had a heart attack. I’ve mostly followed in my father’s footsteps as ‘religion isn’t really for me’, and the rest of my family is perfectly fine with that.
So, yeah, I didn’t have any big break-up with religion like some folks did. I’m also Canadian, which means religion was nowhere near as much of an active political force as it has been in the U.S. Honestly, when Canada was founded, the fact that Ontario was officially Anglican and Quebec was officially Catholic meant that the country started off with a whole lot of “let’s just agree to not talk about this more than necessary because we don’t want to recreate the mess going on in Ireland”. The entire country has a very deliberate and studied attitude of ‘religion is something polite people don’t push in public’ because it was kind of a requirement for keeping the country together a hundred and fifty years ago. Now, that’s not as true as it used to be, in part because we have way too many people who think the U.S. evangelical attitude of ‘politics first with religion as cover’ is a good idea for tapping into resentment, but it’s also true that none of the provinces are officially any church anymore, and for the most part people who front-and-centre their religion in politics up here are still viewed with a certain amount of worry and distaste.
I’ve told this tale here before: Dad’s a right-wing German Catholic. Mom was WELS. While my father had no problem with evolution (as long as you couched it in theistic terms), mom was your typical YEC trash. I probably escaped creationism because my dad got control of me and my sister’s religious indoctrination, a very sore point between my parents along with with my maternal side of the family.
@#9 “Honestly, when Canada was founded, the fact that Ontario was officially Anglican and Quebec was officially Catholic meant that the country started off with a whole lot of “let’s just agree to not talk about this more than necessary because we don’t want to recreate the mess going on in Ireland”.
Bravo!
@#7, 8 My AI sense is going off on that therapist’s response like crazy.
I was raised as a Witness. It didn’t really take, and I was already well down my own path to atheism by the time they considered me old enough to take Pastor Russell’s Bible Student Movement and co. seriously. Pro tip for Young-Earth Creationists: keep your kids away from cereal boxes! I learned all about dinosaurs and deep time from those.
It’s true, though, that if you don’t celebrate Christmas as a little kid, that doesn’t take either. I have few happy memories of Christmas from back then, and plenty of hateful memories of other Christians interrogating me about it. I do not consider it to be a secular holiday.
The NYT article shared in the comments suggests asking the racist relative to explain his views. But when it turns out to be just “inexplicably stubborn stupidity” (as per charley in comment #1), what then? Once the inexplicably stubborn stupidity is evident, for myself and my loved ones’ sake I would likely give up on that person.
@12: It reads like bog-standard therapist’s advice, and LLMs are pretty good at regurgitating bog-standard anything, because the internet is full of examples since long before the rise of genAI. So, impossible to tell.